The Urban Solid Waste Management Conundrum in Ghana: Will It Ever End?

Abstract

Proper solid waste management (SWM) has become one critical environmental challenge faced by cities in Ghana due to its externalities. Notwithstanding the efforts by city authorities to remediate the problem, it still remains a monumental challenge and an elusive enterprise. This is evidenced from the uncollected garbage at public spaces and indiscriminate dumping at zones with fatal flaws. This article examines the current conventional solid waste management philosophies in urban Ghana, an African country whose development and growth is widely regarded as rapid and chaotic and points out some of the flaws in them. The fieldwork involved fifty key informant interviews with experts and six separate focus group discussions with some household heads. The paper argues that the current approaches to SWM, which are often imported from the Global north, have yielded little results because they are incompatible with local development trajectories. The paper concludes that the problem will persist unless the imported solutions are integrated with indigenously derived strategies.