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Who cares about the North-South divide in standards of
living?
By Masahudu Ankiilu Kunateh
Twenty years of rapid economic development in
Ghana, under present and
successive governments, have done
little, if anything, to reduce the historical North-South
divide in standards of living. While rural development and
urbanization have led to significant poverty reduction in
the South, similar dynamics have been largely absent from
the northern
part of Ghana; comprising
Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions, which covers
40% of Ghana’s land area.
According to latest World Bank report, one out of every
three Ghanaian cannot afford the basic necessities of life.
This means 30 percent of Ghanaians are poor, in spite of
several years of rapid economic development in the country.
The disparity in poverty range in the country
could not have been wider, while on the average 20 percent
of Ghanaians in the south are poor, a whooping figure of 63
in every 100 Ghanaians in the north has no means of
acquiring the basic necessities of life.
Furthermore, between 1992 and 2006, the number of the poor
declined by 2.5million in the south and increased in the
north by 0.9million.
In sharp contrast with the south which covers 60% of the
country’s landmass, there was no significant decline in the
proportion of poor in the population of the north.
Today, the majority of Ghana’s poor live in northern Ghana,
where they are predominantly
farmers dependent on the pattern of
rainfall in the region. They
grow only food crops like
sorghum, millet, maize, ground-nut, and yam. Livestock also
do well in this zone of the country. These livestock include
cattle, sheep, goat, poultry;
especially guinea fowl, and pig.
These farmers are highly vulnerable to shocks given the
weather and limited
diversification of their income sources. Weather condition
in the north does not encourage all-year-round as in the
south. Amazingly, the northern parts of the country have
limited irrigation facilities as compared with the south
with all the state-of-art irrigation facilities. While the
poor have little education, increases in education in
northern Ghana do not seem to have provided greater
livelihood opportunities. This is
reflective of the absence of better
socio-economic condition of these regions.
To cope with the various shocks to which they are exposed
(floods, droughts, insects, diseases, conflicts-all of which
are preventable with relevant infrastructure, public
services, insurance and conflict resolution mechanisms) the
northern poor tend to mortgage
their prospects to eventually escape poverty by depleting
their human and physical capital by
adopting risky behaviours, including child migration or
illegal artisanal mining.
Additionally, the draw of oil boom
services in cities mostly located
in the south, couple with climate change, threaten to
further widen the north south gap.
To this end, the Lead Economist of World Bank, Sebastien
Dessus warns that “any poverty alleviation strategy for
Ghana must put poverty in northern Ghana at centre stage,
and acknowledge its specific causes in the design of
possible interventions”.
He added that this consideration is not only important for
the sake of efficiency in poverty reduction, but also to
mitigate the development of horizontal inequalities, foster
national unity through balanced development and consolidate
democratic gains achieved in the last two decades.
Furthermore, international
experiences indeed point to
significant risks of civil conflict that
can be brought on by the growing horizontal
inequalities in young democracies in particular, the
World Bank economist admonished.
The south is isolated
from the north economically and
unable to integrate itself with the more dynamic south
for lack of adequate
infrastructural connectivity.
Yet, this integration is essential
for the north given the need to tap into resources
from outside the region in order
to pull itself out of subsistence
livelihoods and escape poverty
In its "Tackling poverty in
Northern Ghana" report, the World
Bank observes that the last two decades have seen a
convergence in human capital endowments between the north
and the south thanks to government, development partners and
non-governmental organisations’ programmes in the
region, but a divergence in poverty and economic outcomes
is needed.
The World Bank report shows that, while
national road networks could be further expanded and
improved, this is unlikely to have a large impact on
regional disparities, given the relatively high road density
and degree of connectivity that already exists between the
north and the south.
Rather, low farm output and productivity,
combined with the low density of farms in some parts of
northern Ghana, make economic integration expensive in terms
of rural network expansion to connect the main North-South
backbone of infrastructure and markets in the presence of
high fixed costs and/or the absence of economies of scale.
To add up, migrants from the north to the south are largely
economically unsuccessful and motivated by push factors that
expel migrants out of desperation to poor quality jobs.
Although migrants from the north do not make up the biggest
share of migrants in Ghana, they do not do as well from
migration as their southern counterparts. Migrations from
the north tend to migrate out of desperation and, given
their lower level of education, migration often results in
them doing high risk jobs or putting themselves in positions
of vulnerability. The young girls carry heavy loads on their
heads on the streets of the cities just to eke out a living.
They sleep on the streets and markets and earn ranging GHC3
to GHC5 a day. The story is very horrible for the young boys
who migrante to the mining areas
in the south.
According to demographic experts, successful north-south
migration, in terms of poverty alleviation, is further
hampered by the south’s low capacity to absorb large numbers
of migrants from the north for cultural, social, economic,
and urban-planning reasons. This, they say limits the
development of economic and informational north-south
integration channels through diasporas.
Tackling poverty in Northern Ghana therefore calls for
interventions that go beyond spatially blind policies and
are well targeted within northern
Ghana with a view to supporting livelihood opportunities and
reducing vulnerability to the various climatic, economic and
political shocks that plague these unfortunate regions.
People could live well from agriculture in northern Ghana if
low productivity was addressed by a more proactive and
spatial approach to addressing infrastructural gaps,
and technology and business
climate constraints. Agriculture in the north has been
constrained by the lack of well planned and coordinated
investment in infrastructure building
- particularly rural roads
and irrigation. With these the question still remains!
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