Who cares about the North-South divide in standards of living?

President John Evans Atta Mills (left), Vice President John Mahama (right)

Twenty years of rapid economic development in Ghana, present and successive governments have done little, if anything, to reduce the historical North-South divide in standards of living.

While rural development and urbanization have led to significant poverty reduction in the South, similar dynamics have been largely absent from Northern Ghana, comprising Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions, which covers 40% of Ghana's land area.

According to latest World Bank report, one out of every three Ghanaian cannot afford the basic necessities of life. This means 30 percent of Ghanaians are poor, in spite of several years of rapid economic development in the country.

The disparity in poverty range in the country could not have been wider, while on the average, 20 percent of Ghanaians in the south are poor, a whooping figure of 63 in every 100 Ghanaians in the north has no means of acquiring the basic necessities of life.

Furthermore, between 1992 and 2006, the number of the poor declined by 2.5million in the south and increased by 0.9million in the north. In sharp contrast with the south, which covers 60% of the country's landmass, there was no significant decline in the proportion of the poor, in the population of the north.

Today, the majority of 'Ghana poor' live in northern Ghana, where the poor are getting poorer. They are predominantly rainfall-dependent farmers who grow food crops, including sorghum, millet, maize, ground-nut and yam.

Livestock also does well in this vegetation zone of the country. These livestock include cattle, sheep, goat and poultry, especially guinea fowl.

These farmers are highly vulnerable to external shocks, given the limited diversification of their income sources. Weather conditions in the north do not encourage all-year-round farming as happens in the south.

Amazingly, the northern parts of the country have limited irrigation facilities, as compared with the south, blessed with all the state-of-art irrigation facilities. While the poor have little education, increases in education in northern Ghana do not seem to have provided greater livelihood opportunities. This is reflective of the absence of better off-farm opportunities in these regions.

To cope with the various shocks to which they are exposed (like floods, droughts, insects, diseases, conflicts -all of which are preventable with relevant infrastructure, public services, insurance and conflict resolution mechanisms), the poor tend to mortgage their prospects to eventually escape poverty, by depleting their human and physical capital, and adopting risky behaviours, including child migration or illegal artisanal mining.

Additionally, the oil boom in services and cities mostly located in the south, coupled with climate change, threaten to further widen this gap.

To this end, the Lead Economist of World Bank, Sebastien Dessus warns that 'any poverty alleviation strategy for Ghana must put poverty in northern Ghana at centre stage, and acknowledge its specific causes in the design of possible interventions'.

He added that this consideration is not only important for the sake of efficiency in poverty reduction, but also to mitigate the development of horizontal inequalities, foster national unity through balanced development and consolidate democratic gains achieved in the last two decades.

International experience indeed point to significant risks of civil conflict with growing horizontal inequalities in young democracies in particular, the Economist admonished.

Furthermore, the north is isolated economically and unable to integrate itself with the more dynamic south, in spite of adequate connectivity through infrastructure. Yet, integration is essential for the north, given the need to tap into external demands and resources, to advance out of subsistence livelihoods and escape poverty traps.

In tackling poverty in Northern Ghana report, the World Bank observes that the last two decades have seen a convergence in human capital endowment between the north and the south, thanks to government, development partners and non-governmental organisation programmes in the region, but a divergence in poverty and economic outcomes.

This reflects a divergence in returns to economic factors -especially human capital, as well as poor mobility of these factors. The World Bank report shows that while national road networks could be further expanded and improved, this is unlikely to have a large impact on regional disparities, given the relatively high road density and degree of connectivity that already exists between the north and the south.

Rather, low farm output and productivity, combined with the low density of farms in some parts of northern Ghana, make economic integration expensive, in terms of rural network expansion to connect the main North-South backbone of infrastructure and markets in the presence of high fixed costs, and/or the absence of economies of scale.

To add up, migrants from the north to the south are largely economically unsuccessful and merely motivated by push factors that expel migrants out of desperation. Although migrants from the north do not make up the biggest share of migrants in Ghana, they do not do well from migration as their southern counterparts.

Migrations from the north tend to migrate out of desperation and given their lower level of education, migration often results in engaging in high risk jobs or putting themselves in positions of vulnerability.

The young girls carry heavy loads on the streets of the cities just to eke out a living. They sleep on the streets and in markets, and earn income ranging from GH¢3 to GH¢5 a day. The story is very horrible for the young boys who migrate to the mining areas in the south.

According to demographic experts, successful north-south migration, in terms of poverty alleviation, is further hampered by the south's low capacity to absorb large numbers of migrants from the north for cultural, social, economic, and urban-planning reasons.

Tackling poverty in Northern Ghana, therefore, calls for interventions that go beyond spatially blind policies and are well targeted within northern Ghana, with a view to supporting livelihood opportunities, and reducing vulnerability to the various climatic, economic and political shocks that plague these unfortunate regions.

People could live well from agriculture practice in northern Ghana, if low productivity was addressed by a more proactive and spatial approach to addressing infrastructural gaps, technology and business climate constraints.

Agriculture in the north has been constrained by the lack of well planned and coordinated investment in infrastructure -particularly rural roads and irrigation.

As a result, the guinea savannah region in Ghana is often perceived as having agro-ecological conditions that are too difficult for improving the productivity of agriculture, although neighbouring Burkina Faso says this does not have to be the case.

While providing acess within two kilometers to an all-season road to all Ghanaians might be unaffordable in the short run, cost requirements to ensure that there is adequate road accessibility to 80% of the agricultural land would shrink substantially. And a same spatial approach could be applied to small scale irrigation schemes. Improved dissemination of technology, improved knowledge and facilities for post-harvest handling, in addition to overall improvements in the value chain, are also needed to reduce loss of harvests. Moreover, innovative institutional arrangements such as out-grower schemes and contract farming, which better link smaller-holders to markets, and are more dependent on private sector actors, are promising candidates for scaling up and replication.

With this, the question of the paradox of the north-side divide still begs to be answered!