Genealogies of Ghana’s housing crisis: the role of colonial interventions and neoliberal reforms
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Date
2021
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Publisher
Taylor & Francis Group
Abstract
The urgent need to develop and increase housing units has always featured
prominently in electioneering campaigns in Ghana. Successive governments
have developed countless programmes to deal with the housing deficit, but
there has not been a significant improvement. As we write, the government
of Ghana is grappling with a housing deficit of over two million units. But
why has this problem remained intractable despite what seems like concerted
efforts by various administrations to provide affordable housing for Ghana’s
more vulnerable populations? Focusing on the 2015 National Housing Policy,
this article critically reviews Ghana’s various housing policies and reforms,
exploring how colonial policies and neoliberal reforms are separately and
jointly implicated, in fundamental ways, in Ghana’s currently engulfing housing
crisis. Our findings reveal that the yawning gap noticeable in Ghana’s overall
effort at housing provision for the populace, is rooted in the colonial logic of
piecemeal intervention. This same logic has continued to traverse successive
Ghanaian housing policies through the immediate postcolonial era, the adjustment years, and the current period.
Description
Research Article
Keywords
Colonialism, Ghana, Ghana’s housing policy, neoliberal reforms, piecemeal intervention