Urban land use/land cover changes in the Tema metropolitan area (1990–2010)

Land use and land cover changes are local and place specific, occurring incrementally in ways that often escape our attention. This study sought to detect changes in land cover in the Tema Metropolis of Ghana from 1990 to 2010. Multispectral Landsat Thematic Mapper data sets of 1990, 2000 and 2007 were acquired, pre-processed and enhanced. Unsupervised classification of the images was performed and six land cover classes (water, wetlands, closed vegetation, open vegetation, cropped lands, and built-up) were derived. The post-classification change detection technique was performed to derive the changes in land cover and their corresponding change matrices. Between 1990 and 2010, built-up areas expanded steadily to become the most prevalent land cover type in the metropolis, reducing vegetation cover dramatically. High population growth with its attendant rise in the demand for housing, and increasing commercial activities, were found to have influenced land cover changes over the period.     

Sanitation: the neglected Siamese twin of water in achieving the millennium development goals (MDGs) in Ghana

While inadequate water and sanitation services have both been implicated in a number of mortality and morbidity situations all over the world, the improvement in sanitation provision lags far behind that of water. This paper therefore seeks to examine the spatial variation in sanitation provision in Ghana and assess the factors that have contributed to the low investment in sanitation infrastructure as well as how sanitation can be improved. It revealed that the low sanitation has its roots in somewhat complicated political, institutional, economic and socio-cultural factors, including inadequate political commitment, poor monitoring, higher negative externalities associated with sanitation compared with water, and low sanitation demand resulting from poor social marketing for sanitation. Sanitation should therefore be marketed as a concept that has public health benefits and not merely as a toilet facility. Proper social marketing for sanitation and scaling up the community-led total sanitation approach should be pursued to stimulate individual demand for private sanitation.