Beatrice Mosello
Executive summary The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) embedded water and sanitation as fundamental pillars of development. Their successors, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) went a step further and shifted the focus from service delivery to service delivery ‘for all’, thereby adding a fundamental concern with equity. Despite significant progress, however, huge disparities in access to and use of improved water and sanitation facilities between the richest and the poorest, as well as between quintiles, remain.
This report is part of a global study commissioned by WaterAid, aimed at understanding plausible pathways of change to promote broad-based and equitable access to water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) services. We conducted a political-economy analysis exploring the incentives, constraints and opportunities for change, with a focus on the poorest fifth of the population. Two other country case studies and a synthesis report are available.
We selected Ghana as a case study considering its good progress in recent years in reducing inequalities in access to urban water within a context of overall impressive economic growth and poverty reduction. Over the past 20 years, Ghana has successfully transitioned from authoritarian rule to democracy; achieving middle-income status in 2010, its poverty rate has fallen significantly and it ranks among the highest-performing countries in terms of human development in sub-Saharan Africa.
However, poverty reduction has not gone hand in hand with inequality reduction. The serious external and internal macroeconomic shocks that have affected Ghana since 2012 contributed to a sharp rise of the price of nonfood items, hitting urban households particularly hard and raising concerns about the country’s future growth prospects.
These trends for the overall economy are reflected in trends in the WASH sector. According to the World Bank, the poverty reduction achievements of the 1990s and 2000s have been accompanied by a substantial improvement in access to basic household services, such as sanitation, electricity and clean drinking water.
Between 1990 and 2015, access to improved water sources increased from 84% to 93% in urban areas, and from 39% to 84% in rural areas. Ghana’s sustained economic growth and development process in the 1990s and 2000s have contributed to this progress, stimulating infrastructure investments aimed at improving service delivery in many sectors, including water.
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