SMUS APRI 2025 Postdoctoral Fellows – Policy brief series on wicked urban problems in African cities – Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Ghana
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Joel Ongwech
The 2025 SMUS–APRI Urban Africa Post-Doctoral Research Scholarship Programme was designed to strengthen postdoctoral researchers’ ability to communicate findings on urban “wicked problems” in African cities to policymakers and the public at large through a series of policy briefs.
The resulting APRI special series, “Wicked Urban Problems in African Cities: Rethinking Policy and Practice”, comprises four briefs by Dr Mildred M. Ambani Songoro, Dr Calvince Ouko Othoo, and Dr Emmanuel Amponsah, with guest contributors Mourice Wambua Kausya and Brunilde Verrier. Each brief tackles a distinct urban challenge: a failed transit system, a broken mapping workflow, corruption in water provision, and the persistence of illegal electricity connections. Read together, the briefs highlight a recurring urban policy dilemma in which behaviours treated as problematic are often rational responses to conditions of systemic exclusion.
The wicked urban problems highlighted in the policy briefs are systemic, politically contested and mutate as actors respond to attempted fixes, so that one-dimensional fixes generate new harms rather than resolving existing challenges. These recurring paradoxes, or “wicked problems,” as Rittel & Webber (1973) call them, form the theoretical basis of this series.
Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems in Ghana
Dr Emmanuel Amponsah’s policy brief looks at a failed attempt to introduce a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) in Ghana. The introduction of a BRT system was promoted as an integrated reform and a technical fix for urban congestion. What it delivered was a downgrade of the functioning Quality Bus Service and its eventual operational collapse, with numerous attempts to relaunch the service ongoing since 2005.
Drawing on document analysis and expert interviews, the brief traces the failure to overlapping mandates, tokenistic engagement, donor-driven models misaligned with local conditions and unsustainable financing. The unresolved issue at the centre of this failure was the displacement of existing trotro operators, whose livelihoods the reform threatened and who fought back through union action and by stalling construction.
Summary
- Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) promises a high-capacity, reliable public transport system that can improve mobility, reduce travel times and foster sustainable urban development.
- Poor planning and implementation, as well as institutional and financial issues, continue to hamper the successful deployment of the BRT system in Accra and other cities.
- To ensure the success and sustainability of future BRT initiatives in Ghana, there is a need for institutional reform, integrated planning and stakeholder management.
- There is also a need for sustainable funding through taxation, property development from the private sector and land value capture instruments.
To read the full policy brief, please click on the image above or on the following DOI link: https://doi.org/10.59184/pb026.07.