Perceptions of Slum Dwellers and Municipal Officials on Factors Impacting the Provision of Basic Slum Services in Accra, Ghana

Abstract

The dramatic growth of the millennium city of Accra has generated a lot of challenges for city authorities to manage-including the increasing slum development and the inadequate provision of basic services such as education, health, water and sanitation especially for the urban poor. The complexity and challenge of urban governance is exacerbated by the multiplicity of central and local government as well as other development actors performing these urban development functions. With the hinge side that ‘urban inefficiency and inequality can be reduced through improved governance’, the paper contends that any effort to reduce urban poverty should be preceded with the right appreciation of the factors that influence the delivery basic services to the urban poor. Using a mixed qualitative and quantitative method approach in five secured slums; the paper explores the extent to which key socio-economic, institutional and political factors influence the delivery of basic services to slum settlements under AMA. In the explorative process, the study highlights real life slum issues, including the complex and opaque conditions under which they have to cope amidst the limited basic services available to them. In an added perspective, the study explored the key challenges and remedial strategies employed by AMA to meet the growing demands of basic urban services of the urban poor. Based on available evidence from the field study, it was found that the slums of Accra are adversely affected by the socioeconomic, institutional and political factors influencing basic urban service delivery in the city.

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