General

From the complexities of distribution hubs to a functioning nationwide logistics network, not to mention the minimum consistent business activity needed to make the whole model viable, a housing numbering system performs an essential role in the development of the next Amazon in Africa. If Amazon wanted set up in Ghana as in the US and the UK, and they haven’t, you can bet that one of the factors has been the lack of a fully functional addressing system.  Good news: Ghana has a shot at fixing that. Let’s look at the general need for a functioning address system and its role in national development. First, an optimised and functioning address system is the basic structure for quickly identifying physical properties. Second, by directing the creation and delivery of infrastructure projects and services in the urban setting, an address system is a tool used by city governments to monitor urban growth. Third, address systems assist companies in providing essential fire and police services and act as a guide for more effective and efficient mail delivery.  Also, a helpful street naming and numbering system is the foundation for intuitively identifying locations. Finally, street addresses are necessary for locals and guests to navigate (Ecklu 2011). Address numbering is a practice that allows one to “assign an address” to a plot of land or dwelling by using a system of maps and signs that list the numbers or names of streets and structures. This idea can be used in urban networks and services because, in addition to buildings, other urban fixtures like streetlights, taxi stands, and public standpipes also have addresses. The housing numbering system, as mentioned earlier, is one of the most basic techniques for service delivery utilised by institutions in the public and private sectors. It makes it possible to collect taxes efficiently, dispatch emergency services like ambulances, firefighters, and law enforcement officers, and manage utility companies’ networks and revenue collection more effectively (Mennecke and West Jr 2001; Yildirim et al. 2014).  Still, proper location identification systems positively influence the achievement of more general socio-economic development goals in most developing countries (Meso and Duncan 2002). Increasing digitalisation and the widespread usage of mobile devices today have created a space and a framework for innovation that increasingly combines physical and digital components (Nylén and Holmström 2015). According to Imieliski and Navas (1999), Roick and Heuser (2013), and Goodchild (2009), this phenomenon gave rise to the idea of digital location addresses, which makes use of significant technological advancements to transform descriptive locational information like postal addresses and named locations into an unambiguous geographic references. As a result, authorities in both wealthy and developing nations continue to look for ways to address issues with geographical addresses (Walsham and Sahay 1999). It took the world a while to discover this solution. Moreover, the fact that it is constantly being modified makes house numbering more challenging to tackle in mainly developing nations, such as Ghana. In the past years, countries worldwide struggled with their housing addressing system. Rarely have new neighbourhoods been added to the street identification systems initially utilised in city centres’ older communities. As a result, urban services were in a worrying situation due to inadequate identification methods. How can you navigate a rapidly growing country easily and effectively, nationwide? How can you swiftly send out ambulances, firefighters, or law enforcement officers? How are letters and messages delivered to private residences? In what ways are municipal services offered? How are malfunctions in the telephone, electricity, and water networks located? How do you put up a system for collecting taxes effectively? It was against these questions that the need to intensify and extend the street naming and addressing system to other parts of cities worldwide arose.  Establishing a home address is a significant issue.  Despite appearances, it is one of the most challenging in urban living. The issue is important since a person’s place of residence defines them just as much as their height, hair colour, or eye colour. Moreover, a person’s home address is now a crucial component of their personal identifying information; it can be found on their social security card and voter identification.  That said, the concept of street, housing identification or naming that dates back to as early as the 18th century in Mannheim, Germany, is considered the prototype of American cities in the 19th century. However, the first street-addressing initiatives in sub-Saharan Africa were in the early 1990s. Despite this backdrop, in Ghana, all initiatives to correctly identify and number houses from the 2000s to as late as 2015 all relatively failed. Till recently, largely even still in use, to identify buildings, people use landmarks regardless of formal street names: “Make a right at the mango tree next to the uncompleted building and look for the petty trader selling on the table top. He will tell you where to go”. There are some obvious problems with this system. The tree may have been cut down. The trader might no longer be at their regular spot.  Many communities in Ghana, including Accra, are so fast-growing that getting lost is becoming increasingly easy. Urban navigation is even harder for visitors and tourists. These are only the everyday issues. At the extreme end, taxing via real estate can be challenging for local governments in cities without addresses, and the implication on local micro and macroeconomics is huge (Osabutey, 2014). But, on the contrary, and in different countries where their street and housing address systems work effectively, the immersive benefit for individual business owners and local authorities has been unprecedented.  Take, for instance, the case of Amazon: a multinational technology business with headquarters in the United States that focuses on artificial intelligence, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and e-commerce. One of the most valuable brands in the world, it has been called “one of the most significant economic and cultural forces in the globe.”  How did Amazon get there: they took advantage of a working digital housing system that could identify and

Collective identities and trauma memories are intricately entwined in our time. For example, the memories of past and present victimization serve as the foundation for the collective identities of the majority of ethnic minorities. Likewise, social trauma victims and their descendants frequently use explicit and purposeful remembering to empower and construct identity.  In contrast, the offenders and their offspring attempt to erase and cast doubt on the integrity of such memories, undermining the empowerment and identities they provide. This dynamic is more evident than ever in the North Atlantic experience, such as the history of slavery and the slave trade that occurred some four hundred years ago. The subsequent abolishment of this trade around 1807 led to what we now call the African Diaspora.  The term “diaspora” originates from the Greek “διασπορά” (Diaspora, literally means “scattering”). The word gained popularity within the English language with its use in the Jewish Diaspora before it started being used in a broader sense to include other populations (Brubaker 2005). That is to say, and as Palmer (2000) posited, the concept of “Diaspora” is not only confined to the people of African descent. Thus far, the term “African Diaspora” has been widely used to refer to a worldwide collection of the population of African descent, mainly from West and Central Africans who were enslaved and brought to the Americas during the Atlantic slave trade between the 16th and 19th centuries, with the United States, Brazil, and Haiti having the biggest populations. However, Africans started migrating to Europe and the Americas in greater numbers in the late 20th century, creating new African diaspora populations that were not directly associated with the slave trade (Palmer 1998); hence, in the modern context, the term African Diaspora can be used to represent a growth industry for the people in Africa.  Thus, African Union (AU) defines the African Diaspora as “people of native African origin living outside the continent, regardless of their citizenship and nationality and who are willing to contribute to the continent’s development and the building of the African Union.” In line with this, the Africa Union’s constitutive act declares that it shall welcome and promote the full participation of the African Diaspora as an integral part of our continent in establishing the African Union and regards the Diaspora as its sixth area or region. Ergo, within the AU, there are six (6) regions: West Africa, East Africa, North Africa, Southern Africa, Central Africa, plus one last region, the “Sixth Region”, which is the African Diaspora. Converse to the wounds that the slave trade might have left on the African continent, the time for Africa is now. This is the period and opportunity to lick our wounds and take our destiny into our hands.  The Africans in the Diaspora have responded to this and are still contributing massively to the economy of Africa. Detty December has come to represent a time when the Diaspora comes into particularly West Africa in relatively large numbers for festive celebrations.  Away from the history lessons, let us now quantify the value of these contributions on the economy of the African continent as a whole and especially on the economy of Ghana. One of the most obvious connections between migration, Detty December, the Diaspora and development is remittances. After a decade of re-evaluating the relationship between migration and development, the conventional thinking that migration threatens chances for economic growth and results in stagnation and dependency has been challenged. International migration, defined as the coordinated or concerted improvement of economic conditions in origin and destination nations based on their complementarities, has been cited in United Nations publications as an ideal strategy for fostering development since 2006.  That said, African migration has increased more than from any other part of the world since 2010, yet most of these flows have been inside Africa. Thus, the overall number of African migrants in 2020 was 40.6 million. This represents only 14.5% of the global migrant population, far less than the shares between Asia (41.0%) and Europe (22.5%). Moreover, less than one-third of all African migrants (27.2%) reside in Europe. Other than Africa, African migrants account for less than 15% of the entire migrant population (Mo Ibrahim Foundation., 2022). In light of the above, evidence shows that the contributions from remittances far outweigh the official development assistance and foreign direct investment that low- and middle-income nations get.  Before the COVID-19 epidemic, the World Bank estimated that officially documented remittances in 2019 reached a record-high $714 billion, including $553 billion to low- and middle-income nations. Despite initial worries that the numbers might decline due to the epidemic, they remained constant in 2020.  According to recent predictions, global remittances are estimated to have reached $773 billion in 2021, with $605 billion flowing to low- and middle-income nations such as Ghana (Migration Policy Institute., 2022). A UN Report cited in The Economic Times (2022) also states that India, China, Mexico, the Philippines, and Egypt were the top five remittance recipients of current US dollars in 2021.  Thus, if we’re to go by the report, India was the top remittance recipient among low- and middle-income countries, with $87 billion way ahead of China and Mexico’s 53 billion dollars, the Philippines (36 billion dollars) and Egypt (33 billion dollars). The United States, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Switzerland were the top four countries from which remittances were sent in 2020. Moving on, in the context of Africa, remittances are the primary source of international financing for development. Take, for instance, Nigeria, which received 19.2 billion US dollars’ worth of remittances to sub-Saharan Africa in 2021, a large majority of the region’s overall remittances.  Nigeria has consistently received the most significant amounts of all remittances sent to Sub-Saharan Africa over time. This is because Nigeria, the most populous African country, also has a considerable diaspora population. Ghana was the next recipient, with remittances totalling almost 4.5 billion dollars.  To this end, the ten (10) highest recipients of remittance inflow in

Sport in Ghana has grown rapidly since the Colonial era when there was little consideration for an organized schedule of activity other than the daily drill known as physical training (PT). After gaining independence from British Colonial Rule in 1957, the Gold Coast began a course of rapid development with a focus on seeking national identity and receiving recognition on a global scale in all fields of endeavour within the broader context of an “African identity” (Baba 2000). Ghanaians (at the time, residents of the Gold Coast) had fully embraced organized sport by the turn of the 20th century. This prompted the establishing of the first sports organization, the Gold Coast Football Association (GCFA, now known as the Ghana Football Association), in 1920. Following this, the Gold Coast Amateur Athletics Association (now known as the Ghana Athletic Association) and Gold Coast Olympic Committee (now known as the Ghana Olympic Committee) were established in 1944 and 1951, respectively. Ghana, then known as the Gold Coast, took part in its first Olympic Games in Helsinki, Finland, in 1952, along with British Togoland, which included the present-day nations of Togo and Ghana’s Volta area. Ghana’s speedy sporting development over the years made her an example for other colonies looking to construct an African sports image. Schools and colleges in Ghana had implemented comprehensive interscholastic programs with excellent planning under a law requiring all students to participate in intramural sports.  Most schools and colleges had physical education departments set up with mass gymnastics and competitive sports (such as soccer, track and field, boxing, table tennis, and cricket) that were part of the Empire Day events. Teachers and former service members taught and oversaw these sports activities. Looking back and counting our achievements since independence until now, our country Ghana has become the first nation on the African continent to earn an association football medal after its athletes won a total of four Olympic medals in its thirteen Summer Games participation, including three in boxing and a bronze (BBC News., 2011).  Ghana has competed in various competitions, winning four African Cup of Nations titles, participating in four FIFA World Cups (2006, 2010, 2014, and 2022), and one FIFA U-20 World Cup. Ghana, following Cameroon and Senegal in 1990 and 2002, became the third African nation to go to the quarterfinals of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.  The Black Satellites, Ghana’s national U-20 football team, are arguably regarded as the team that develops into the country’s national football team. Ghana is the first and only nation to win the FIFA U-20 World Cup on the African continent and was runner-up twice, in 1993 and 2001. The Black Starlets, Ghana’s national U-17 football team, have won the FIFA U-17 World Cup twice, in 1991 and 1995, and have finished second twice (in 1993 and 1997).  Additionally, the nation has produced several top-tier boxers, including Joshua Clottey, Ike Quartey, and three-time world champions Azumah Nelson, DK poison and Nana Yaw Konadu. Thus, it is often argued that the successes of these boxers put Ghana’s name on the map. That said, despite the successes and strives of the other numerous sporting activities, including athletics, tennis, swimming, tennis, handball, hockey, cricket and even local ampe her in Ghana, boxing and at the very extreme, football, appears to have taken the centre stage and have received maximum attention, sometimes even at the detriment of what has been termed “the lesser sports”.  Ghana is by no means a two-sport country, but there is also no denying the fact that boxing and, especially, football have dominated everything from Olympic medals to individual triumphs, to moments that left us stunned, happy, and sometimes sad. Take, for instance, the penalty missed by Asamoah Gyan in the 2010 World Cup against Uruguay (GhanaSoccerNet., 2017). Alternatively, more recently, the penalty miss by Andrew Ayew against Uruguay in the ongoing 2022 FIFA World Cup. The entire nation gasped in both cases. Football is a blessing. But riddle me this: is football the only sport that Ghana has to concentrate on to the detriment of the other sports? What successes, if any, in other sports, have brought some nations together? Fortunately or unfortunately, the apparent maximum concentration on football dates to the era of the first president of the Republic, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Football in this era was used as a Pan-African tool to promote unity and call for mobilization among participating countries. Thus, Nkrumah participated in some local clubs’ fundraising games and even ‘kicked-off’ one game between Accra Hearts of Oak and Standfast.  When it became clear that independence would soon come, Nkrumah took on much more of a direct role in football management, which allowed him to project his vision for the sport as a means of forging the kinds of cultural and emotional ties that he thought were essential for the establishment of a peaceful Ghanaian state and pan-African unity (Darby, 2013).  The importance of Nkrumah’s use of the Black Stars to promote pan-Africanism is emphasized by Benjamin Koufie, a former player and assistant coach of the national team, who recently recalled that, since Nkrumah utilized football to reach every country on the continent, he wanted to make sure that the Black Stars of Ghana were a shining example.  Ghanaian football has not been without its many controversies. Those in the sports fraternity and the ordinary Ghanaian have often argued and wondered why the government of Ghana continues to spend relatively more on football. Football apparently unites Ghana like no other sport does. But is this limitation organic or self-imposed?  As mentioned early on, the focus given to the football fraternity is sometimes to the detriment of other sports. For instance, the Ghana Basketball Association of Ghana was cited in 2011, almost lamenting their neglect by the Sports Authority. Thus, after nine months of qualifying for the 22nd Africa Women’s Basketball Championship 2011, hosted by Mali, their call for support fell on deaf ears. It took the benevolence of well-wishers and private individuals to get