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Floods are common events that confront many cities in the developing world. Ghana, a developing country, is persistently challenged with flood events, especially in its major cities. In informal Accra, for instance, despite the severity of flood effects and its associated threats, poor informal residents continue to stay. As a result, these poor urban dwellers have developed local coping strategies made up of mitigation and reactive measures to manage and adapt to flood hazards through their preceding experiences. In this article, we have embraced the convergent parallel mixed method of case study design to echo and explore (1) the major effects of preceding floods on informal households, (2) the local informal coping strategies adopted by households to mitigate and respond to flooding and its effects in the future and (3) the determinants of the coping strategies of households that underpin their continual stay in spite of flood risks in Alajo, an urbanised suburb in Accra metropolis noted as one of the slum communities that easily flood in Ghana. Our analysis has used a mix of qualitative and quantitative data collected from both secondary and primary sources as well as a conceptualised model known as disaster resilience of place. The key findings (Alajo has low degree of adaptive resilience to major floods which might occur in the future because of the lack of social learning in the coping strategies developed through several years of lessons learnt from perennial floods) and proposals (local coordination in implementing the coping strategies to flooding, state support of the local strategies and adoption of rainwater harvesting) also make contributions to managing urban floods in informal settlements in the developing world.

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All countries strive for sustainable growth and development. However, for countries to achieve the desired growth and development, efforts are needed to plan, regulate, control and guide the development process in the right direction. This makes the need for development plans imperative in spearheading sustained growth and development. Ghana, a developing country, has adopted a 40-year development plan, with the vision of achieving "a just, free and prosperous society" by 2057. This paper uses a descriptive approach based on data from secondary sources including public documents, official statistics, national diaries and published papers. It synergizes the country's mechanism for the implementation of its long term development plan. The findings of the paper present to concerned actors, insight into how Ghana intends to implement its long term development plan. It offers the platform to critically assess, disparage and/or recommend the plan for other developing countries around the globe.

Urban farmers remain vulnerable and trapped in poverty due to urbanisation and food crop and input price volatility. However, studies on the causes and effects as well as coping strategies to the phenomena remain inconclusive amidst diminishing urban farmlands, as the focus has been on smallholders in rural areas. This paper examines the attitudes of urban farmers on the strategies adopted to cope with input and crop price fluctuations in the Ejisu-Juaben Municipality, Ghana. Data obtained from 380 respondents showed that four major factors influence the volatility of input prices: oil prices, exchange rates, cocoa producer prices and inflation. Farmers, however, had no coping strategies to these due to the limited control over them. Two key factors were noted to influence crop price fluctuation: natural and demand and supply factors. Farmers coped with food crop price fluctuations by: adding value to crops; farming in flood plains; diversifying income sources and shifting to cocoa cultivation. A shift to cocoa production and farming in flood plains was however revealed to have adverse environmental and ecological implications. The paper recommends the promotion of contractual farming to safeguard farmers against income falls; and the formulation of an environmental ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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