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There are few inter-African country urban analyses because of the continent’s enormous size and socioeconomic diversity, language barriers, and wide variations in national and regional urban research capacity. Nevertheless, comparative urban studies are critical in understanding contemporary African urbanization. In this comparative spatial and temporal analysis of Ghana and Kenya’s urbanization, we find that both countries are urbanizing rapidly and are faced with many common urban problems. Moreover, Ghana is more urbanized than Kenya and has a larger indigenous urban imprint and a more widely dispersed urban pattern. Besides their physiographic and population conditions, we trace these countries’ convergent and divergent urban trends to their shared but unique experiences of colonialism, nationalism and globalization. 相似文献
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J. Henry Owusu 《The Professional geographer》1998,50(4):418-436
Since the early 1980s, most Sub-Saharan African countries have resorted to structural adjustment programs to reform their ailing economies. Adjustment, however, may provide a convenient means for governments of the adjusting economies and international capital to meet their current economic and political interests, usually by sacrificing the physical environment, with huge environmental costs for the adjusting country. This paper uses Ghana's forestry sector, which has been characterized by a dramatic increase in woodexports since adjustment, to demonstrate a direct link between adjustment and environmental destruction. Ghana's dramatic increase in wood exports, involving a rapid and extensive deforestation, results from the government's need to meet its increasing external debt service obligations, and is exacerbated by the series of massive local currency devaluation required under adjustment “to get prices right.” The systematic reduction in government revenue from devaluation to amortize the increasing debts, keeps the government and indebted wood processing firms on a treadmill of export-based extraction/deforestation. 相似文献
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Kwadwo Owusu Maame Asiwah Nkansah 《Geografisk tidskrift / udgivet af Bestyrelsen for Det Kongelige danske geografiske selskab》2017,117(1):1-10
Construction of dams affects the livelihoods of the population living along the dammed river. There is a need for more studies to guide dam development policies and management to safeguard the livelihoods of local river users. This paper examines the effects of dams on the socio-economic livelihoods of downstream communities by drawing on the Kpong Dam in Ghana constructed from 1979 to 1982 with the goal of supplying energy and for irrigation purposes. Primary data were collected in resettled and non-resettled downstream communities using a mixed-research approach. This case study highlights how the Kpong Dam has affected the downstream river-dependent population whose livelihoods, particularly farming and fishing revolved around the seasonal flow regimes of the Volta River. Our study challenges the general perception that dams increase agricultural production by illustrating that developing ancillary facilities such as irrigation schemes as part of dam projects can enhance all-year-round agricultural production to improve food and income security of downstream households only when constraints such as lack of farm inputs are addressed. To safeguard livelihoods and limit the social impacts of dams, compensation schemes and alternative livelihood activities should be designed to include resettled and non-resettled communities along the downstream areas affected by dam projects. 相似文献
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Paul William Kojo Yankson Alex Barimah Owusu George Owusu John Boakye-Danquah Jacob Doku Tetteh 《Natural Hazards》2017,85(2):691-707
In this paper, the extent to which the potentially transit-dependent portion of the population is vulnerable to the effects of a hurricane is estimated. The vulnerability of an area is defined as a composite measure of the proportion of disadvantaged persons, distance to transit, and flooding potential of people within an area. Unlike past studies which have focused on the vulnerability of the population in relatively large geographic areas, this study estimates the vulnerability of the population in 30 m × 30 m areas as defined in the National Land Cover Database. Population estimates from the national census at block level are disaggregated to the 30 m × 30 m units using a modified dasymetric mapping method in ArcGIS. The modified mapping method assigns population to each small areal unit using weights estimated by regressing the area of each land use in a census block against the population in that block. The coefficients in the regression analysis are “weights” associating population with each land use, and are used to distribute the population in each census block to the small geographic units based on their land use. In a case study of New Orleans, the results show that some areas are not well served by the existing transit pickup locations, as evidenced by their high vulnerability scores. Reassignment of pickup point locations to cover higher vulnerability score areas was investigated using integer linear programming. The results show that the optimally located pickup points serve areas with a larger average vulnerability score than the current pickup points in the study area. The method appears to be helpful in identifying vulnerable areas that, subsequently, could receive improved hurricane evacuation service in the future. 相似文献
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J. Henry Owusu 《The Professional geographer》2001,53(2):230-247
In 1983, Ghana embarked on a program of structural adjustment under the auspices of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to resuscitate the economy and to foster development. This paper utilizes the Lagos Plan of Action, a comprehensive, continent‐wide effort and African‐led policy strategy for the economic development of the African continent, to examine the contribution of adjustment to the development of an integrated economy in Ghana. Adjustment is examined as a form of structural transformation, as evidenced by the emergent intranational (intra‐ and inter‐sectoral) and international linkages in the formal wood processing industry, a key sector with tremendous potential for such linkages. Intranationally, this study shows that, as in the pre‐adjustment years, inter‐sectoral linkages, although important, were not dynamic enough to play a significantly galvanizing role in the nation's economic development. However, intra‐sectorally, a dramatic expansion in lumber exports led to an unprecedented constriction in the traditional forward linkage between sawmills and downstream processors. This forced the latter to depend on the informal sector for inputs. Internationally, Ghanaian firms operated as subcontractors of convenience for firms overseas (particularly in Europe) via an expanded forward linkage, reflecting a new “colonial relationship” under the program. 相似文献
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We present evidence from the analysis of gridded annual rainfall data that, increased variability and declining rainfall totals are the main cause of declining lake levels in the Volta basin above the Akosombo Dam. West Africa has undergone a period of diminished rainfall, punctuated by a series of severe droughts and marked by a shift in rainfall regime. As a result, lake levels behind the hydro-electric impoundment have fluctuated so widely at times that, power has had to be rationed. The trends in the spatial and temporal variability of annual rainfall in the riparian nations explain the low impoundment levels frequent in recent decades. The drying of Burkina Faso and Mali is particularly marked and synchronous to an apparent shift in the rainfall regime in Ghana towards a longer dry season and vanishing short dry spell, the effects which tend to negate each other. The various regional and temporal associations between El Niño-Southern Oscillation phenomenon (ENSO) are investigated as a possible cause of variation across the basin. The strengths of these associations and low frequency shifts suggest an unfortunate correspondence between national and climatological boundaries which may serve to heighten regional political tensions resulting from ENSO effects. Lack of re-investment in the Akosombo Dam as a result of management policies, political and pre-construction contractual agreements have all conspired in recent decades to make these hydro-climatological changes more devastating. 相似文献
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The study simulated the effect of using reservoir storage for reducing flood peaks and volumes in urban areas with the Dzorwulu basin in Accra, Ghana as case study. A triangulated irregular network surface of the floodplain was created using ArcGIS from ESRI by integrating digital elevation model and the map of the study area. The weighted curve number for the basin was obtained from the land use and soil type shape files using ArcGIS. The Soil Conservation Service curve number unit hydrograph procedure was used to obtain an inflow hydrograph based on the highest rainfall recorded in recent history (3–4 June 1995) in the study area and then routed through an existing reservoir to assess the impact of the reservoir on potential flood peak attenuation. The results from the analysis indicate that a total of 13.09 × 106 m3 of flood water was generated during this 10‐h rainstorm, inundating a total area of 6.89 km2 with a depth of 4.95 m at the deepest section of the basin stream. The routing results showed that the reservoir has capacity to store 34.52% of the flood hydrograph leading to 45% reduction in flood peak and subsequently 38.5% reduction in flood inundation depth downstream of the reservoir. From results of the study, the reservoir storage concept looks promising for urban flood management in Ghana, especially in communities that are over‐urbanized downstream but have some space upstream for creating the storage. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 相似文献