Juliana Afi and her five children live in a single-room apartment in a compound house in Dansoman, a suburb of Accra in Ghana. The apartment has no kitchen, bathroom and toilet facilities.

Rent charges are very high. She had to pay five years in advance in U.S. dollars using the social welfare payout received from her late husband's police service fund. Now she sells donuts and wonders how she will pay her next advance rent when the current contract expires.

Big housing demand

Afi's concern epitomizes the housing challenges faced by the people of Ghana. Building plots range from $4,000 to $6,000 depending on the area concerned. With 28.5 percent of Ghanaians living below the poverty line and the average Ghanaian earning about $1.25 per day, according to a World Bank report, owning a decent house is a difficult challenge.

Statistics from the Ministry of Housing, Works and Water Resources indicates that Ghana has a housing deficit of approximately 1.3 million units. This means that about 5 million Ghanaians are in dire need of a place to live and there is the need for 130,000 units annually over 10 years. Governments over the years have tried to deal with the housing deficits in Ghana but not much has been achieved. Current efforts yield only about 60,000 units annually, leaving an additional 50,000 or 60,000 units undelivered.

Policies questionable

Housing policies in Ghana have been scrappy. From Ghana's first president, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah's days of the State Housing Corp., which saw the construction of state houses at Tema, to the National Housing Building Plan under the Ministry of Work and Housing in the 1980s, to the Ghana Poverty Reduction Strategy (GPRS I), which ushered in the Highly Indebted Poor Country debt relief program of the World Bank, which allocated some funds for the housing sector, nothing concrete seems to have been accomplished in Ghana's housing problem.

A multibillion-dollar deal, supposedly struck by the current administration with South Korean investors to construct about 200,000 housing units in Ghana over the next 15 years at a cost of $10 billion, has become a debacle. The joint venture between B.K Asamoah's G.K. Airport Co. and a South Korean-based corporation called XTS Engineering & Construction Ltd. was commissioned by President John Evans Attah Mills in April 2011, but not a single block has been laid for the first building, owing to internal wrangling between the two companies.

Under the project, 30,000 housing units costing $1.5 billion was to be completed between 2012 and 2015 in the first phase, while the final phase of 170,000 units was to be completed in a 10-year time span.

This deal would have certainly given Ghanaians some relief in their housing problems. With government's apparent failure to provide housing, the only alternative is the private sector construction companies. The Ghana Real Estate Developers Association (GREDA) is acquiring land and building estates for Ghanaians, but the cost of these houses, however, is far above the reach of the ordinary Ghanaian worker. The leading real estate developer in Ghana, Regimanuel Gray Ltd., which built about 126 housing units in 2006, sold a one-bedroom (semi-detached, expandable) for $17,500 in 2006.

According to Edward Effah, Managing Director of Fidelity Bank, "Currently, real estate developers quote at least $50,000 for a semi-detached house and in the absence of long-term mortgages, most Ghanaian workers are priced out of the market."

And although some real estate companies are offering mortgages for workers, even with their lower rates a worker would still have to earn about $600 a month to afford these, which excludes many.

Bottlenecks

A big negative factor in land acquisition is the delay in getting land titles. "You buy a piece of land today and it takes forever to get your land title. I don't understand why. It's like a deliberate effort by government officials at these departments and divisions to delay the process," said Peter Tsikata, a real estate consultant.

Dr. Odame Larbi, Executive Secretary of Lands Commission, said successive governments had failed over the years to deal with the land issue.

He said the Lands Commission has now begun computerizing its operations to speed up and streamline the process of documentation and issuing titles, while Alban Gbagbin, Minister for Works and Housing has promised to remove all the bottlenecks on land acquisition and registration to enable the private sector to help ease the housing deficit in Ghana.

In addition, to combat the high cost of land and building materials, the government is now encouraging the use of Pozolana, a local material, which is cheaper than cement.

(Reporting from Ghana)