Ghana

What the record shows

Accra is unusually well mapped and unusually unable to act on it. Two of the entries below produced open datasets that have outlived by years the grants that paid for them, and in both cases nobody inherited a duty to use what was collected. The rest of the record tells the same story from the money side: the numbers that get audited are what the digitising cost, not what it achieved.

Between June 2018 and February 2020 a humanitarian mapping team surveyed four flood-prone neighbourhoods on Accra's Odaw river into OpenStreetMap — roughly 36,000 buildings, 98 km of roads and paths, 1,500 drain points, 83 km of drain segments and hundreds of waste dumping sites, with more than a hundred mappers and thirty government staff trained, paid for by the World Bank. The data is still there six years after the money stopped. The flood programme it was collected for had rehabilitated 0.10 km of a planned 6 km of drainage after six years. Open data outlives the grant that made it; the obligation to act on it never existed. The trotro mapping is the same shape in transport: surveyors with GPS phones mapped about 300 minibus routes from 2015, a 2017 campaign moved the network into OpenStreetMap, and the export is still downloadable — carrying a service calendar that ran out on 31 January 2020, with no re-survey since 2017. The mapping was funded as a project rather than as a duty, and Ghana's OpenStreetMap community, not an agency, is what keeps it alive.

The city's traffic infrastructure states the problem in two numbers. Forty-one signals between Achimota and the central business district were rewired in 2019 to talk to each other and to a control room, with buried detectors, cameras, adaptive controllers and priority for the city's buses; that corridor still runs seven years on, at 33 controllers and 80 cameras, on about US$3.4 million of donor money. Its intended successor, meant to cover the whole metropolis at around US$210 million, is 23 per cent built with its hardware in storage and its contractors in court. Accra now has two traffic systems and only the cheap one works.

Aayalolo is the record's most instructive near-miss, because the sequence was inverted. Ghana bought the fleet and a closed-loop contactless fare system, then cancelled the 9.1 km of dedicated lane that would have made the buses fast. What opened in December 2016 is a scheduled quality bus service running in mixed traffic, with a card that never worked reliably — paper tickets were sold from the first month. Its first month carried about 1,580 passengers a day against a target of 22,500, seven per cent, and ran the corridor in 62.8 minutes at 21 km/h against targets of 32 minutes and 28.2 km/h; the World Bank's completion report rated it unsatisfactory. A service designed to beat the shared minibuses now queues behind them, and its management said in January 2026 that it had reached its ceiling.

Where a system did reach national scale, the constraint moved to whether people had a reason to use it. GhanaPostGPS cut the whole country into five-metre squares in October 2017, each with its own address code, and anyone applying for a national ID card while resident has to supply one. It is one of the few nationwide systems in this atlas that passes the scope test for a city entry, because every Accra address genuinely carries a code. A peer-reviewed survey of 999 households in three suburban Accra communities found 68 per cent of property owners likely to use their digital address against 32 per cent of renters. Making an address compulsory is easier than making it useful, and take-up split along tenure lines while the features residents were promised lagged years behind the launch.

The measurement layer is genuinely good and reaches almost nothing. Breathe Accra has put one low-cost sensor in each municipal assembly of the metropolitan area since 2022, passing fifty in 2026, run by a university team on philanthropic money; a peer-reviewed colocation study put the environmental agency's network at a daily average of 23.4 micrograms of fine particulates over 2018 to 2021, 1.6 times the World Health Organization's daily guideline, across 11,001 valid days. No ambient threshold triggers a restriction. Ghana's 2025 air-quality regulations bind industry to install controls and report emissions, but no reading crosses a line and produces a consequence by itself; the lever the assemblies name is a bylaw against open burning. Accra measures more than most African cities and can act on almost none of it.

The two utility-and-revenue entries close the circle. Ghana centralised property-rate billing nationally in January 2023 and then pulled back, telling assemblies to resume collecting themselves; Accra's assembly built its own billing system from May 2024 and added mobile short codes for rates and business permits. The Auditor-General's finding is the only audited figure in the entry, and it is about cost rather than yield: the Assembly paid a private collector a commission to chase 393 institutions that were already complying, and the recommendation was to collect internally for value for money. Accra's only audited number is what the digital collector was paid, not what digitisation collected. The prepaid meter rollout ends on the same asymmetry: the utility can read consumption remotely, flag tampering and let customers buy credit anywhere, and when the regulator gave it 48 hours in February 2026 to explain why prepaid units were draining faster than customers expected, neither side could settle it from the meter data — because only one of them can read it. If the entries below agree on one lesson, it is that Accra has repeatedly bought the ability to see something without buying anyone's obligation to respond to it.