Land markets in African cities are characterised by the co-existence of different modes of supply that originate from the different stages of their development. Customary land tenure remains important in many of these cities, although its future is widely disputed. This paper discusses the implications of the co-existence of customary land tenure and state involvement in the land market in peri-urban Accra, where land is rapidly being converted from agricultural to residential use. The land market is shown to be complex and diverse, characterised by a high level of uncertainty and widespread disputes. The strong sense of cultural identity associated with customary land, and the difficulties of introducing major changes to land markets, however, point towards maintaining a modified form of customary land tenure.

Despite the recent increased interest in female entrepreneurs, attention has tended to focus on dynamic individuals and generic incentives without considering the roles of gender and place in entrepreneurship. In this article, we draw on the notion of mixed embeddedness to explore how time‐and‐place–specific institutional contexts influence women's entrepreneurship. Drawing on primary data collected in Ghana, where exceptionally more women engage in entrepreneurial activities than men, we examine the scale and characteristics of female entrepreneurial activity, exploring the factors that account for this strong participation of women, and examine whether this high entrepreneurial rate is also reflected in their performance and growth aspirations. The findings reveal a disjuncture between, on the one hand, the vibrant entrepreneurial endeavors of Ghanaian women and positive societal attitudes toward female entrepreneurship and, on the other hand, female business activities characterized by vulnerability and relatively low achievement. The article shows how regulatory, normative, and cultural–cognitive institutional forces, which have been transformed over time by local and global processes and their interaction, are concomitantly propelling and impeding women's entrepreneurial activities. We propose that the study of female entrepreneurs within economic geography could be advanced by analyzing the differing effects of the complex, multiple, and shifting layers of institutional contexts in which they are embedded.

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Extreme weather events pose significant threats to urban health in low-and middle-income countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa where there are systemic health challenges. This paper investigates health system vulnerabilities associated with flooding and extreme heat, along with strategies for resilience building by service providers and community members, in Accra and Tamale, Ghana. We employed field observations, rainfall records, temperature measurements, and semi-structured interviews in health facilities within selected areas of the cities. Results indicate that poor building conditions, unstable power supply, poor sanitation and hygiene, and the built environment reduce access to healthcare for residents of poor urban areas.Health facilities are sited in low-lying areas with poor drainage systems and can be 6°C warmer at night than reported by official records from nearby weather stations. This is due to a combination of greater thermal inertia of the buildings and the urban heat island effect. Flooding and extreme heat interact with socioeconomic conditions to impact physical infrastructure and disrupt community health as well as health facility operations. Community members and health facilities make infrastructural and operational adjustments to reduce extreme weather stress and improve healthcare provision to clients. These measures include mobilisation of residents to clear rubbish and unclog drains; elevating equipment to protect it from floods; improving ventilation during extreme heat; and using alternative power sources for emergency surgery and storage during outages. Stakeholders recommend additional actions to manage flood and heat impacts on health in their cities, such as, improving the capacity of drainage systems to carry floodwaters, and routine temperature monitoring to better manage heat in health facilities.Finally, more timely and targeted information systems and emergency response plans are required to ensure preparedness for extreme weather events in urban areas.

International audienc

Recent growth in mobile telephone and mobile-based information services in many developing countries provides opportunities to reduce costly and incomplete information dissemination in the agricultural sector and ensure efficient functioning of markets. But in order to successfully use mobile phones for the optimal development of agricultural markets, understanding the impact of social structure on mobile phone adoption, its uses and perceived impacts are invaluable. Although global assessments of capacity in the use of information communication technology (ICT) devices have been considered, such assessments mask significant geo-spatial variations among local farmers—male and female—with respect to their capacity to effectively use basic mobile phone functions. Documenting and recognizing this is important for the development of national agricultural ICT policies, as well as programmes aimed at increasing farmers’ knowledge and use of ICT for agricultural marketing. This article’s contribution to agricultural marketing and the use of ICT in developing countries (such as Ghana) is anchored in the assessment of the technical capacity and mobile telephone-based market information access to farmers in selected rural districts of Ghana. The selected districts are where most households are poor and heavily dependent on farming as their mainstay, and furthermore, where market information which mobile phones facilitate is crucial to maximizing their incomes.

Existing research on urban Ghana mainly focuses on processes occurring within the country's major cities, thereby reproducing a trend within the social sciences to overlook the role of intermediate and secondary cities. This paper aims to address this shortcoming by exploring spatial and social transformations in Sekondi-Takoradi, one of Ghana's secondary cities and the metropolitan area serving the region's emerging rubber industries as well as the country's oil and gas economy. Using qualitative interviews conducted with residents in five of the city's neighbourhoods, and a modified version of Kaufmann's typology of mobility, we examine migration into Sekondi-Takoradi, residential mobility within the city, and the daily mobility of the city's residents. The paper highlights how these diverse forms of mobility interact with processes taking place both within and outside Sekondi-Takoradi, most notably influencing and being influenced by livelihood strategies. It is argued that the city and its hinterlands can best be envisaged as a mobile networked whole, rather than consisting of disconnected and compartmentalised locales. The paper thus contributes to broader debates on how mobility shapes urbanisation by providing new empirical data on events unfolding in Africa's secondary cities, and extends existing research by providing a counter narrative to literature that examines the city and its surrounding rural areas separately.

Emerging issues from the Bui hydropower project suggest that the experiences of two earlier hydropower projects in Ghana failed to prevent challenges related to resource access and livelihoods. This article examines the nature of the challenges, their causes, why they were not avoided and the role of the Chinese builders. We conducted 43 interviews and 11 focus group discussions and analyzed qualitative data by themes using narrative analysis. Our findings show that the livelihoods of the resettled communities are, on balance, negatively impacted by the construction of the dam. While Chinese dam-builders played a major role in financing and enabling the dam's construction, the Ghanaian governance arrangements were found to be more important in addressing the livelihood challenges.