The Data Gathering Process

Data collection in developing countries and especially in Africa is ridden with difficulties as a result of underdeveloped records management systems. However, having lived and worked in Ghana all my life, I was aware of the potential difficulties that I would encounter, especially related to motives underlying policy actions that went back over two decades. However, my experience in undertaking this research also drew my attention to the fact that research related to policy can be even more hazardous than would be the case elsewhere. As I have come to appreciate, policy means politics and politics, be it

contemporary or historical accounts, can be very controversial and perceived as dangerous for respondents tasked to reflect on and articulate opinions. In Ghanaian society, emerging from military rule to democratic constitutional rule, people and organisations from whom information is required are often not too keen to candidly share information and opinions for reasons that I have come to appreciate as self-preservation. In spite of the cloud of

21 _{Cited in Bryman (2001:13).}

33 respectability accorded to Ghana, especially by western societies for its achievements in democracy, there is a pervasive sense of arbitrary use of power by the political class.

The principal obstacle to the free sharing of views was the respondents‘ genuine fear of victimization for expressing honest opinions about policies, past or present. This risk of victimisation is a perceptible factor that can not be discounted. It had the effect of denying, delaying or restricting my access to respondents and institutional sources. A principal lesson learnt in the data collection for this research has been the importance of diffusing fears and guaranteeing protection. I also found value in recourse to multiple sources to securing

information on any particular event or incident. The practical experience of data triangulation has shown me in greater detail the significance of its merits than the literature on research methods could ever have taught me. On the down side, this has also led to instances of data overload which has required the investment of time in sifting through review and discarding of information that was not relevant or helpful.

Access to the organizations and informants was helped by my familiarity with some of these organizations as a result of my earlier work as a consultant for the UN-Habitat in implementing a slum upgrading project in Ghana. This generated both opportunity and threat for my data collection. On one hand, being a consultant of the international organisations such as the UN provides access to the highest offices (up to the Presidency) and consequently places one in a position of higher power in relation to bureaucrats and community groups. Furthermore, the assignation as an ―international expert‖ by reason of this association with an international organisation is an intimidating position for bureaucrats. To this extent,

respondents could be very economical with information. On the other hand, this position enabled me to get access to documents that ordinarily would not be given out by civil servants. As my association with the UN project ended before the start of this post-graduate research work, this distinction was clarified for informants wherever I went for information in

34 an attempt to free the selected respondents from any inhibitions. Due to the need for repeat visits to informants and organizations, the field work took a total of seven months to conclude.

At the start of the field work, I identified and assembled distinct sets of people into focus groups to discuss the outline of the research and the related requirements of the field work. Selection of the participants in these focus groups was based on their expert knowledge of the thematic areas which was validated in my initial consultations with housing, local governance and policy experts known to me from my professional work in Ghana. The themes were identified on the basis of the preliminary reading of housing reforms. The focus groups were organised according to the following themes: housing, housing finance, local governance, land management and administration, World Bank projects, UN projects, private real estate developers, planners in central and local government, general policy experts, and lastly a low-income community group in Tema. It took six weeks starting from the second week of August 2006 to the end of September 200622 to organise the focus group discussions because of difficulties experienced in synchronising the availability of the different experts. The focus group discussions also suffered from frequent interruptions as participants often left the meetings shortly to attend to urgent matters. However most participants did return to the discussions to contribute meaningfully to the discussions as the reasons for which they excused themselves were resolved by telephone. With the exception of two discussions, I conducted all the (ten) focus group discussions in the conference room of the Institute of Local Government Studies because of its location on the periphery of the capital. The motive was to draw the participants away from their respective work places as much as possible in order to minimise interruptions as well as provide a neutral location for the discussions. For the community group I undertook the focus group discussion in their own community built

35 meeting facility. Lastly, I met with the focus group of housing experts in the conference room of the Ghana Institute of Architects.

Prior to undertaking data collection, preliminary consideration was given to the nature of the research question and its imperatives for the field exercise in a focus groups discussion with housing bureaucrats. Through these discussions it was decided to establish a temporal stratification in order to chart policy developments before, during and after the reforms and thereby unravel underlying structures and its associated changes. Focus on this stratification was informed by the desire to establish the social practices and the context prevailing in these periods in order to understand the generative conditions and actions underlying reversionism. The pre-reform era was important in developing an appreciation of the prevailing conditions and state of the housing sector and especially of the elements of these conditions that were deemed as problematic thereby necessitating reforms. Identifying these conditions enabled an examination of the underlying and predisposing structural causes and to what extent the reform activities addressed these conditions. The examination of the reform era then enabled me to identify and assemble all actions that were undertaken under the aegis of the reforms. These facts facilitated the determination of the impetus for those actions and how those actions allied with the enabling principles. By distinctly compartmentalizing the reform era, I was able to review its outcomes in the light of expectations and the actual activities that transpired. Having delineated the reform period from the post-reform era, I was able to then identify the material conditions and processes for which reason the reform outcomes were legitimated. In this regard, the discourse was carefully examined to understand the rhetorical tools utilized to legitimatize outcomes.

This temporal stratification which established the boundaries of the three periods however faced the challenge of determining the specific point in time when the reforms began and ended. This was resolved following guidance from the focus group discussions

36 with housing experts who were involved in the pre-reform, reform and post-reform era. It was concluded that the housing sector reforms begun with the invitation by the state of

international agencies to support the urban and housing sectors following the inception of the Stabilisation and Structural Adjustment Programmes. Furthermore, following the direction by the housing focus group, the end of the reform programme was fixed to the end of the World Bank‘s Urban II programme in 2000, which also coincided with the unique occurrence of the first ever democratic political transition in Ghana. Cognisance was taken of this political transition and its impact on the continuities and discontinuities in policies. In the light of the foregoing, the pre-reform era could be considered to be the post-colonial period up to 1984, followed by the reform era spanning 1984 to 2000 and the post-reform era from 2000 to the present (2009).

In respect of the reform era, although the timelines appeared to be quite clear, my attention was drawn to three distinct patterns in the reform trajectories based on the category of sponsors and advocates of initiatives. In this regard, the reform trajectories were driven by the efforts of the (i) World Bank, (ii) the UN (that is, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Centre on Human Settlements (UNCHS)), and lastly (iii) the local policy community that originally comprised, predominantly, bureaucrats of the Housing Ministry; latterly the local housing policy community was taken over by the public pension funds, the Social Security and National Insurance Trust (SSNIT). I was made aware, and therefore took account, of the overlap of the activities in these distinct agency trajectories and also an overlap in the established temporal boundaries. Thus, although classified into pre- reform, reform and post-reform eras, the activities led by these three key policy actors in the housing and urban development sectors were not entirely fixed within distinct boundaries.

Having established the external and internal dimensions of the research, I turned my attention to identifying sources for collecting data covering these three (pre-reform, reform

37 and post-reform) policy periods. These were disaggregated on two operational levels –

vertically and horizontally. On the one hand, data was gathered from organisations taking account of the vertical spectrum of interest ranging from the international, national, and local levels. International organisations identified were mainly the World Bank and the UN-

Habitat. At the national level, key sources of information included the Ministry of Works and Housing (MWH) from which housing sector policies directly emanates. In addition, the Ministry of Local Government, Rural Development (MLGRD), the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning (MOFEP), and the National Development Planning Commission (NDPC) were identified as sites for information on policy decisions. The Ministry of Finance, for example, is the sector ministry in charge of managing the macro-economy and supervises the disbursement of annual budgetary funds. As a result, it has an important role in determining the nature of the financial resources available for any sector, and in respect of this study, the housing sector. An important overlap that was taken into account was the operation of the identified international organisations at the national level; the World Bank Country Office and the Office of the UN-Habitat Programme Manager. Lastly, at the local level, I focussed on the local government of Accra with the functionaries of the selected departments as the sources of information reflecting their front line role in housing. These departments included the Town and Country Planning Department, Metropolitan Engineer‘s Office, Metropolitan Development Planning and Coordinating Unit, and the Metropolitan Coordinating Director‘s Office. I contacted and interviewed representatives from these offices together with the Chief Executive form the Metropolitan Statutory Planning Committee (in charge of approving development control). Accra was chosen because it has a pioneering role and torchbearer effect on urban development in Ghana.

In terms of the horizontal disaggregation of data sources, I focussed on the sub-sectors of housing namely land management, land-use planning and development control, housing

38 finance, building materials, and housing development. Given the predominant interest of this study in policy, I focused my initial attention on public agencies in these sub-sectors. In doing so, I observed that some public organisations involved in some aspect of housing policy in one way or the other, had become defunct. This was the case in respect of the main state-owned mortgage bank – Bank for Housing and Construction (BHC) – which emerged in the early 1970s but had collapsed by the end of the housing sector reforms in 2000. Similarly, the first publicly owned housing finance agency – the First Ghana Building Society – had become virtually moribund by the 1990s and was effectively under administration at the time of the data collection. These institutions were incapable of providing the documentation that I required. To circumvent this hurdle, I tracked the former management staff of these

institutions and obtained some documentation that they had personally retained. Similarly in housing delivery, two pre-reform public housing development companies – Real Estate Development Company Limited (REDCO), a subsidiary of BHC, and the State Construction Corporation – had been liquidated. Their demise was not critical to obtaining the necessary data for this study since the State Housing Company (SHC) - as the first ever public housing organisation - sufficed in the extrapolation of historical and contemporary data regarding government policy towards housing development. SHC in particular had been engaged in nearly all housing programmes of the state prior to the inception of the reforms. In addition, it was an important player in the reform era, although its institutional charter changed during the reforms. It still retains a significant role as a housing developer, albeit without any state subventions for its activities.

I undertook several key informant interviews and focus group discussions after identifying the sources of information. Focus group discussions and preliminary discussions were held very early in the research to identify key informants. For the World Bank in particular, most of the key informants were staff and consultants who came from

39 Washington. Checks showed that virtually all but one of the participants in the World Bank component of the reforms had long left their posts. Using different means including internet searches and tracking through the most recent publications of these informants, I was able to obtain the latest addresses of some of them and established contact. Unfortunately, virtually all of them were in disparate locations such as Romania, Jordan and USA (Minnesota) where they could not be physically reached given the significant budgetary constraints. The

alternative of using emails to send interview questions did not yield any positive response. However, through participation in the 3rd World Urban Forum in Vancouver23 from the 19th to the 23rd June 2006 appointments for interviews were secured with a couple of informants from the World Bank. As a result, I visited the World Bank offices in Washington in June 2006 where I met with the Senior Economist of the Bank who had been involved in the Ghana housing reform project. Following an interview on the subject he also compiled and gave to me the project reports that the Bank had in its archives which had not been available at the Ghana country office of the Bank.

Other interviews secured during the Vancouver conference were with additional informants from UN-Habitat, who, though not directly conversant with the peculiar situation of Ghana, were nonetheless informative in discussing the conceptual issues of enabling housing policies. The interviews with the UN-Habitat informants were facilitated by the launch at the Conference of the UN‘s publication reviewing the global application of the enabling policies (UN-Habitat, 2006). The reflection on the enabling reforms and a special Expert Group Meeting on innovating financing of slum upgrading held as part of forum, to which I was invited as a former consultant, created the appropriate platform for engaging these informants in their natural domain.

23 _{The World Urban Forum series was initiated by UN-Habitat and organised in Nairobi as a global think tank} for the UN on urban issues and also as a platform for engaging stakeholders of the urban agenda in constructive debates. Subsequently the forum has been held biannually in Barcelona (2004), Vancouver (2006) and Nanjing (2008).

40 The search for documentary data, especially related to policy rationale at each

juncture of policy change, compelled me to go beyond these listed organisations to other sources such as the National Archives, the libraries of the University of Ghana and the Faculty of Planning Department and the archives of newspapers, in particular the publicly owned newspaper, Daily Graphic24 and the Ghana News Agency. However, recourse to the other newspaper sources became necessary following the limited access provided by the National Archives in spite of assurances and accompanying proof that the use of the

requested materials was solely for academic purposes. Again, this experience emerged as the manifestation of the perceived fears of bureaucrats. In the light of such fears by bureaucrats, I had to use the newspaper reports of housing related news that I had obtained from the

archives of the press houses as supplementary evidence in examining the research questions. In respect of other archival searches, I secured materials from the headquarters of the World Bank in Washington during my research visit in June 2006, related to their participation of the reforms. I was given access to documents such as internal memos and staff appraisal reports and evaluation reports of projects and given permission to use the information therein. In the process of identifying and collecting the requisite reports it became obvious that most of the agencies in Ghana I was researching did not have the reports I needed. However some retired staff of these agencies were able to provide me with the reports as they had made personal copies of such reports of work they had been involved in prior to retirement.

I also undertook three observational surveys to confirm the influence of the public pension funds on the initial housing development activities of private sector developers after the inception of the housing reforms, the penetration of international housing development companies, and ground the anecdotal evidence of the scale of growth of the private sector developers. The first survey was necessitated by evidence suggesting that locational decisions

24

Daily Graphic as the oldest daily newspaper, was established in 1950 as a private business but subsequently nationalised in 1956. The 1992 constitution engendered the editorial insulation of all publicly owned press houses through the replacement of the government‘s appointive power by a non-governmental commission.

41 by the nascent private sector developers emerging from the housing reforms were predicated on similar decisions of the public pension funds, centred on the sites of their first mass housing development programme. The second survey aimed to establish the relative degree of penetration of international housing development companies in the housing market of Ghana, using Accra because of its torch-bearing role in the urban spectrum. The need for this survey was generated by the implicit assumptions of ―free‖ markets underlying the neo-