Why Ghana's Local Government Structure Fails Villages & Towns

People do not live in regions. They do not live in districts. They live in villages, towns, and cities. Ghana likes to describe itself as a decentralized state. On paper, that is correct. In practice, the system is a classic case of form without function. Authority is fragmented, responsibility is blurred, and accountability is diluted. The result is that many towns and villages where people actually live are systematically underserved, not because resources do not exist, but because the architecture of local government is fundamentally misaligned with reality. Ghana is not a decentralized state. If Ghana’s development problem were merely about money, we would have solved it long ago. If it were about plans, we would be an advanced economy by now. The persistent failures we see, projects that collapse into litigation, investments that disappoint, policies that unravel in public view, all point to a deeper issue. They are rooted in a chaotic social organization, or more precisely, in the absence of it. This is my second installment of the RE-IMAGINE GHANA series that turns from diagnosis to anatomy. The question is no longer what is wrong, but where it is wrong. Two more series will focus on where it is wrong. And the answer, unfortunately, is uncomfortably concrete. It is local government. The institutional layer that should translate national intent into everyday order is instead reproducing chaos. What follows draws directly on the framework I laid out in the first installment of my re-imaging Ghana article. Why social order begins where people actually live Economists sometimes sound abstract, but the reality here is stubbornly physical. People do not live in regions. They do not live in districts. They live in villages, towns, and cities. These are the places where children go to school, where markets operate, where roads matter, and where citizens decide whether the state is present or absent. Ghana’s local government system ignores this basic fact. It is built upside down. Authority is concentrated in Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies that are defined largely by political boundaries, while the places where people actually live are treated as sub structures, often existing only on paper. This inversion is not a technical inconvenience. It is the source of our chaotic social organization and many of our dysfunctional local engagement. There is a cost to administrative confusion Across the country, remarkably basic questions go unanswered. Are we a village or a town. Who is responsible for sanitation. Which authority is accountable for schools or clinics. When even local officials cannot answer these questions clearly, development does not merely slow down. It becomes arbitrary. You walk down on the sidewalk leading up to Movinpick and you see vast areas of sidewalk removed, being used for hawkers’ table and you still have to ask “Who is responsible?” without an obvious answer. The local government system has evolved not as a coherent design, but as a political sediment. Layers have been added over time, often in response to short term political incentives, until we arrived at today’s arrangement of Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies that rarely correspond to how people actually live, work, and move. The result is predictable. Resource allocation becomes arbitrary. A settlement of five hundred people can be called a town, while a settlement ten times larger remains a village. Some places are elevated to municipal status overnight, unlocking funds and prestige, while others with stronger economic bases are left behind. This is not decentralization. It is randomness with official letterhead. When administrative status is disconnected from population, infrastructure, and economic function, incentives shift. Local leaders rationally focus on lobbying upward rather than delivering services downward. Over time, citizens disengage because participation does not translate into outcomes. Ownership dissolves. That is what has evolved all across the country, across our neighborhoods, as we witness today. Current local government structure and why it misfires Ghana’s district system is formally divided into three categories. Metropolitan Assemblies are designated for large urban areas with populations above 250,000, including cities like Accra and Kumasi. Municipal Assemblies are meant for medium sized urban areas with populations between roughly 95,000 and 250,000. District Assemblies cover smaller and largely rural areas, with populations typically between 75,000 and 95,000. As of 2025, there are 261 Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Assemblies. By law, the District Assembly is the highest political and administrative authority in its jurisdiction. It plans development, approves budgets, passes bye laws, and supervises sub district structures such as town, area, and zonal councils. District Chief Executives are appointed by the President. Assembly members are partly elected and partly appointed. Members of Parliament sit as non voting participants. On paper, this looks decentralized. In reality, it is centralized politics wearing the costume of local government. In practice, it is the source of deep and persistent dysfunction. The entire system is built on political boundaries rather than real settlements. Villages, towns, and cities are treated as administrative afterthoughts rather than foundational units. This has produced confusion, weakened participation, distorted incentives, and made orderly modernization nearly impossible. The core structural problems The first and most damaging problem is that boundaries are, again, political, not social or economic. MMDAs are largely drawn to match parliamentary constituencies or political compromises rather than actual towns, cities, or villages. As a result, a single city can be split across multiple assemblies, while one district can contain dozens of disconnected settlements with very different needs. This is why urban planning in places like Accra or Kumasi is incoherent. No single authority is responsible for the city as a functioning whole. Transport, housing, waste management, and land use planning are fragmented by design. Second, local executives are not locally accountable. Metropolitan, Municipal, and District Chief Executives are appointed by the president, not elected by residents. Their career incentives therefore point upward to the center, not downward to communities. When resources are scarce, political loyalty predictably outranks service delivery. Third, local governments have responsibility without power. MMDAs are tasked with roads, sanitation, markets, basic education infrastructure, and environmental health. But they control very little money. The bulk of their funding comes from central government transfers, especially the District Assemblies Common Fund. These transfers are often delayed, earmarked, or politically influenced. Local revenue sources exist in theory, but in practice are weak, poorly administered, and politically sensitive. This means assemblies cannot plan seriously. You cannot build a clinic or maintain roads on promises that arrive late or not at all. Fourth, sub district structures are hollow. Town councils, area councils, and unit committees are closest to where people live, yet they are chronically underfunded and largely ignored. Many exist only on paper. They have no staff, no offices, and no budgets. Citizens are told to participate locally, but the institutions meant to receive that participation are empty shells. Perhaps the most damaging feature of Ghana’s system is that local government boundaries follow parliamentary constituencies rather than real communities. This is the equivalent of designing a power grid based on election results. Take Accra. The capital is fragmented across multiple assemblies, each with its own budget and political incentives. No single authority is responsible for the city as a functioning whole. Transport does not align. Waste management fragments. Housing sprawls without coordination. The same logic, scaled differently, applies to Kumasi and emerging cities like Tamale. Cities are engines of productivity because they coordinate labor, capital, and infrastructure. Fragment that coordination and you throttle the engine. Unfortunately, our cities are disorganized Economies are nothing but social organisms – networks of people, firms, and governments interacting through rules, hierarchies, and expectations. And like any organism, they either grow in an orderly pattern or metastasize chaotically. For development to take root, entrepreneurship must arise within structure as I said in my first article. Without systems, standards, and hierarchy, enterprise is like rainfall on loose sand: visible for a moment, but quickly gone. Structure matters and is the system through which authority is exercised, coordination occurs, and accountability is enforced. It is not bureaucracy in its pejorative sense; it is the skeleton that gives form to the muscle of human energy. When systems are well-designed, each level – village, town, city – knows its responsibilities, resources, and limits. Administrative clarity is what turns civic participation into productive governance. Without it, everything becomes ad hoc and personal: who you know replaces what is right; discretion replaces procedure; and progress is constantly undone by improvisation. A society without structure can generate brilliant individuals but never sustainable companies. Firms depend on predictable rules, functioning utilities, enforceable contracts, and capable local administrations. Entrepreneurs need not only capital but a context – one where systems are stable and standards apply evenly. Consider the case of Accra, our capital city. For decades, the lament has been that “Accra is overcrowded.” But the data tells a different story. With a metropolitan population of about 2.6 million, and around 5.4 million in the broader Greater Accra Region, it is not the sheer number of residents that is the problem. Rather, Accra suffers from a structural collapse of urban governance. What should function as a single metropolitan organism has been fragmented into 29 separate assemblies, each with its own bureaucracy, budget, and political alignment. The result is a city without coordination—where road maintenance, sanitation, zoning, and transport each follow their own inconsistent rhythm. A city is not merely a collection of neighborhoods. It is a living system that requires centralized planning and decentralized execution—a balance of unity and autonomy. New York City has one metropolitan government; London has 33 boroughs but one coordinating authority (the Greater London Authority); Johannesburg, too, operates under a single metropolitan municipality. Accra, by contrast, is a patchwork quilt of semi-autonomous fiefdoms, each working at cross-purposes. This is not overcrowding. It is disorganization masquerading as density. These definitions of village, town, and city that I am espousing are not aspirations. They are minimum service contracts between the state and citizens. When these contracts are absent, fiscal decentralization becomes an illusion. Money may flow downward, but without clear mandates it leaks into confusion and duplication, and sometimes corruption. Why towns and villages are left behind The combined effect of these flaws is predictable. Small towns and villages are administratively invisible. They do not generate political headlines, they are not urban enough to attract investment, and they are too fragmented to advocate effectively. Resources gravitate toward district capitals and politically strategic locations, not necessarily toward population centers or areas of greatest need. Service delivery becomes uneven and arbitrary. One settlement may get a borehole because it falls under an influential assembly member’s area. Another equally needy community gets nothing. Roads end abruptly at administrative boundaries. Schools are built without teachers. Clinics exist without equipment. Most damaging of all, citizens disengage. When people do not know who is responsible for what, participation becomes futile. Ownership disappears. Local government comes to be seen not as a vehicle for development, but as a distant, confusing extension of national politics. The system is not working Ghana’s local government system fails because it violates a basic principle of economics and governance. Authority, responsibility, and incentives must align. In Ghana, authority is centralized, responsibility is decentralized, and incentives are political. That combination almost guarantees underperformance. Decentralization in name without decentralization in power produces exactly what Ghana has today. Confusion, inefficiency, uneven development, and communities that fall through the cracks not because they are poor, but because the system does not see them clearly. Until local government is reorganized around real places where people live, with clear mandates, elected leadership, and predictable financing, towns and villages will continue to be everyone’s responsibility in theory and no one’s responsibility in practice. Why villages, towns, and cities must come first If decentralization is to work, governance must start at the level where participation is natural and ownership is real. That level is the village, the town, and the city. One of the most damaging myths in development is that definitions are cosmetic. In reality, they are fiscal instruments. If you do not define what a village, town, or city is, you cannot define what taxes it should raise, what transfers it should receive, or what services it must deliver. A serious system starts with clear taxonomy. And If you want to understand why modernization stalls, look at towns. Towns are the hinge of development. They connect rural producers to markets, labor to opportunity, and villages to cities. When towns work, agricultural productivity rises, migration is orderly, and cities grow without chaos. When towns fail, villages stagnate and cities sprawl. Yet Ghana’s system treats towns as administrative footnotes rather than the backbone of social organization. This is where reform must begin. Defining the Village Clearly A village should be defined as a rural settlement of fewer than five thousand people, largely agrarian. Its public contract is modest but non-negotiable. Clean water through boreholes or small systems. Basic sanitation. A primary school. A community health post. Rural electrification. Feeder roads. A community meeting space. The goal at the village level is not sophistication. It is reliability. A village should have, as a matter of standard policy, clean water through boreholes or small water systems, basic sanitation facilities, a primary school, a community health post staffed by trained personnel, access to electricity either through the grid or community energy solutions, feeder roads linking it to the nearest town, and a community meeting space. These are not luxuries. They are the minimum conditions for dignity and economic participation. Defining the Town Precisely A town should be an urbanizing settlement of roughly five thousand to fifty thousand people, functioning as a hub for surrounding villages. Its obligations rise sharply. Piped water. Organized waste collection. Reliable electricity. Primary and secondary schools. A staffed clinic. Paved internal roads. A central market. Banking services. Internet connectivity. Local transport and security. Here, the standard must rise sharply. A town should have piped water, organized waste collection, reliable electricity, primary and secondary schools, a clinic with doctors and nurses, paved internal roads, a central market, banking and basic financial services, internet connectivity, public transport links, security services, and civic spaces. Once again, the point is predictability. A town anywhere in Ghana should mean broadly the same thing in terms of public services, regardless of political cycles. If a settlement does not meet these standards, it is not underperforming. It is misclassified. Defining the City as an Integrated System A city should be any settlement above fifty thousand people with diversified economic activity. Cities require integrated transport systems, hospitals, tertiary education, zoning and land use planning, affordable housing, advanced waste management, public safety services, and digital infrastructure. Cities are productivity engines, but only when governed as unified systems. Splinter them administratively and you get congestion, informal sprawl, and infrastructure breakdown. Minimum amenities for a city must include uninterrupted water and power, hospitals, tertiary education institutions, integrated transport systems, land use planning and zoning, affordable housing programs, advanced waste management, emergency services, public safety infrastructure, cultural facilities, and robust digital connectivity. This is precisely why cities like Accra struggle. They are governed as political mosaics rather than economic units. A Concrete Example: How This Would Actually Work Consider a hypothetical district in the Ashanti Region. Suppose it contains three towns and twelve villages. Town A has 35,000 people and serves as the commercial hub. Town B has 18,000 people and focuses on agro processing. Town C has 8,000 people and supports logistics and trade. Surrounding them are twelve villages ranging from 800 to 3,500 people. Under a standardized system, every village is guaranteed boreholes, a primary school, feeder roads, and a health post. Every town is guaranteed piped water, secondary schools, clinics, markets, and waste collection. Now scale that logic nationally. Once these standards are defined, the state can plan backward. How many clinics are needed. How many kilometers of feeder roads. How many teachers and nurses. Capital allocation becomes predictable rather than political. Private investment responds because infrastructure is no longer a lottery. The district assembly in this model does not micromanage villages or towns. It coordinates. It aggregates budgets. It plans shared infrastructure. Its members represent real jurisdictions where people live, not abstract electoral areas. Reimagining districts as coordinating units, not masters Once villages, towns, and cities are properly defined and empowered, districts should be reimagined. Not as artificial containers of authority, but as coordinating units. Districts should draw their leadership from representatives of villages, towns, and cities within their jurisdiction. Their role should be coordination, planning alignment, and aggregation of resources for services that require scale, such as secondary infrastructure, regional roads, and shared utilities. In this model, authority flows upward from real communities rather than downward from abstract boundaries. Accountability becomes clearer because representatives answer to jurisdictions where people actually live. Participation becomes meaningful because decisions made at the village, town, or city level visibly affect daily life. Fiscal planning becomes possible. Consider a hypothetical district with three towns and twelve villages. Each village is guaranteed boreholes, a primary school, feeder roads, and a health post. Each town is guaranteed piped water, secondary schools, clinics, markets, and waste collection. Once these standards are fixed, the state can plan backward. How many clinics. How many teachers. How many kilometers of roads. Capital allocation becomes predictable rather than political. Private investment responds because infrastructure is no longer a lottery. Scale this logic nationally and modernization stops being episodic. It becomes cumulative. A simpler, more serious architecture This fix I am proposing is not complicated, which is perhaps why it has been avoided for so long. First, redraw administrative boundaries to match actual villages, towns, and cities. Each settlement should belong to one, and only one, local authority responsible for its full development. Second, establish regional development authorities for large metropolitan areas. Greater Accra should be governed as a single economic unit, with district level administrations functioning as service arms, not competing fiefdoms. Third, tie fiscal transfers to clearly defined service obligations. If you are classified as a town, you must deliver piped water, waste collection, and secondary education. If you fail, the failure is measurable and visible. This is how accountability is created. Finally, embed participation at the local level. When residents know who is responsible, and what that authority is obligated to provide, engagement becomes rational rather than ritualistic. People invest time and trust when the system rewards it. Decentralization that actually delivers True decentralization is not about moving power downward in theory. It is about aligning authority, responsibility, and resources in practice. Ghana’s current system does none of the three consistently. Reimagining Ghana, then, requires more than grand national visions. It requires the unglamorous work of institutional redesign. Clear definitions. Coherent boundaries. Enforceable service standards. Fiscal rules that reward delivery rather than political proximity. Get the local architecture right, and participation follows. Ownership follows. Growth follows. Ignore it, and we will continue to argue about development while tripping over the same potholes, literal and institutional, year after year. This approach aligns authority, responsibility, and incentives. Villages, towns, and cities know what they must deliver. Citizens know what they are entitled to expect. Districts focus on coordination rather than micromanagement. Political seasons lose their power to distort basic service provision. Most importantly, development stops being episodic and starts becoming cumulative. Reimagining Ghana does not require heroic leadership or grand slogans. It requires institutional humility. Start with where people live. Define it clearly. Fund it predictably. Coordinate it sensibly. Everything else follows. This is the foundation of modernization This is the unglamorous truth about modernization. It is not magic. It is repetition. It is the ability of a society to do the same sensible thing, in the same way, over and over again, at scale. That is how order is created. That is how trust accumulates. And that is how development becomes durable rather than episodic. Ghana’s current local government architecture makes this impossible. Nothing is standardized. Every village, town, and city negotiates its development anew, often through political channels rather than institutional ones. The predictable result is disorder in planning, disorder in service delivery, and disorder in civic life. Projects stall, responsibilities blur, and accountability evaporates. Cleaning up local government architecture is therefore not a technocratic exercise or a bureaucratic rearrangement. It is the foundation of social order itself. Modern states begin by defining their basic units clearly, by ensuring that a village in one region means the same thing as a village in another, by getting towns right as the hinge of development, and by governing cities as unified economic systems rather than fragmented political territories. Districts, in turn, must coordinate rather than confuse. Until Ghana undertakes this reordering, every national development plan will rest on unstable ground. Investment will disappoint. Policy will underperform. Institutions will mirror the chaos beneath them. Modernization cannot be legislated into existence from the top. It must be organized from the bottom up. Hene Aku Kwapong, CDD Ghana Fellow, Ecobank Ghana Board Member, Former Head of Royal Bank of Scotland EMEA Credit Markets, formerly of Deutsche Bank, Microsoft, GE Capital and NY Economic Development Corporation.