Accra/Kumasi | Partnership for Research on Informal and Shared Mobility

About ACCRA/Kumasi Living Lab

The research will create new knowledge about the interactions among these modes and services and evaluate their combined impact on people’s everyday mobility and accessibility in Accra and Kumasi. Ultimately, the project seeks to explore, co-produce and demonstrate innovative pathways and strategies to synergize conventional and new ICT-mediated mobility solutions to ensure equitable and socially just mobility and accessibility in Accra and Kumasi.

Accra and Kumasi are Ghana’s two largest urban centers. In the last three decades, Accra and Kumasi have undergone rapid, unfettered outward expansion resulting in large conurbations or city-regions comprising the established historical centers and their sprawling peri-urban settlements. The wider Accra and Kumasi city-regions are home to over 5.4 million and 3.5 million residents, respectively.

Unequal access to opportunities, including jobs and social service are worsening due to a mismatch between the growing population, urban expansion and increasing physical separation between activities on the one hand, and the supply of efficient, reliable and affordable public transport on the other hand. Informal/popular transport known locally as Trotro is the primary means by which residents of Accra and Kumasi meet their everyday mobility and accessibility needs. Two- and three-wheeler vehicles for informal public transport as well as new ICT-mediated, digital platform mobility services (e.g. Bolt and Uber) have also become ubiquitous. In recent years, various attempts to reform urban public transport, including the introduction of a Rapid Bus Transit (BRT) scheme in Accra have largely failed to deliver expected outcomes.

Thus, in Accra and Kumasi, a complex, highly political and contested eco-system of transport modes and services and actors (i.e. operators, workers, public sector institutions, passengers, etc.) have emerged, with profound consequences for public policy and governance as well as ensuring sustainable mobility and accessibility.

The Living Lab will create new knowledge and evidence and learn from on-going programmes and initiatives in the transport and mobility domain in Accra and Kumasi. The research will deploy an ecosystems thinking and work with critical stakeholders to discern and unpack the complex connections and feedback among critical system parts including, transport modes and services, diverse stakeholders, such as incumbent paratransit operators, digital platform mobility service providers and national and local government actors, and regulatory and governance regimes. We will track and understand the dynamics of structural change within the evolving ecosystem using a range of methods, including surveys as well as visioning and foresight methods to foster constructive dialogue among multiple stakeholders in workshop and focus group settings. We will evaluate the mobility and accessibility impacts of new ICT-mediated mobility services using qualitative and quantitative methods. We will develop and test models, pathways and strategies towards integration within the emergent transport ecosystem, underpinned by principles of “equitable” and socially just transport and mobility for Accra and Kumasi.

The primary Higher Education partner for the Ghana Living Labs is the University of Ghana (UG). At UG, we are working with scholars at the Department of Geography & Resource Development (DGRD). DGRD is a leading center of research and teaching in human-environment interactions, including issues around sustainable transport and mobility in Sub-Saharan Africa. Our VREF Research co-Lead and the Next Generation Scholars of this project are all based in the DGRD at the University of Ghana. In addition to UG as primary partner, we are working with scholars in other Universities, especially the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) as part of our research activities in Kumasi.

The Ghana Living Lab’s core research team includes a network of academics based at the University of Manchester, Uk from where the programme also interfaces with and taps into the International Network for Transport and Accessibility in Low Income Communities (INTALInC), as well as the University of Oxford, UK.

The Living Lab has forged strategic partnerships with key stakeholders at the national and local levels including the Departments of Transport of Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) and the Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) and the Ministry of Transport.

DGRD, UG, Columbia University (Earth Institute) and local authorities, such as the AMA have had long-standing strategic partnerships in co-producing and delivering various urban programmes, including the Millennium Cities Initiative (MCI).