Urbanization helps poverty reduction in Ghana: World Bank Report

A World Bank report released here on Thursday has drawn a direct link between urbanization and poverty reduction in Ghana.

It said urbanization had also enabled higher quality education to reach a larger proportion of the population while quality of life had improved for millions of Ghanaians as a result of improved access to services.

Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, Senior Director for Social, Urban and Rural Resilience, at the World Bank, said migration to urban areas had led to a structural transformation away from subsistence agriculture to an increase in industry and service jobs from 38 percent to 59 percent between 1992 and 2010.

The report, titled "Ghana Urbanization Review – Rising Through the Cities", revealed strong relations between income and urbanization, stressing that "urbanization complements economic development".

"Ghana has been able to do that linkage very well; what is more important, we do not see this in every country of the world. Urbanization has helped here in Ghana to develop human capital," Ijjasz-Vasquez noted.

He pointed out that the linkage between urbanization and human capital development was not common across the world "and you have done it right in Ghana".

Labor reallocation and human capital accumulation, he said, were some of the factors that favored Ghana during the period under review (1980 -2013).

"A very important part of Ghana's growth is related to labor re- allocation, that is, from jobs that are less productive to jobs that are more productive," he said.

He however cautioned that labor reallocation and human capital accumulation had diminishing returns and were unsustainable sources of growth.

In his message, Vice-President Kwesi Bekoe Amissah-Arthur said Ghana launched a national Urban Policy and Action Plan in 2012 in recognition of the implications of urbanization for development.

"The policy was meant to improve overall framework and action areas for effective urban development," he explained.

Ghana has also launched a Ghana Urban Management Pilot Project which is intended to increase investments in urban infrastructure, improve spatial planning and ensure financial autonomy of the cities for effective service delivery.

"Quite obviously, the challenges confronting the urban landscape are enormous and it is only an informed work force who can appropriately deal with the challenges to enable them to deliver quality services to the people at the local level," he stressed. Endi