Accra, Nov. 29, GNA – Dr Leticia Appiah, the Executive Director, National Population Council (NPC), has called for the decentralisation of employment policies to reduce rural-urban migration in the country.
She noted that most factories in the country were in urban areas, contributing to the high movement of people to the cities and creating congestion with negative impact on living condition.
The Executive Director made the call in an interview with the Ghana News Agency in Accra on the 2021 Population and Housing Census figures released by the Ghana Statistical Service with focus on urban population.
According to the provisional population figures, Ghana’s population is now 30.8 million, which showed an increase of 6.1 million people from the 2010 population figures, which was 24.6 million.
Population change is driven by fertility, mortality, and migration.
Ghana’s urban population has increased from 50.9 per cent in 2010 to 56.7 per cent in 2021, with 47.8 per cent of the increase in the Greater Accra and Ashanti regions.
Dr Appiah said the figures on the urban population must stimulate authorities to take actions on the reasons behind the movement and adopt workable solutions to curtail the phenomenon, stressing that “population dynamics is about population redistribution.”
The Executive Director, said “employment will drive humans to where there is employment that is why people migrate to the urban areas or abroad to seek for greener pastures.”
“For instance, if a market is sited at a place where there is no banks or hospitals, the market in itself will not draw people there, so there should be a conscious urban or rural planning to have a collection of all the essential services located in those places to attract people there,” she said.
Dr Appiah said the growth in the large number of urban places over the years suggested that re-classification was significant though the two dominant elements driving the urbanisation process had been rural-urban migration and natural increase within the towns and cities.
The country, she stated, had started to see the side effects of rapid urbanisation, including congestion, unregulated urban expansion, limited access to services and affordable quality housing, with institutions unable to cope with the rapid transition.
Dr Appiah said the country must strategise in managing urbanisation to ensure that growth was accompanied by better productivity and inclusion to improve the lives of all citizens.
Ghanaian authorities, she suggested, needed to generate new sources of productivity to create more efficient urban economies and create functional and inclusive cities that provided more equal access to housing, services, and opportunity for all.
She said the country must decide whether to strengthen land use management and planning in metropolitan and municipal areas by valuing land to create effective land markets and coordinating land development with infrastructure and affordable housing.
The country’s population age structure, according to the report, is transitioning from 0-14 years to 15-35 years, with a higher concentration of the youth in the urban areas.
Also, a total of 17,931, 673 which constitutes 58.2 per cent of the population, are 18 years and above.
The 2021 Census was the country’s first fully digital exercise, which employed technology in all aspects of its implementation.
The 2021 PHC counted and collected detailed information on all persons that spent the Census Night – Sunday 27th June 2021 -in the country.
It provided important information to support evidence-based implementation of the national development agenda and supported the tracking of achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals and Agenda 2063 of the African Union.
GNA