Rural Development in Ghana

The Ghanian rural-urban imbalance in education, health facilities, infrastructure (roads), and standards of living is of great concern. The country’s development trajectory has shown a great deal of overconcentration of development projects in the urban areas. We suggest that this divide is best understood as an example of the Matthew effect (ME) that can be further explained and ameliorated effectively by policy changes grounded in Habermasian theory. We then examine the campaign manifestos of the two leading political parties in Ghana, the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and National Patriotic Party (NPP), to see if any of their proposed development policies meet the challenge of the ME. It was found that political parties use rural development as a slogan during political campaigns to win votes, but campaign promises for rural districts are not kept once a political party wins power to govern. More disheartening, given the lack of national rural development policy, is that developmental projects are more likely to be abandoned in rural districts when there is a change of government. Unfortunately, this has been the case since the genesis of the Fourth Republic. Recommendations for national rural development policies are provided to improve the rural neglect.