Ghana’s population explosion stifling development -- Population Council

Executive Director of the National Population Council, Dr Leticia Appiah, is pushing for the control of Ghana’s population growth rate, revealing that the current rate is double global figures.

“Population growth will always determine the growth of a country until it is stabilised,” she said.

Speaking on late-night current affairs show, PM Express on Tuesday, Dr Appiah said Ghana’s high population growth rate, which hovers around 2.2 per cent yearly, is causing an unhealthy growth in urbanisation, which in turn puts a strain on resources and disrupts planning.

“If you look at our country, there are ten regions, if you look at the places where fertility rates are high, the three northern regions, they migrate south. So you have fertility rate very high up north, meanwhile, the growth rate is very low, about 1.2%, because they are coming down south. So it doesn’t flood up north, it floods in the south,” she said.

She said although high population growth does not hold any advantage for the development effort of any country, the disadvantage can be reversed with improved skills that can come from quality education and programmes that improve the human capital.

She adds that because Ghana’s population is growing beyond manageable levels, it is heavily influencing the country’s development focus and preventing proper development planning by government.

“Because we are growing so fast our focus is education; our problems are maternal mortality and child mortality,” she said, explaining that decisions by policymakers will always be determined by the problems caused by the high population growth.

Dr Appiah’s National Population Council has for over two decades been raising awareness of population and development issues including reproductive health in a bid to mobilise support and resources for the implementation of population control programmes.

World Bank figures in 2018 show Ghana has an estimated population of 29.46 million up from the official 2010 census figure of 24.2 million.

Watch more from the exciting discussion in the Youtube video below.

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