Report from Ghana

Traveled to Ghana in December to visit my daughter.  It had been two decades since I had been on the continent, the last time a visit to Botswana -- also with my daughter, who was 11 months old at the time, and my wife.  Here are some observations from Ghana:

Infrastructure is almost non-existent. I probably spent half my waking time in traffic in Accra and roadways north.  Roads were in disrepair, including major trunk routes. Everywhere I went there were open ditch sewage and drainage systems.  A single power line follows the only road from north to south, as does a single microwave transmission line for telecoms.

Yet commerce and social life had long ago adapted.  Lines of cars in traffic were served by an endless stream of vendors offering everything from meals to electronics to the latest fashions.  Roadside shops offering cassava, cooking oil, bananas, hubcaps, sheet glass, doors, motorcycle parts etc etc lined every street and thoroughfare, not just in Accra but in every town and village, and along most routes into and out of any concentration of population.  And it all seemed to work.  Commerce continued, food and goods were plentiful, and patterns of negotiation well established.

To think what some basic infrastructure could provide, how more efficient this decentralized economy could be.   If trucks could avoid transversing gutted and overcrowded back roads to avoid the four-way intersection in the center of Kumasi where the main north-south route of Ghana takes you.  Route intercity traffic around beltways on pot-hole free roads would probably improve national productivity by twofold.

A note on water.  I avoided mentioning water in my infrastructure comments because I wanted to give it special attention.  There is plenty of water in Ghana, from a resource perspective.  Less in the north, but abundant in the south, where there is significant rainfall.  But water infrastructure is the least developed of all.  As I mentioned, no noticeable wastewater management systems.  Drinking water supply and storage is as decentralized as everything else.

One of every 4 or 5 trucks on the road, by my guess, is carrying water -- large tanker trucks to supply on site storage tanks, smaller delivery trucks to supply street vendors with bags of water.  Liter-sized plastic bags of clean, fresh water are sold along every roadway in shops, by women vendors in traffic, by small entrepreneurs with a few bags on a crate by the side of the road.  Trucks carrying packaged bundles of bags -- perhaps 50 to a bundle -- drive up and down the roads of Ghana re-supplying the thousands of vendors as they go by.  Again, it works.