ABSTRACT There is increased exposure of people and critical livelihood assets to flooding globally due to climate change and modification of the biophysical system through human activities. Flooding has become an annual phenomenon in Accra in recent decades and has severe impacts on the poor and vulnerable. Using transdisciplinary techniques across the social and biophysical sciences, this study examined the extent of exposure of urban population to flooding, and the assets and structures tha...
Abstract Flooding is an environmental challenge faced by many nations in the 21st Century. Studies have shown that recent floods in cities are responsible for the outbreak of cholera and non-cholera diarrhoea, but there is little work on the risk perceptions of diarrhoea resulting from flooding. Also, it is not known how risk perceptions of diarrhoea mediate the relationship between flooding and diarrhoeal disease. The risk perceptions people develop resulting from their exposure to floods is...
ABSTRACT The simplest and most basic census item age, mostly present difficulties with regard to its accuracy in statistically underdeveloped countries where civil registration coverage is limited in terms of its accessibility. The study aimed at evaluating and adjusting age data of the population and housing census of Ghana. Several evaluation tools were used to examine the errors. These include visual inspection of the data and at the same time graphing the single age data which revealed h...
ABSTRACT In Ghana and other sub-Saharan African countries, the family is the primary caregiver for elderly persons and provides other forms of support to them. Urbanisation and its associated consequences have weakened traditional family ties and obligation, and subsequently impaired care for the elderly, particularly in urban poor communities in sub-Saharan Africa. Against this backdrop, this study explored the experiences of family caregivers and their elderly care recipients in two urban c...
ABSTRACT C-section births have been increasing, yet disparities exist in the rates spatially and among socioeconomic sub-groups globally. Wide C-section disparities mirror a situation of overuse or underuse of the procedure with implications for maternal mortality. Factors associated with the Csection rise and disparities have not been well documented. The determinants of C-section rise and disparities have focused extensively on individual, institutional and medical factors to the neglect o...
ABSTRACT The literature suggests that globally adolescents initiate sex before age 15. In Ghana, young females initiate sex relatively earlier than males. Studies indicate that the age at which one experiences first sex in itself is not the problem, but rather the challenges resulting from the numerous health and social implications associated with it. One outcome in the literature for early sexual activity is a high number of sexual partners which is associated with a risk of contracting HIV...
ABSTRACT Stalls in fertility transition have been observed in many Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, including Ghana. This stalling fertility, defy the Demographic Transition Theory and have attracted the research attention. Current studies seeking to unravel the causes of the stalling fertility have been inconclusive. Changes in the timing and prevalence of marriage are areas that call for attention because total fertility rate is a function of the age composition of the proportion ever m...
ABSTRACT Whilst there are claims that women in Ghana are involved in alcohol consumption behaviours that pose threats to the maternal health and social development of the country, extensive empirical research in Ghana to confirm these claims are unknown. Using a quantitative data sample of 548 women from the EDULINK Urban Health and Poverty wave II project, the study specifically examined the prevalence and socio-economic and demographic factors affecting alcohol use among women in Ghana. The...
ABSTRACT Factors that determine exclusive breastfeeding in Ghana are important, especially in line with recommendation by WHO/UNICEF. The difference between WHO/UNICEF recommendations of 90% and the level of coverage of exclusive breastfeeding in Ghana (45%) is wide. The study examines exclusive breastfeeding up to 6 months of age as recommended by WHO/UNICEF. It also determines possible factors that influence the progress of exclusive breastfeeding in Ghana, to inform possible strategies for...
ABSTRACT This dissertation uses data from the 2000 and 2010 Ghana Population and Housing Censuses on the active labour force aged 15-64 years and carries out a comparison of 2000 and 2010 regarding the socio-economic differences associated with unemployment in both years. It examines the variation between the unemployed in 2000 and 2010 in terms of their level of education and place of residence and investigates the factors that explain these variations. The study sampled a total of 828,048 a...
ABSTRACT Over six hundred thousand deaths attributable to household air pollution (HAP) occur annually in Africa. On average, women who smoke fish spend six hours daily exposed to hazardous pollutants from biomass fuel. Continued exposure to household air pollution presents a direct health risk to the fish processors, particularly, women and children who are exposed to air pollutants. The main objective of the study was to assess the health and climate implications of biomass consumption by ...
ABSTRACT Food insecurity remains a global health challenge especially for poor areas in developing countries. One of the ways through which access to food can be boosted for the rural dwellers is through access to land, as agriculture is the leading source of income for agricultural-based economies. Little attention, however, has been given to how land ownership arrangements of rural dwellers can affect their food security in Ghana. The study therefore examined the relationship between land ...
Background: The study of parent-child living arrangements and children’s required level of education attained was borne out of observations made and concerns shown by the researcher towards people who have experienced the phenomenon of single parenting. Most of the arguments are that children suffer when they grow in any other type of parent-child living arrangements other than both parents. As more single-parent families appear in societies, interest grows as to the effect of these ho...
Provision and improvement in maternal health services is of critical concern for all governments all over the world particularly those in low to middle-income countries. This led the global community to adopt the United Nations Millennium Development Goal 5 target of reducing by three-quarters the maternal mortality ratio between 1990 and 2015 (United Nations, 2010) so as to improve the well being of women. Crucial to this is access to quality maternal health care including antenatal and...
ABSTRACT This thesis explores the perception and adaptation strategies undertaken among smallholder farmers in agro-ecological zones in rural Ghana. It applies a quantitative analysis of data on 529 farmers in four agro-ecological zones to assess the difference in perception of climate change and the influence on their adaptation strategies. Data for the study was obtained from the 2016 Climate Change, Women in Agriculture and Food Security survey collected by Regional Institute for Populati...