Delays in Building Construction Projects in Ghana

Abstract

This study investigates the causes of delay of building construction projects in Ghana to determine the most important according to the key project participants; clients, consultants, and contractors. Thirty-two possible causes of delay were identified from the literature and semi-structured interviews of 15 key players in the implementation process. These delay factors were further categorised into nine major groups. The list of delay causes was subjected to a questionnaire survey for the identification of the most important causes of delay. The field survey included 130 respondents made up of 39 contractors, 37 clients and 54 consultants. The relative importance of the individual causes and the groups were calculated and ranked by their relative importance index. The overall results of the study indicate that the respondents generally agree that financial group factors ranked highest among the major factors causing delay in construction projects in Ghana. The financial group factors were delay in honouring payment certificates, difficulty in accessing credit and fluctuation in prices. Materials group factors are second followed by scheduling and controlling factors.

Investigating Challenges in Financing Contractors for Public Sector Projects in Ghana

“…The study revealed some reasons for delayed payments to include poor planning and bureaucracy on the part of the employer. This confirms earlier studies by Fugah and Agyarkwa [2] and Badu et al [18] about untimely payment of certificate by clients. The survey indicated that cash flow is a major challenge based on the contractors experience in an interview.…”

“…The performance of the public sector contracts in relation to effective and efficient financing of public sector projects has been the challenge of the sector over a period with successive governments. The potential reasons for construction delays of public projects has been due to untimely honoring of certificate by client, credit inaccessibility by contractors and price fluctuations [2]. Badu et al [18] confirmed this by stating that both large and small-scale contractors experience difficulty in accessing funds.…”

“…What is prominent among these challenges is financing contractors for public sector projects. A number of studies have been conducted on the success of projects and factors affecting contractors' performance in Ghana; [1] [2] [3] [4]. However, these studies show poor performance by both large and small scale contractors.…”

Construction Delays in Developing Countries: A Review

“…Besides, they have been experiencing delay because of procurement delay and late delivery of materials and equipment, and lack of skilled labor [41]. South Africa and Tanzania have similar issues like Ghana to produce project delay.…”

“…Beyond these groups, financial, managerial, government rules and regulations, and external factors were recognized as the common groups in most of the studies (Table 1). However, few studies added some more groups like contract documents or contractual relationships, design related, and environmental factors [41,51]. Based on these findings, this study classified the delay factors under 8 major groups, for example, financial, owner, contactor, consultant, manpower and resources, project, managerial, and external [4,12,47].…”