Comprehensive Study Notes on Land Use Planning and Rural Development in Ghana

Reasons for the Change in Focus for Rural Development

Disparities in Development Fruits: Past development strategies have resulted in significant disparities in the share of development benefits.
Social Amenities Gap: There are marked disparities in the provision of essential social amenities between rural and urban areas. These include:
- Health facilities
- Electricity
- Potable water
- Housing
Income Gaps: A significant gap exists between rural and urban income levels.
Equity and Social Justice: Based on grounds of equity and social justice, rural areas should not be neglected because the vast majority of the population in African countries resides in rural settings.
Economic Health and GDP: Most developing countries depend on primary activities. Since the rural sector accounts for the greater part of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of African countries, national economic health depends on increased productivity within the rural sector, specifically the agricultural sector.
Resource Distribution Ethics: Development cannot be truly achieved when resources are disproportionately given to a minority population over the majority.

Concepts and Objectives of Rural Development

Definition: Rural Development (RD) is the outcome of a series of qualitative and quantitative changes occurring among a rural population, where converging effects improve the people's standard of living.
Main Objectives:
- To drastically change the income levels of people residing in the countryside.
- To improve the quality and standard of life of rural dwellers in Africa.
Essential Elements for Discussion:
- Qualitative and Quantitative Change: Desired changes can be planned or unplanned.
- Intervention: Planned change is brought about through intervention in the rural milieu (environment) by change agents representing the government or development agencies.
- Magnitude of Change:
  - Revolutionary change: A complete break with existing social structures, customs, and modes of production.
  - Evolutionary change: Involves only an improvement in the existing situation.
  - Gradual change: Long-term, incremental shifts.
  - Drastic change: Immediate and significant shifts.

Planned Activities to Promote Rural Change

Land Tenure Reform: Involves changes in land ownership or tenancy rights to create easy access to land. This includes issuing land titles, enforcing contracts, and adjudicating disputes over boundaries, inheritance, and rights.
Agrarian Reform: Entails the organization of an efficient delivery system for new seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, other technical aids, and specifically credit to the rural masses. It also involves establishing stable markets for agricultural produce.
Infrastructural Development: The provision of basic facilities such as roads, wells, boreholes, irrigation, drainage, and storage facilities. It may also include settlement relocation and resettlement.
Provision of Social Amenities: Includes the establishment of education and health facilities in rural areas.
Institutional Development: The creation of institutions to ensure that changes are sustained long-term. Examples include institutions for input supply, agricultural marketing, and credit provision.
Political Participation: Ensuring the rural masses have a continuing and determining say in planning, decision-making, and implementing programs that affect their lives.

Classification of Inputs for Rural Development

Group I: Requires Capital Investment:
- Agrarian reform
- Infrastructural development
- Provision of social amenities
- To some extent, institutional building.
Group II: Requires High Degree of Popular Mobilization:
- Land tenure reform
- Political participation
- Institutional development (to a much larger extent).
Current Trend: In most African countries, the strategy pursued to date is predominantly of the investment type.

Development Projects and the Project Cycle

Financial Resources: Rural development projects are vehicles for financing induced growth. Financial resources are often the single most massive input injected to accelerate growth.
Reasons for Failure: Projects often fail not due to a lack of finance, but due to:
- The society's inability to absorb finance effectively.
- The planners' inability to define an efficient social strategy.
The Project Cycle Model:
1. Programme or project identification
2. Preparation
3. Appraisal (Setting a goal and evaluating the means to achieve it)
4. Implementation
5. Evaluation
Control Factors: The project cycle is generally controlled by politicians, planners, and administrators. Beneficiaries are rarely involved in identification, preparation, or evaluation.
Success Factors: Others argue for:
- Flexible planning
- Trial and error processes
- Bottom-up approaches rather than top-down.
- Application of labor for productive purposes to make land use efficient.

Objectives and Methodologies of Land Use Planning (LUP)

Main Objective: To achieve the productive potential of land or enhance the productivity of degraded land.
Productive Potential Sources: Agriculture, livestock products, forestry, and locally relevant uses like mining and wildlife reserves.
Planning Empty Lands:
- Description: Surveying and classifying the environment (Natural Resource Survey).
- Classification or Evaluation: Assessing resources in terms of potential production.
- Development: Planning means to translate resource potential into actual production.
- Output: Each phase leads to the production of maps. Governments must have a detailed inventory of land resources.
Land Use in Densely Populated Areas:
- Intensification: Increasing productivity for better yields via fertilizers, improved irrigation, and modern technology.
- Conservation: Using methods like silos for storage, tilling, and improving methods to conserve soil fertility.
- Protection of water resources.

Specific Land Measures

Land Conservation Measures:
1. Watershed protection.
2. Contouring of arable lands to control runoff.
3. Construction of dams for river regulation.
4. Demarcation and fencing of grazing areas.
Productive Measures:
1. Planting fuel wood plantations.
2. Intro of improved farming and fish farming.
3. Building clay dams for irrigation water.
4. Construction of wells for drinking.
5. Bullock ploughing.
6. Use of farm yard manure.

Land Policy and Administration in Ghana

Territorial Data: Ghana covers a total area of $238,539\,km^2$ . Territorial waters extend $12\,nautical\,miles$ and the exclusive economic zone extends $200\,nautical\,miles$ from the low water mark.
Dual Governance: Land administration is governed by both customary practices and enacted legislation.
Ownership Categories:
1. Public or State Lands ( $20\%$ ): Compulsorily acquired by govt via legislation, vested in the President, held in trust for the people.
2. Private Lands ( $78\%$ ): Communal ownership held in trust by a Stool, Skin, or family.
3. Vested Lands ( $2\%$ ): Shared by the State and traditional owners/private individuals.
Titles and Rights:
- Absolute/Alloidal/Permanent Title: Highest right, usually vested in a stool, skin, clan, or family. No restrictions.
- Usufruct Right: The right to use the land for a specific purpose only.

Problems with the Land Sector in Ghana

General Indiscipline: Land encroachment, multiple sales of parcels, unapproved development, and litigation.
Indeterminate Boundaries: Lack of reliable or accurate maps leading to conflicts between stools/skins.
Compulsory Acquisition Issues: Large tracts acquired by government remain unutilized, with delayed compensation, leaving owners landless.
Inadequate Security of Tenure: Due to land racketeering, slow court processes, and weak administration.
Accessibility Difficulties: Conflicting ownership claims and outmoded procedures hinder agricultural and industrial development.
Weak Administration: Lack of a comprehensive framework, outdated legislation, and poor coordination among delivery agencies.
Lack of Consultation: Failure to involve owners/chiefs in allocation and management decisions.
International Border Management: Inadequate coordination with neighboring countries leading to issues with cross-border farming, smuggling, and shared water bodies.

Ghana's Land Policy Framework and Actions

Guiding Principles:
- Protect international boundaries.
- Land as common property for all Ghanaians.
- Optimum land usage.
- Government-facilitated equitable access.
- Community participation at all levels.
Aim: Judicious use of land and natural resources.
Conditions Against Transaction: Land cannot be transacted if it is not mapped, under litigation, or protected.
Policy Action Implementations:
- Securing boundaries and shared water resources.
- Facilitating access and collaboration with traditional authorities.
- Creation of land banks and land bonds.
- Reducing price subsidies on state land.
- Joint technical committees with neighbors.

Land Administration Reform and Pluralism

The Plural Environment: Labri (1994) classified indigenous systems into Centralized political authority and Decentralized/Acephalous communities.
Causes of Cultural Plurality: Migration due to cash crops (cocoa, rubber, oil palm), complex tenurial arrangements (e.g., share cropping resulting in sharing land rather than produce), and migrant congregation.
Legal Pluralism Framework:
1. Customary
2. Islamic
3. Statutory
4. Constitutional
Sources of Law: The Constitution, Acts of Parliament, By-laws, Common laws, Customary Law, and Case Law.
Customary Land Interests:
- Alloidal Title (highest right).
- Customary Law Freehold (gifted or nominal consideration).
- Share cropping (division of proceeds or land).
- Alienation holdings (outright acquisition by non-members).
Common Law Interests: Freehold, Leasehold, Licenses, and Easements.

Land Administration Project (LAP)

Objective: To undertake policy and institutional reforms for a sustainable, fair, efficient, and decentralized system.
Four Main Components:
1. Harmonize policies with customary laws.
2. Institutional reform/capacity building.
3. Establish transparent land titles.
4. Issue and register titles in pilots.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):
- Deed Registration Time: Baseline was $3\,months$ , achievement was $2.5\,months$ (Goal was $1\,month$ ). A Deed is a signed/sealed/delivered documentary evidence of transfer.
- Title Registration Time: Baseline was $3\,years$ , achievement was $8\,months$ (Goal was $< 6\,months$ ).
- Revenue: Baseline $76\,million\,dollars$ , achievement $21\,million\,dollars$ .
- Other KPIs: Increased women's acquisition, Customary Land Secretariats, Land Agency Act, clearing court backlogs.

Education in Rural Development

Functional Components of RD: Raw materials, production, marketing, personnel, education, health, and governance.
Role of Education:
- Facilitator of transactions and linkages.
- Enhances frequency, fidelity, and capacity of linkages.
- Core connector of all components.
Sub-divisions:
- Non-formal: Organized learning outside the formal system (Coombs and Ahmed, 1974).
- Formal: Chronologically graded from primary to University.
Dialectical Relation: Education is both a product of society and a facilitator of change and economic development.
Impact on RD:
- Consciousness: Activates participation.
- Functional Ability: Enhances capacity to diagnose needs and assert rights.
- Manpower: Supplies trained personnel with rural backgrounds.
- Linkages: Ties rural and urban sectors via behavior change.
- Employment: Attracts investors and increases income opportunities.
- Productivity: Raises productivity per unit of capital and labor ( $Active\,Agents$ ).

Health in Rural Development

Definitions:
- Traditional: Absence of disease.
- SEI (2004): Related to vulnerability/susceptibility to risk.
- WHO: A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, not merely the absence of disease.
Role of Health:
- Human Capital: Physical health aids mental health, increasing efficiency and income.
- Life Expectancy: Correlated with productivity; part of the Human Development Index (HDI).
- Capital Formation: Healthy dwellers spend less on medical care, breaking the "vicious cycle of poverty" by investing savings.
- Mental Liberation: Freeing people from barbaric customs (e.g., FGM).
- Participation: Healthy societies are more inclined to cooperate on sustainable projects.
RD's Role in Health: Improves nutrition through better farming and market access; improves hygiene and health education.
Hindrances to Rural Health: Facility inaccessibility, personnel unwillingness, lack of research/data, and conservative attitudes (preferring "quack doctors").

Local Government System in Ghana

History: Indirect Rule during colonial era. Municipal Ordinance of 1859 birthed modern structures.
Current Framework: Local Government Act 2016 (Act 936). 261 total assemblies (6 Metropolitan, 111 Municipal, 144 District).
Definitions:
- Metropolitan: Population $> 250,000$ .
- Municipal: One-town assemblies, population $> 95,000$ .
- District: Population $> 75,000$ .
Composition: District Chief Executive (DCE), $70\%$ elected members, $30\%$ appointed by President, and non-voting MPs.
DCE Role: Nominated by President, approved by $2/3$ of assembly. Chairman of executive committee. Term is $4\,years$ (max 2 terms).
Presiding Member: Speaker of the Assembly. Elected for $2\,years$ . Chairman of Complaints and Public Relations Committee.
Sub-structures: Sub-metropolitan councils, Urban councils ( $P > 15,000$ ), Zonal councils ( $P \approx 3,000$ ), Town/Area councils ( $P = 5,000 - 15,000$ ), and Unit Committees ( $P = 500 - 1,500$ ).

Decentralization and NGOs

Definition: Transfer of functions, powers, and resources to lower levels of governance.
Types:
- De-concentration: Shifting location of implementation to reduce congestion; decisions remain at the center.
- Devolution: Legal conferment of power; local bodies can make decisions and raise money autonomously. Requires constitutional amendment to retract.
- Delegation: Permissive activity where power is given to another to implement on one's behalf.
- Privatisation: Engaging private entities/NGOs to carry out government activities.
Cases Against: Can lead to separatism, capture by local elites, macroeconomic planning difficulties, and high administrative costs.
NGO Categories: Relief/welfare, technical innovation, population development, grassroots, advocacy, and public service.
NGO Origins: Northern-based (e.g., USAID, World Vision, DANIDA, JICA) vs. Southern-based (local or affiliates).