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Including local citizens in decision-making about the use of local resources is crucial to improving the generation of locally raised funds. This study illustrates the positive effects of composite budgeting - a participatory process - in meeting local people's development interest and needs, and in promoting expenditure autonomy. Using a case study approach and drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, the study found that Ghana's system of district assemblies - which are largely made up of elected members - appears to be relatively successful in delivering the capacity and independence required to make funding decisions that benefit local people and the development of their area. The paper suggests a link between citizens' confidence in the working of their assembly and their willingness to contribute to locally generated funds.

This paper examines inequalities in drinking water access among regions and between urban and rural areas in Ghana with a focus on access to safely managed water service, access to safe water, access to water on premises, access to sufficient quantities of water, and access to improved water. Microdata of the 2017/18 Ghana Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey was used and analyzed using descriptive statistics and Gini index. Nationally, access to safely managed water service was low (6.8%) with moderate inequality among regions (Gini index = 0.27) and high inequality between rural and urban areas (Gini index = 0.42). Among the 10 administrative regions, moderate inequality was recorded for access to water on premises (Gini index = 0.20), and low inequality for access to safe water (Gini index = 0.117), access to improved water (0.06), and access to sufficient quantities of drinking water (0.02). The results of the study reinforce the call by the United Nations for disaggregation of national data of the Sustainable Development Goals by relevant socio-economic and spatial variables at a subnational level to help in the design and implementation of inclusive and equitable policies.

Microfinance institutions must understand what influences their clients' choice of credit source in order to design and provide adequate and appropriate credit facilities to their clients. This paper explores the determinants of the choice of credit source among beneficiaries of microfinance systems in the Upper West Region of Ghana. An interview guide and a questionnaire were used to collect data. The study employed the multinomial probit model to analyse the data. The study revealed that gender, arable crop farming, household size, dependency ratio, access to microfinance information, repayment period, group size, interest rate, distance, loan amount, borrowing experience, household assets, and household members employed were the main determinants of the choice of credit source among beneficiaries. The study recommends that the Bank of Ghana, through the Apex Bank, standardise repayment periods and procedures such that banks compete on innovative methods of sourcing borrowers, which could result in efficiency in the lending industry.

Purpose This paper aims to examine landlords’ health support systems to tenants to control COVID-19 in selected informal settlement rental housing (ISRH) in Ghana, dwelling on landlords’ views. Design/methodology/approach The paper used the concurrent imbedded mixed-methods approach and grounded the findings in the socio-ecological theory. The authors collected both qualitative and quantitative data from 242 landlords in 13 informal settlements across Ghana using quotas. The authors undertook semi-structured face-to-face and telephone interviews. The authors conducted content and thematic qualitative data analysis and used simple descriptive statistical data analysis. Findings The paper discovered that tenants had limited knowledge on the transmission of the pandemic, forcing landlords to regulate their building services usage, ventilation and thermal control, entertainment, common areas and rent advancement for tenants to control the pandemic. Also, tenants found it difficult to comply with the rules on ventilation for fear of criminal attacks, while high social connection and interaction among renters and inadequate enforcement caused the non-adherence by renters to social gathering. Again, landlords had difficulty in contract-tracing visitors suspected to be infected with the virus. Originality/value The use of concurrent and imbedded mixed methods to investigate landlords’ viewpoints on their support in health needs of their tenants to regulate COVID-19. The prescriptions from the study provide practical applications to formulate a mix of housing and health policies to formalize the support of landlords to their tenants in ISRH in Ghana.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to evaluate the roles of landlords in tenant management during COVID-19 pandemic season among informal settlement neighbourhoods in urban Ghana. Design/methodology/approach This study used a mixed methods research approach and foregrounds the discussions of the results with the social roles theory. Using the quota sampling procedure, this study used 467 semi-structured interviews of tenants from five old informal settlement neighbourhoods in urban Ghana. This study adopted the thematic analytical technique in the results section. Findings This study uncovered that landlords perform a gate-keeping social relationship role in ensuring tenant safety during the COVID-19 pandemic season through the provision of security, care and support, discipline, hard work, morale building to accountability. However, this study found that most landlords do not provide tenancy agreements to tenants which strained some social relationships in tenant management. Originality/value The application of social roles theory in this study provides a cutting-edge approach to the study of welfare of tenants living in informal settlement housing units during periods of pandemic. This study practically provides a participatory approach to analysing and discussing the roles of landlords in tenant management and proffering solutions for formalisation of these roles in housing policies in Ghana.

This study examined and compared the objectively-weighted, expert-based-weighted and stakeholder-based weighted Scalogram approaches based on their centrality indices and factors considered in assigning weights to the functions. A mixed-method approach, comprising both quantitative and qualitative techniques were employed to gather primary and secondary data for the study. All the three Scalograms with different weighting techniques were analyzed in Microsoft Excel, focusing on centrality and weighted centrality indices and simple linear regression models. The study discovered that the grand total centrality index of the objective Scalogram is 4,105.60, the expert-based Scalogram is 10,294.2 while the stakeholder-based one is 10,429.80. The co-efficients of determination for the three are 0.9892, 0.9757 and 0.9812 respectively, giving explanatory powers of 98.92%, 97.57% and 98.12% respectively. It is recommended that due to resource constraints, planners should rely more on the objective-based approach, followed by the stakeholder-based approach and then the expert-based approach, since the latter approach has rather reduced the explanatory power of population by increasing values of the centrality indices. Again, bottlenecks to the development of Area Council headquarters (intermediate settlements between Wa and lower-level settlements) should be tackled for efficient spatial distribution of functions. The contribution of this article to the spatial and development planning literature is its juxtaposition of the three techniques in Scalogram analysis.