HABI¹A¹ IN¹¸. Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 245—257, 1998( 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd

Printed in Great Britain. All rights reserved0197-3975/98 $19.00#0.00

PII: S0197-3975(98)00009-5

Housing Policy in Ghana:Towards a Supply-Oriented Future

A. GRAHAM TIPPLE*Centre for Architectural Research and Development Overseas (CARDO),

University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE1 7RU, UK

DAVID KORBOEDepartment of Housing and Planning Research, Kwame Nkrumah University of

Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this paper is to review past and present housing policies in Ghana,particularly the 1993 National Shelter Strategy (Ghana, 1993, Policy Planning and Evalu-ation ºnit, Ministry of ¼orks and Housing, Accra), in the context of housing supply for thelow income majority. The current international policies embodied in the Global Strategyfor Shelter (GSS) (UNCHS, 1990) and the Global Plan of Action of Habitat II (GPA)(UNCHS, 1996) have provided a framework within which current housing policies are to beformulated with the intention of cranking up housing supply. We suggest some character-istics of Ghanaian housing and urban society which demand different approaches. In thatcontext, we recommend means by which current policies can be made more supply-efficientby building on strongly held beliefs and attitudes rather than through the imposition ofalien market-oriented value systems. ( 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved

Keywords: housing policy; finance; tradition; Ghana

HISTORY AND DEVELOPMENT OF HOUSING POLICY

In the first-half of the 20th century, the colony of the Gold Coast (including Ashantiand the Northern Protectorate) had a fairly standard attitude towards housingdevelopment for the time (up to Independence in 1957). It began with an impetus tohouse British Civil Servants in some splendour separate from the local people. Thiswas partly to prevent the spread of malaria, yellow fever, and other debilitatingdiseases to the newcomers. Planning and sanitation measures were closely inter-twined but little was done to improve the housing conditions of the majority of thelocal population. Some improvements were made as a response to an outbreak ofplague in Kumasi (Brown, 1978) and the earthquake in Accra in 1939 (Gold Coast,1946). However, the main programmes for improvement had to wait until after theSecond World War, the new emphasis on colonial development, and the need toshow some gratitude to the brave lads returning from the battle fronts to theircolonial homelands. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a few thousand small dwellings

*Corresponding author.

245

were erected for veterans and junior civil servants. These joined the estates builtfollowing the earthquake to establish the state housing sector in the main cities.

Since Independence in 1957, the Ghana government’s housing provision activityhas been carried out in Tema New Town by the Tema Development Corporation(TDC) and in the main cities by the State Housing Corporation (SHC) whichconstructed about 24,000 single household dwellings between 1957 and 1990(Ghana, 1993). While, for example, government-built houses comprised about 20%of all the houses in Kumasi in 1988, they are so small compared to the other housesthat they comprise only 7% of the rooms.1 This is after they were extended asa result of the initiatives taken by their users at no cost to the government.2

For all its small size, the state sector has taken a prominent place in governmentpolicy. The First Republican (Nkrumah) government used it as a way of interveningin population distribution through planning housing in towns where employmentopportunities were planned (Ghana, 1959). Much noise and energy has beenexpended in establishing and promoting methods of increasing efficiency andreducing costs in supply but always the state sector has failed to meet targets andabsorbed more resources and attention than its output should have merited.

The main policy directions have been in the direct supply of quite a smallnumbers of dwellings and a number of measures to influence demand. These haveincluded subsidies for the renting and subsequent purchase of government-builtdwellings; subsidised interest rates for borrowers from the few institutions con-cerned with housing finance, and a very successful rent control regime starting in1943 and only relaxed in 1987. This last reduced the rent to income ratio of themedian household to only 2% of expenditure (Malpezzi et al., 1990). At the sametime, state financial agencies have been encouraged to invest in so-called low-costhousing. Loans have been available to the fortunate few (typically less than 100 peryear in total) from the State Insurance Corporation (SIC), the Social Security andNational Insurance Trust (SSNIT), and the First Ghana Building Society (FGBS)but recipients have inevitably been relatively well off and in formal employment.SSNIT and SIC have also constructed estates of housing for rent as capitalinvestments [1485 and 409, respectively, 1985 to 1990 (Ghana, 1993)], but they areunsuited to their raison d’eL tre of securing long-term financial yields while providinghousing for low income households. They have been let at rents which are too highfor low-income people but are too low to allow a return on the investment sufficientto maintain the capital base. Thus, the housing agencies have been selling them totenants since 1993.

Internationally, policies since the 1970s have been leading away from directhousing provision for low income households. Successive governments in Ghanahave tended to adopt these policies without altering them for local circumstances.A project to introduce co-operative housing was tried in Tema during the 1970s(Dawuni, 1980) but it proved very difficult to implement and did not benefit the lowincome group. There has been an upgrading project in Nima along the lines devisedfor squatter settlements, even though Nima is not a squatter settlement and itsoccupant households are more frequently renters than owners and have little togain in real terms from the project. There have been several efforts to introduce sitesand services schemes but with little success and none for the low income groupwhose problems such schemes are designed to address in other countries.

CURRENT HOUSING SUPPLY

¹he national shelter strategy

The national shelter strategy (Ghana, 1993) represents the current direction ofurban housing policy in Ghana. It was formulated at the Ministry of Works and

246 A. Graham Tipple and David Korboe

Housing with the assistance of the United Nations. It lists six main objectives:

1. improving the quality of shelter;2. improving the environment of human settlements;3. making shelter programmes more accessible to the poor;4. promoting private sector involvement through an enabling policy environment;5. encouraging rental housing; and6. promoting orderly growth with infrastructure in place.

The strategy admits that ‘an analysis of the 1991 Development Estimates of theMinistry of Works and Housing reveals that approximately 8 per cent of invest-ment could be classified as going into the target groups, while approximately 50 percent of investment went into the completion of uncompleted houses, the construc-tion of bungalows for civil servants, the acquisition of SSNIT flats and therehabilitation of government bungalows’. (Ghana, 1993: part II, p. 85).

The consequence of this, that the poor are subsidising the rich, is not lost on thewriters of the strategy. It is surely the context in which a revolution in supplypolicies is required. However, the strategy is firmly based in old institutions andfollows lines similar to previous (ineffective) policies.

While it makes policy suggestions to enable the inputs to housing, the nationalstrategy follows earlier ill-fated government development plans in proposing an-nual construction and servicing targets for 1994—1997 which do not reflect theobjectives very closely, especially with respect to increasing accessibility for thepoor. The targets are as shown in Table 1.

These plans are based on the provision, by public or private sector, of 264,000dwellings. This figure arises from Table 2.7 in Vol. 1 of the National ShelterStrategy and includes housing extra urban households, eliminating the urbanshortfall by 2010, and allowing 1% replacement per annum.3 Although this tableassumes 13 persons per house (more than two households per house), the plannedoutput shown here is mainly for quite small (single household) dwellings,4 mostly

Table 1. Housing solutions offered by the National Shelter Strategy

Housing solutions Number Percentage Cost (C mill) Percentage Percent unitsfrom private

sector

New units to be completed

Upper income 3 bedroom 39,570 12.6 712,260 36.6 100Middle income 2 bedroom 105,520 33.5 844,160 43.4 90Rental units (two rooms) 52,760 16.8 105,520 5.4 100Core houses 39,570 12.6 79,140 4.1 50Uncompleted units to be completed 26,470 8.4 131,900 6.8 0Total new units 263,890 83.8 1,873,430 96.3 79Existing units

Private upgrades 15,000 4.8 3000 0.2 100Rehabilitation loans 3000 1.0 6000 0.3 0Improvement loans 3000 1.0 6000 0.3 0Total existing units 21,000 6.7 42,000 2.2 71Plots

Developed plots 10,000 3.2 16,000 0.8 10Site plus communal services 10,000 3.2 5,000 0.3 0Site plus individual services 10,000 3.2 10,000 0.5 0Total plots 30,000 9.5 31,000 1.6 0.3

Total units 314,890 100 1,946,430 100 71

C1 million approximately equalled £1,000 at the time of the plan.

Housing Policy in Ghana 247

for the middle and upper income groups, and a few rented chamber and hall units5(c. 53,000, about 17% of the planned production). Following past developmentplans, it is based on increasing the proportion of houses which are single householddwellings, i.e. the type built by GREDA members in the formal sector, rather thanencouraging the multihabited compounds and other house forms with manyhouseholds, usually built in the informal sector.

Thus, though the rhetoric of the strategy addresses the need to concentrate onlower cost houses when they are provided through government budgets, the planfigures show a dominance of upper and middle income group housing in theproposed production. Furthermore, the 10% public share (C84 billion) in provid-ing the middle income two-bedroomed units is a considerable proportion ofgovernment spending proposed in the housing sector.6

The public sector efforts are to be achieved by actually building dwellings ratherthan by investing in public—private partnerships which are practised in Malaysia,for example Abdullah (1995), and are so much a part of the enabling strategy. Thetargets require doubling the production from SHC, etc, in the first year and makingfurther increases in succeeding years. This also seems to reflect past plans, wheresuch efficiency improvements were taken for granted, rather than echoing thereality in which state enterprises have continued to operate well below capacity andeven further below plans.

A recent housing finance scheme, officially targeted at the low-income popula-tion, has signally failed to assist them. The Home Finance Company (HFC) wasincorporated in mid-1990 but applicants have to purchase their new housing fromregistered real-estate developers. Loans have concessionary real interest rates ofonly 3.5—4.5% above the inflation index. The borrowers are mainly public servantsand many had institutional assistance from organisations such as the GhanaNational Petroleum Corporation, the Ghana National Procurement Agency, andthe American-owned Volta Aluminium Company.

HFC is seen by its officials primarily as a viable financial enterprise; they have nodelusions of it being a major lender for low-income housing activity. Policy-makers,on the other hand, have often advertised HFC as the long-awaited solution to theproblems of low-income housing finance. The registered private developers (theonly suppliers whose products are acceptable to the HFC) find it necessary to buildfor upper sectors of the market. Thus, their houses are only affordable to publiccorporations and individuals with very high incomes.7 It is an open secret thata sizeable proportion of such money comes from overseas employment and fromdubious local and foreign sources. Thus, the subsidised interest rates, paid for bythe public purse, are redistributing income from the majority poor to the fortunatefew.

¹raditional and informal sector supply for the vast majority

No formal sector finance or any other assistance is available for the majority whodevelop in any informal way; through the common disqualifiers from the formalsector which affect most housing actually occupied by the poor, particularly nothaving more than a traditional land lease (as land held thus cannot be used ascollateral— see below), or not having planning permission.

A great majority of the people in urban Ghana have been housed throughsmall-scale private sector initiatives. Even when government housing budgets wereconcentrating on establishing a formal sector rental stock, a vast majority of thepeople were housed by their own efforts and those of the small-scale privatelandlords.

Our recent research project examining housing supply in Accra, Kumasi andBerekum8 shows that house ownership is rarely achieved before the age of 40 andby this time family obligations are likely to be quite onerous. However, new

248 A. Graham Tipple and David Korboe

builders of houses are less well-off than might be imagined given the large size ofhouses being built. Taking expenditure as a proxy for income, new owners in 1994tended to have annual household incomes of about C1.5 million (£1500) or 12 timesthe minimum wage. Their incomes are only 25—50% higher than renters in the samehouses. Thus, it cannot be said that only the rich can afford to build a new house inGhana.9

The traditional urban housing in Ghana has always been the compound consist-ing of many rooms opening off a private internal courtyard. In Accra, many of thesehave been similar to the Yoruba compound of Nigeria with a large house at thefront containing double-banked rooms opening off a hallway, and single storeywings at the sides with rooms opening off the courtyard. In Kumasi they havetended to have a single bank of rooms all round the main courtyard but may be twoor three storeys high on each side. In Kumasi, 57% of houses were compounds in1988 (Malpezzi et al., 1990).

Compounds have generally been constructed by informal sector builders (thosewho are not registered and operate largely outside official employment and taxregulations), on plots which are the property of the owners but to which they onlyhave traditional land rights. These plots do not necessarily correspond with officialplans. Some houses are built with traditional earth technologies, but increasinglythey are in cement blocks with in situ cast reinforced concrete structural elements,especially where more than one storey is to be erected. They tend not to conformwith building and planning regulations in such matters as leaving set-back spacesat the edges of the plots, covering only 60% of the plot with buildings, building inmaterials conforming with British Standards of strength and durability, and havingat least one water closet toilet and tap on each floor. Throughout the century, thegreat majority of the urban population have lived in compound houses and ourhousing supply data show that compound housing is likely to be important wellinto the future. In the 1990s, however, there is a trend towards villas and apart-ments which has begun to dominate the new supply.

About half the recent additions to the housing stock have been in the form ofcompounds and the other half are villas; usually free-standing detached self-contained dwellings with a mean of six rooms. Often these will start with theerection of a servants’ quarters along the rear boundary but this is as likely to beoccupied by the owner or extended family members as by servants. Manyremain without the main house for a decade or more as money is collected for thefinal (main) phase of construction. Construction tends to take years rather thanmonths; the medians in our sample are four years for compounds and 3.5 years forvillas.

Renting, usually in the private sector from small-scale landlords living in themultihabited house, is and will continue to be very important in urban Ghana. InAccra, 43% of households rent their room or rooms, in Kumasi about threequarters of households rent. There is a growing number of people who occupy theirrooms rent-free because they are related to the owner or are part of a lineage groupwho have inherited their house in common (Tipple and Willis, 1991; Amole et al.,1993). These family house occupants constitute about 48% of households inAccra (GSS, 1995) and 25% in Kumasi (Tipple and Willis, 1991) and are bound tobecome more common as mortality claims the ageing owners. More than half thehouseholds in each city occupy only a single room (GSS, 1995) and only ownersregularly have more than one room to call their own (Tipple and Willis, 1991).Occupancy rates are very high, 3.3 persons per room in Kumasi (Malpezzi et al.,1990).

The means by which these relatively low income households in Ghana manage tobuild such large houses appear to hinge on not fulfilling the letter of thebuilding and planning regulations and the low prices for building achieved byinformal sector builders. In addition, compounds are much cheaper than the more

Housing Policy in Ghana 249

fashionable detached villas, allowing less-well-off householders to become owners.In Kumasi, compounds appear to cost about C3.4 million (£3400), or C 700,000(£700) per room. Villas, which usually have higher standards of fittings and finishes,cost about C10 million (£10,000), or C1,700,000 (£1700) per room. Mean house costto income ratios for recent owners of houses are lower for compounds (3.5) thanvillas (5.4), but neither are particularly high. Compound builders tend to haveincomes 40% lower than builders of villas.

The formal sector alternatives to these houses are much smaller and moreexpensive. For example, the highly subsidised one- and two-bedroom bungalowsavailable from the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT) werepriced at C5.4 million and C8.5 million (£5400 and £8500) or more than C2 million(£2000) per room. The commercial builders, whose products qualify for HFCfinancial assistance, were selling one-bedroom (two-roomed) dwellings at about C8million (£8000) and two-bedroom (three-roomed) dwellings at C10—11 million(£10—11,000); more than C3 million (£3000) per room. The dwellings proposed inthe National Shelter Strategy (Ghana, 1993) are much more expensive than thebuildings being constructed by our samples in Accra, Kumasi and Berekum, takingaccount of inflation, and are in a completely different league of cost per room. Thus,the two- and three-bedroomed dwellings intended for the middle and upper incomegroups were priced at C8 million and C18 million respectively in 1992; far aboveour private suppliers’ prices when inflation is accounted for.

The lack of loan finance means that almost all house construction takes place forcash. Would-be owners gather materials over a long period before building com-mences. This is evident from the large piles of cement blocks stacked for many yearson and close to building sites. In addition, preferences in roofing material arestrongly influenced by sheets of a size which can be stored under beds! Oncebuilding starts, cash supply can be very intermittent leading to incremental build-ing. Most villa buildings takes place in horizontal slices (all the foundations, all thewalls, all the roof, etc.). Only recently have some villa builders taken to completingand occupying a few rooms at a time in the manner common with multihabitedcompounds and elsewhere in the world.

¹he importance of extensions

Housing extensions are an important housing supply mechanism in urban Ghana.In the 1980—1988 period, for example, Malpezzi et al. (1990) found that a fewnew houses had been constructed but the housing stock had expanded to accom-modate the growing number of people. The expansion had mainly been in exten-sions, often as extra rooms on the ground floor or, less frequently, the addition ofanother storey. Our surveys in Accra, Kumasi and Berekum suggest that manyextensions are part of a very protracted incremental house building process ratherthan being the result of a new decision to build taken well after the completion ofthe house.

SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF GHANAIAN HOUSINGAND URBAN SOCIETY

¸ack of a market in most real property

The tale of inefficiency and failure of formal housing suppliers to perform to planand the reliance of most householders on the informal sector are not unfamiliar andcould probably be told for countless countries in Africa and elsewhere. However,

250 A. Graham Tipple and David Korboe

there is an added dimension to the housing scene in urban Ghana which compli-cates the application of internationally developed policies and projects. Land andhousing in Ghana are not generally for sale.10 Outside a small government-controlled sector, land is only available for occupation on leases and with titles ofonly surface user (usufruct).

The means of land allocation and leasing conditions in Ghana are extensivelydocumented elsewhere (for example, Bentsi-Enchill, 1964; Ollennu, 1962). It is,however, vital to our discussion to understand that land in Ghana is owned bykin-groups (abusua) which consist of those who have died, those who are alive, andthose yet to be born. The material world is seen as part of a larger realm which isinhabited by ancestors who are vigilant and influential over affairs affecting thelong-term wealth and wellbeing of the lineage. In this culture, anyone who acts toreduce the lineage for his/her own gain, e.g., by disposing of land, housing, or otherreal property, is likely to be punished by the ancestors, even to death.11 This systemof land and property ownership is the basis of the loyalty and obligation systemwhich gives traditional Ghanaian towns their particular character, especially withrespect to strong social controls and very low crime rates. Efforts by the governmentto ‘modernise’ by reducing traditional land allocation (through Nkrumah’s landlegislation, e.g., the Administration of Lands Act, 1962) and the nationalisationdebates in the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g., Kom, 1980), have come to nothing.Land and real property are still traditionally held and show little sign of change.

Most of the land in Kumasi and the provincial towns in South and CentralGhana is held by paramount chiefs (Ollennu, 1962). The chiefs can alienate land tomembers of the stool (as of right) or strangers in exchange for a tribute, known asdrink money. The money paid to the chief does not represent an ‘arms-length’purchase price, it is simply a tribute to the ancestors of the land-holding lineage.Land title registration and document processing procedures are still centralised inAccra and are overlaid on the traditional allocation system. In the North, thesystem is similar but skins take the place of stools.

For land in Accra, the owning bodies are represented by chiefs (Mantsemei),fetish priests (wulomei), quarter heads (akutseiatsemei) and family heads (HUDA(Housing and Urban Development Associates), 1990). While there are some areaswhere stools gained the rights to allocate land (particularly in Labadi), mostquarter heads have remained in control of their land. There are also some land-owning families. This rather complicated set of, often overlapping, land allocatingentities has led to many very clouded titles with the subsequent delays in develop-ment, legal costs, and multiple payment for the right of use of the land. Recently, aspart of the new stress on urban management, the land registration system in Accrais being overhauled as a precursor to a national land registry.

In the cities, there has also been a ‘modern’ sector where land is allocatedthrough leasehold and administered directly by the government’s Lands Commis-sion.12 However, it is quite small and only accessible to a few very influential (andquite westernised) people. The number of freehold plots in urban areas is insignific-ant. For Accra, records at the Lands Commission Secretariat indicate that free-holds account for less than 0.1% of the total land area. In addition, state-controlledland is just under 13%.

There is no direct link between plot size and price. So, even though the amountpaid is now a notional market ‘value’, it is unlikely to be lower for a smaller plot.Plots in Ghana are large by international standards. In established settlements inKumasi, typical plots measure between 1200 and 3500 m2 though plots of970—1040 m2 are becoming increasingly common in less established areas wherechiefs are carving out smaller, but still substantial, plots to maximise their gains.Throughout the urban areas, the combined effect of large plots and small builtareas is low-density urban sprawl resulting in higher infrastructure costs and,therefore, a negative impact on prospects for servicing.

Housing Policy in Ghana 251

In most developing countries, squatting has been an alternative land occupationstrategy for many of the poor. In Ghana, however, it is very rare mainly due to theclose watch kept on the land by local chiefs and, perhaps, a fear of floutingsupernaturally underpinned laws of land occupation (Tipple, 1984; Konadu-Agyemang, 1991; Korboe, 1993).

¹he need to build for more than one household

The importance of lineage obligations causes most would-be owners to wanta house which is much larger than their household alone would demand. Mostowners are seen as benefactors by poorer members of their lineage and take theirobligations to provide accommodation for others very seriously. The averageowner in our survey provides accommodation for about 20 people. It is notcustomary for urban owner households to occupy the whole house and often roomswill be let to tenants or occupied rent-free by the households of family members.Thus, most would-be owners want relatively large houses.

While current housing policy in Ghana centres on encouraging individuals tobuild single household bungalows with three, or at most four, habitable rooms asa single dwelling, current owners and builders tend to provide 8—10 rooms perhouse. The latter is an efficient way of developing the large plots and should not bereplaced by single household dwellings.

Ownership of houses is also closely controlled within the same religio-socialsystem as land. We have discussed elsewhere (Amole et al., 1993) the importance ofinherited (family) houses as a social safety net in urban West Africa. Althougha house may be regarded as the personal property of the original owner while he orshe is alive, it will be inherited by the lineage in common with a senior male (abusuapanyin) as the first among equals. In many parts of Ghana, the lineage excludesa man’s own children. Although there is legislation to allow close relatives who arenot in the deceased’s lineage (e.g. a man’s children in Asante) to inherit the housewhen the owner dies, litigation by the traditional heirs (brothers and nephews)tends to favour lineage claims.

It is quite common to find owners in their fifties and sixties building houses largeenough for many households when they might be expected to want just a smalldwelling for their retirement years. Similarly, owners who reach advanced age arequite likely to extend their houses even though their own requirements are alreadywell served. The inheritance of a house by the members of an abusua in common, ina culture where its sale is unconscionable, encourages structures which are easilyoccupied by several loosely linked households. These would ideally have manysimilar sized rooms each with independent access from semi-public space. Thus, thecompound is an ideal form for inherited housing. Mindful of the inevitability ofinheritance, policy makers should realise that the owners and occupants of a typicalhouse will not be a single household but rather members of an abusua.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FUTURE HOUSING SUPPLY POLICY

Currently, national housing strategies in developing countries are increasinglybased around the Global Strategy for Shelter (UNCHS, 1990) and the policydirections now embodied in the Global Plan of Action from Habitat II (UNCHS,1996). The main points arising from these and affecting policy in Ghana are theadoption of enabling shelter strategies and the need for a realistic sector widestrategy which is appropriate to local norms and directed at scaling up supply toa level adequate to meet demand.

It is directly in the spirit of both the Global Strategy for Shelter and the GlobalPlan of Action to shift government policy interventions from any notion to provide

252 A. Graham Tipple and David Korboe

complete housing or to interfere with the final price of housing through subsidies orrent controls. Any realistic estimate of past performance gives little confidence toagencies such as SHC13 and SSNIT as being able to become major providers.Instead, government efforts and housing budgets should be aimed at enabling theinput markets to work effectively, to ensure that the construction industry isencouraged at all levels, and to provide an appropriate and efficient regulatorysystem to maximise output at affordable prices. We would make the followingsuggestions for government interventions.

Availability of land

The traditional system has much to commend it in that it is locally controlled,relatively inexpensive to operate, and potentially equitable in its allocation practi-ces (Okpala, 1977; Tipple, 1984). In addition, and very importantly, the control ofland by traditional communities through their chiefs contributes to the security,welfare and loyalty systems of the majority of the people (Tipple, 1985; Korboe,1993). The main problem for land allocation currently is the clouded nature ofmany titles and the lack of bankable titles over traditionally allocated land. Theformer should be largely resolved when the current land registration exercise iscomplete, the latter would require sensitive extending of the security of the titlewithout taking away the allodial right to the land vested in the community.

We recognise that the non-marketability of land is important to the socialcohesion of Ghana’s urban people. Thus, the outright ownership required in raisingcollateral on land could damage the community’s long-term ability to regain theallodial rights to land alienated to an unsuccessful builder and then forfeited toa loaning agency. However, it is unlikely that a finance system that is so sorelyneeded will develop without forms of collateral on fixed property acceptable toboth the traditionalists in the community and to formal financial agencies.

In the National Shelter Strategy (Ghana, 1993), the need for foreclosure laws andprocedures are articulated. In developing these, however, it is essential that marketsystems for land transactions, and the ability of loaning agencies to sell land rightsto the highest bidder following a foreclosure, are not imposed on the people whilebeliefs in the sacral nature of land holding are generally held. The exact relationshipbetween traditional beliefs and the acceptance of a market in land rights is a subjecton which the current Draft Land Policy (Ghana, 1996) is silent but one on whichresearch should be undertaken jointly by specialists in religion and land.

Availability of finance

The most important mechanism for improving housing supply is undoubtedlya source of finance. It is the lack of finance which mostly impedes the rapidcompletion of houses, and which delays their start until late in a person’s life. Theability to borrow over a long period for house construction and extension isundoubtedly a felt need among suppliers and potential suppliers of housing inGhana.

Finance for new house construction

The vast majority of prospective owner-builders must still use the cash in theirwallets, so to speak, for buying leases on land and paying material suppliers,artisans and service agencies. In our housing supply research, the median recent-builder household has an income (in 1993 prices) of under C2 million (£2000) perannum and is building five to ten rooms costing about C6 million (£6000). Thus,loans of C3—8 million (£3—8000) at 1993 prices would suffice to help financing thegreat majority of houses found in our survey. There would appear to be no reason

Housing Policy in Ghana 253

for reducing interest rates below those prevailing in the banking market as thehouse cost to income ratio is only about three so does not constitute exceptionallevels of housing investment. There also appears to be no reason to make themrepayable over the usual 25 years as any spreading of the financing load (even for aslittle as five years) would be an improvement for current builders relying on cash. Itmay, thus, be more appropriate to have five to ten year repayment periods. Theloans should be released in stages for the purchase of the land lease, and financingthe various stages of building in order to reduce the debt burden to a minimumduring the building process.

The issue of securing the loan on the land and then the buildings and the need forsome fundamental changes in the way land is regarded arises again here. Onceagain, we would reiterate that the need for financial security must be matched withmaintaining the integrity of community control of land.

Finance for extensions

It is probable that financial assistance for extensions, in the form of market rateloans of C1 to 2 million, would assist owners wishing to extend. Currently, almostno finance is targeted at house extenders and there are no tax or other financialincentives to add rooms. As rents are also very low, the anticipation of futureincome is not an important factor in extension activity. However, the contributionof extensions to the housing supply is undoubtedly very worthwhile and should beencouraged by the housing finance policy.

¹he construction and building materials industries

There seems to be little problem for our recent builders and recent extenders arisingfrom the construction industry or the supply of building materials. There is,however, a problem which can be detected outside the survey and which wouldmanifest itself if more people were intending to build. In general, there are very fewcapable building contractors and even fewer developers who could supply housingahead of demand. The construction industry has no speculative elements; there isno Ghanaian equivalent of the British ‘spec builder’ constructing large numbers ofhouses and selling them at or near completion at prices which a household withmedian income can afford to buy. Of course, they are not likely to arise until themarket is created by having a housing finance system to provide end-user finance inthe form of mortgages. Furthermore, they are unlikely to be successful until front-end finance, the ability to acquire parcels of land for onward allocation, and othernecessities of the development process are available. As one of the authors hasargued elsewhere (Tipple, 1994), the scaling up of supply called for by the GSSrequires new levels of assistance to be targeted to professionals in housing supplyrather than to individual households intent on having one house built.

¹he regulatory framework

It is difficult to build a traditional compound house and still keep within thebuilding and planning regulations, especially when the planning officials regard thecourtyard space as built up and not part of the open area required in theregulations. We have seen, however, that many recent builders have remainedfaithful to the compound form and that it provides very cheap accommodationfavoured by the lower income sector of our sample of builders and owners. Ourdata add more evidence to the on-going argument that compound houses shouldbe encouraged as an urban building form, especially as they are so inexpensive andeasily built incrementally.

254 A. Graham Tipple and David Korboe

Where regulations exist which inhibit housing supply without achieving a realincrease in utility, safety and health among the residents or neighbours, they shouldbe abolished. It is obvious that many regulations are regularly flouted eitherthrough inadequate development control or by bribing the inspectors. It is time forsimpler forms of regulation which reflect the real conditions in which people live inGhanaian cities and which encourage house ownership among relatively lowincome people. Building standards based on what is built by current housingsuppliers are likely to be more valid than those based on those coming out of 1930sBritain.

House inheritance as a social safety net

We have seen that inherited housing is an important part of the stock and acts asa social safety net, providing the young and the old with cheap accommodation.Houses with many rooms of similar sizes and accessible from semi-private/semi-public space are easier to use as family houses than villas with internal accessthrough other rooms. This is another reason why the government should enable theconstruction of compound houses and other multi-habited structures rather thandiscouraging them through the interpretation put on the building and planningregulations.

Encourage rental housing

It is likely, if not inevitable, that most urban residents will rent rooms or apartmentsrather than own a house in the city. The legislative environment should encouragethe construction and maintenance of rented rooms and apartments. This wouldinvolve purposefully and progressively removing the vestiges of rent control andintroducing true market rents. Without this measure, the shortage of accommoda-tion represented by a 3.3 persons per room mean occupancy rate for Kumasi isunlikely to be overcome. Nor is the standard of rental accommodation likely toimprove from its currently low level.

CONCLUSIONS

It is our conviction that policies for improving the delivery of housing in Ghanamust take full account of the non-market nature of housing and land transactions.Thus, sustainable housing policies will require an approach different from that inthe past and those practised in many other developing countries. There is littlechance that encouraging the construction of single household villas will provideappropriate housing solutions for more than a tiny minority of urban Ghanaianhouseholds.

We believe that the current informal housing supply system has many advant-ages especially with respect to the cost of housing provided by them. Inexpensive-ness is an especially important virtue in a society where housing is not aninvestment. In the light of the poor past performance of the commercial formalsector, and with its products completely missing the low income group, theinformal sector should be utilised as the basis for workable housing supply policies.Emphasis should be on increasing its efficiency, especially through suitable financewhich is unlike current mortgage arrangements. Its characteristics must includesustainability at any level of demand (thus, it would have to be at market interestrates), ability to accept collateral which was not real estate, and lending periods ofno more than a decade. In addition, the benefits of improving the performance ofbusinesses within the informal construction sector will be important. Even thoughthis might entail public money being used to make private businesses more

Housing Policy in Ghana 255

profitable, it is likely to be more efficient than addressing householders’ ability toparticipate in self-help alternatives (Tipple, 1994).

Traditional multi-habited houses offer much more appropriate accommodationfor inheriting lineages than do villas. Many of the characteristics of the courtyardhouse are valuable and should be enabled in future housing. These include simpli-city of construction, a relatively high density urban form, a safe environment forchild care, the ability to use rooms for renting or fulfilling family obligations, andcongruence with traditional inheritance practices (Amole et al., 1993) through theproliferation of similarly sized rooms and the ability to gain access to each roomindependently. However, the compound form has some disadvantages which makeit unpopular with more affluent Ghanaians and physical planners. There is a needto study the nature and importance of these objections and to propose methods ofdesign and use which will ameliorate or eradicate them. Even in the absence of suchsolutions, there are grounds to remove the illegality of compound housing bychanging the practice of counting the courtyard as built-up area in terms ofpermitted plot ratio. This would allow the choice between compounds and otherforms to be made on an equal footing and equalise their chances of obtainingfinance and other benefits of full legality.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors acknowledge the invaluable assistance of the following: Ken Willis andGuy Garrod of the University of Newcastle upon Tyne who were active in thehousing supply study; the Department of Housing and Planning Research, Univer-sity of Science and Technology, Kumasi; the British Council; and the LeverhulmeTrust who financed the Housing Supply Study in Ghana (Grant no. F125X).

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Amole, B., Korboe, D. and Tipple, A. G. (1993) The family house in West Africa: a forgotten resource for policymakers? ¹hird ¼orld Planning Review 15(4), 355—372.

Bentsi-Enchill, K. (1964) Ghana ¸and ¸aw. Sweet and Maxwell, London.Brown, J. W. (1978) Increased intercommunication and epidemic disease in colonial Ashanti. In: Disease in African

History, eds. G. W. Hartwig and K. D. Patterson. Duke University Press, Durham, NC.Dawuni, A. A. (1980) Co-operative housing: case studies. Paper presented to the National Housing Seminar

(Ghana), University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, 17—22 March.Ghana, Government of (1959) ¹he Second Development Plan 1959—1964. Government Printer, Accra.Ghana, Government of (1993) National Shelter Strategy. Policy Planning and Evaluation Unit, Ministry of Works

and Housing, Accra.Ghana, Government of (1996) Draft ¸and Policy. Ministry of Lands and Forestry, Accra.Gold Coast, Government of (1946) A Pamphlet Setting out the Revised Accra Rehousing Scheme. Government

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Ministry of Local Government, Government of Ghana, Accra.Kom, E. (1980) Land tenure reform. Paper presented at the Seminar on ¹itle Registration, ¸and Resources

Management and ¸and ºse Policy, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, 3—8 August.Konadu-Agyemang, K. O. (1991) Reflections on the absence of squatter settlements in West African cities: the case

of Kumasi, Ghana. ºrban Studies 28(1), 139—151.Korboe, D. T. (1993) The low-income housing system in Kumasi: an empirical examination of two neighbour-

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Okpala, D. C. I. (1977) The potentials and perils of public land ownership and management: a case study of theLagos Executive Development Board (Nigeria), 1928—1972. Ph.D. Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology.

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NOTES

1These data are derived from an unpublished survey by Samuel Boapeah as part of the World Bank Rent ControlStudy published as Malpezzi et al. (1990).

2The extension of government-built houses is common in Kumasi and a preliminary case study has been publishedas Tipple and Owusu (1994).

3This assumes a lifespan averaging 100 years for houses in the current stock.

4The Plan uses the words house and dwelling interchangeably although this is unhelpful in a society where it iscommon for many households to occupy one house (see Tipple et al., 1994 for a discussion of this semantic issue).

5A minority, but sought after, provision in compounds where a living room and a bedroom are let as a suite.

6It looks even greater when the completion of uncomplete units is related to the relatively expensive units criticizedin its rhetoric.

7There is an issue here that most households who can afford these dwellings would not want to live in such a smallstructure, preferring, instead, a larger house which brings more status and has space to accommodate many familymembers.

8Information on current housing is taken from our yet unpublished research project examining housing supply inAccra, Kumasi and Berekum sponsored by the Leverhulme Foundation. It was carried out at the Centre forArchitectural Research and Development Overseas (CARDO), University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and theDepartment of Housing and Planning Research, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi. A discussion ofincome and wealth issues arising in it can be found in Tipple et al. (1997).

9Though only the rich can afford new formal sector housing.

10While this is true to a greater or lesser extent in many (especially West) African countries, and on a personal levelfor people from many cultures in Africa and elsewhere, it is particularly valid in Ghana where the sale of a housewould raise serious religio-social issues. When Ghanaians talk about the sale of land, they mean the sale of therights to use the surface for a fixed period of time. The land itself remains community property.

11The only exceptions are those whose religious convictions cause them not to fear supernatural activity,particularly born-again Christians.

12There are no new freeholds currently being granted in Accra.

13Except in its recent performance in Kumasi where production has been increased to respectable levels.

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