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Ghana plans to replace its polluting buses "trotro" and formalize garbage collection in slums as part of a new plan to help its overcrowded capital cope with climate change and disasters.
This West African country has become the second country in the region after Senegal to launch a plan to help its capital, Accra, to develop safely as part of the global network of 100 resilient cities.
"We hope this will go a long way in helping other cities in Africa," said James Mensah, head of resilience in Accra, who created the plan with the city council in response to floods, fires, collapse of buildings and epidemics.
Greater Accra, home to about 4 million people, is built on an eroding coast. More than half of the population lives in informal housing that coexists with skyscrapers in a seaside town.
One of the 27 initiatives in the city aims to reduce floods by improving waste management. Garbage in slums and markets is collected informally on tricycle trolleys called "Borla taxis" because the roads are too small for city trucks to move around.
But Borla taxi drivers usually throw trash on the side of the road because the disposal site is far away. It then clogs the gutters and blocks drainage when it rains, and floods increase the risk of waterborne diseases, Mensah said.
"We went out into the field and talked to locals and locals, and they told us exactly what we could do to deal with this situation," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The solution, already underway, is to register taxi drivers in Borla with the city and create micro-unloading stations where they can deposit the waste for trucks to recover.
As part of another initiative, the city plans to consolidate the owners of minibuses used as shared taxis, called "trotro", and give them funds to buy bigger and more fuel-efficient vehicles, said Mensah.
The Resilient 100 Resilient Cities Network, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, was created in 2013 and helps cities around the world hire a Resilience Officer and create a plan.
But funding and project implementation may be lacking, said Arabella Fraser, Research Fellow in Urban Resilience at the University of Nottingham.
"They did a lot of hard work, a very good job of pioneering … but then the main challenge is to apply these strategies," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
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100 resilient citiesGhanaclimate changes
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