The Ghana Integrity Initiative (GII), which is the local chapter of Transparency International (TI), last week organised a Training Workshop on Land Urban Corruption Modules for academic institutions, professional bodies, government agencies and other relevant stakeholders at the Amonoo-Neizer Conference Center at KNUST, in Kumasi.
The workshop was expected to increase awareness and knowledge of some 100 participants on the causes, effects and dynamics of land and urban corruption as well as to equip them with practical tools and strategies to identify, prevent and combat corrupt practices in the land and urban planning sector.
Land and urban corruption have become significant barriers to equitable development and effective governance in many African countries because corruption in the land sector has led to the marginalization of vulnerable communities and undermined land tenure security.
To address this anomaly, TI and its partners including GII have developed a training module on land and urban corruption as part of the Land and Corruption in Africa (LCA) II project to equip users with the essential knowledge, practical tools and strategic tactics needed to identify, address and counteract corrupt practices in their routine professional activities.
Prof. Rudith King, a lecturer at the Centre for Settlements Studies at the KNUST who facilitated the program, bemoaned the anomalous sprawling of towns and cities in the country without properly managing the land which underscored the need for stakeholder engagements to collectively work to see how best to manage the space which is available for a sustainable development for the future.
She said the haphazard sprawling of cities all over for instance, now makes it difficult to differentiate Nsawam or Aburi in the Eastern region or Kasoa in the Central region from Accra in the Greater Accra region and emphasized the need for all interest groups to be involved because planning a settlement is not just for one group of people as there are so many interest groups involved.
Prof. Rudith King, who is also a lead person for a German sponsored project, Network for Land Governance in Africa (NELGA), stressed that an effective settlement planning demands bringing all the interest groups on the same wavelength to meet, plan and agree on what a community wants collectively.
Mr. Michael Henchard Okai, Project Coordinator at GII stated that the haphazard ways of planning often result in accidents such as flooding and buildings collapsing which are indications of a disjointed and lack of coordination in the planning chain and, therefore, the need for these stakeholder engagements.
From Thomas Agbenyegah Adzey, Kumasi
