Building a more resilient Ghana with flood mitigation measures is important for villagers from a village in northern Ghana pictured fleeing floods carrying belongings and children. AFP PHOTO/- (Photo by AFP) (Photo by STR/AFP via Getty Images)
Facilitating resilience enhancement and inclusive growth in Ghana
Urban projects featuring resilient development have become popular. A study of the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID) shows that these efforts could conditionally enhance resilience and inclusive growth.
Resilience has been extensively explored, both theoretically and practically. Its pursuit has become a shared value among different disciplines.
The study of resilience in terms of development and climate adaptation has generated projects across the world to understand how human wellbeing can be improved through livelihood stress reduction and climate adaptation enhancement. However, conducting resilient development projects is complicated, which challenges assessing their outcomes.
Assessing Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID)
Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID) is a five-year investment loaned by the World Bank in 2019 to conduct resilient development. GARID is currently one of the most up-to-date resilience plans. It aims to improve flood risk management and access to basic infrastructure and services in the targeted informal settlements.
Studying GARID yields an opportunity to empirically examine if integrated resilient development projects improve regional resilience and lead to inclusive growth in practice.
GARID focuses on a series of projects to build up both flood mitigation and the capacity of drainage channels. It has five components (see Figure 1):
- The project maps out its climate-resilient drainage and flood mitigation measures . It consists of structural measures, such as the construction of flood retention basins, to mitigate flood impacts, and nonstructural measures, like installing flood early warning systems, to improve flood preparedness.
- The project focuses on solid waste capacity management improvement. Its goal is to reduce solid waste volumes in the Great Accra Region (GAR), involving disposed and uncollected waste.
- It engages with the residents downstream of Nima Stream about their needs and conducts upgrading intervention – as participatory upgrading – in Nima, Alogboshie, and Akweteyman.
- It supports project management activities of the implementing entities and preparatory studies for the subsequent phases.
- Under its contingency emergency responses, it foresees the need to enable rapid funding reallocations between the above components under emergency conditions.
Figure 1: Project activities of GARID
Notes: GARID focuses on a series of projects to build up both flood mitigation and the capacity of drainage channels. Source: World Bank.
An IGC study led to the development of an impact assessment framework, incorporating (1) resilience enhancement and (2) inclusive growth and focusing on GARID’s first three components (as listed above). The assessment framework includes two independent surveys for pre- and post-intervention, involving three specific neighbourhoods where GARID intervenes (Nima, Alogboshie, and Akweteyman; as GN), and three paired, non-intervened neighbourhoods (Accra New Town, Abofu, and Achimota; as CN) as the comparison counterparts.
As such, 19 indicators across eight dimensions were structured to facilitate the two surveys in 2022 and 2024, including detailed information on household characteristics, demographic, and socioeconomic information, their flooding and living conditions, and the perceptions of GARID and the neighbourhoods.
Did GARID improve Greater Accra’s regional resilience?
The study uses a difference-in-difference (DiD) approach to understand the influences of GARID. The results suggest that the introduction of GARID has significantly affected GN, in contrast to CN, in terms of data usage and information sharing, living quality improvement, social safety net, and bottom-up action (dimensions 2,4,7, and 8 in Figure 2 below) during the transition from the baseline to the midline. GARID does not result in obvious differences in GN from CN between the assessed timeframe across the other dimensions.
Figure 2: Intermediate influences of GARID on Greater Accra resilience
Notes: The introduction of GARID has significantly affected GN, in contrast to CN, in terms of data usage and information sharing, living quality improvement, social safety net, and bottom-up action (dimensions 2,4,7, and 8). Source: Figure generated by the author.
Positive impacts of GARID
Knowing that the introduction of GARID has stressed its transparency (dimension 2) and stimulated committed bottom-up action (dimension 8) among focus neighbourhoods is an exciting empirical finding. Scholars have stressed enhancing projects’ transparency and emphasised bottom-up activities’ crucial role in strengthening community resilience.
The study’s findings engage with the literature through respective interpretations. On the one hand, achieving a project’s transparency is often based on the degree of stakeholders’ involvement, relying heavily on intentional strategy-making, visioning, and empowerment in a top-down manner to format responsible governance. On the other hand, GARID’s influence on stimulating a growing local commitment in GN implies how the residents are accumulatively and positively responding to the changing urban landscape and the possibility of driving a positive impact on community resilience via bottom-up actions. In other words, the findings echo scholars’ arguments that collaborative efforts from both top-down and bottom-up are needed for successful resilience development.
Negative impacts of GARID
The finding that GARID is resulting in negative impacts on living quality (dimension 4) and social safety net (dimension 7) is unexpected but understandable, partly by hearing words from the ground like “the pace of work is slow” or “the project has kept long.” Scholars have explored discourses around delayed urban interventions and the potential “temporal contestation,” which features merging collective action to demand acceleration from the state.
The findings here are similar to those of the literature and can be interpreted in two ways. The negative impacts might just reflect the fact that the GN have been challenging environments with environmental, economic, and social vulnerability, which was the exact reason that they were chosen under GARID.
The conditions in GN have been deteriorating while waiting for GARID to really hit the ground. Another explanation is attached to the delay itself. When the waiting has exceeded the residents’ expectations, doubts could start to occur, negatively influencing the respondents’ living satisfaction and their awareness of trustworthy organisations to enhance the neighbourhoods’ safety net.
Early insight on advancing integrated resilient development projects
The study, assessing GARID from its baseline to midline, reveals that:
- Most indicators do not have significant differences for now
- Two immediate reactions are negative, potentially because of the long wait for GARID’s actual interventions
- Two positive perspectives hint at the residents’ forward-looking aspects. The immediate impacts driven by GARID come with the potential to convert into substantial positive outcomes once the project is fully developed.