A child runs across a makeshift bridge in Old Fadama. Located in Ghana’s capital Accra and colloquially referred to as ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’, Old Fadama is Ghana’s largest slum and is home to some 80 000 people. With no public sanitation services at all, what limited toilet facilities exist in the community are privately owned and operate on a pay-per-use basis. People who cannot pay – children, for example – defecate in the open or in plastic bags which are often dumped near toilets, such as the one past which this drain flows.
World Poverty Clock, a global humanitarian organization, has said that close to 2.8 million Ghanaians are living in extreme poverty.
It means that this huge number of Ghanaians are living below the global poverty line of a $1.9 spending a day.
And frighteningly, the number represents about 10 percent of the entire population of the country.
The report shows that Ethiopia is the only African country that is on the same level as Ghana as of August 2018. It is expected that both countries will be able to reduce extreme poverty to at least 3% of their respective populations.
The report added that real-time data projections show that about 28 Ghanaians escape extreme poverty every hour, giving the country a fairly positive rank on the continent and in the world.
The report also showed that a cursory mapping of the extreme poverty trends in Ghana indicates a gradual decline over the past decade.
Ghana was the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to reduce poverty by half, as expected by the Millennium Development Goal 1.
But a large number of its people still live in extreme poverty. Most of these people live in the rural areas. Those in the urban areas who suffer extreme poverty have a challenge accessing better infrastructure in the country.
Between 1991 and 2014, poverty levels had dropped by over 50%.
As of 2014, 24% of Ghana’s population, representing 6.4 million people, were considered poor.