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Migrants build at home
Migrants build at home Long distance housing .development by G hanaians in London -
Johnson Diko and A. Graham Tipple
In times of serious housing supply problems leading to high income-tohousing-cost ratios, Third World households may solve their housing problem by migrating to Europe or North America where salaries allow savings sufficient to build or buy a house back home. This study of Ghanaians living in London shows how highly qualified workers, taking comparatively menial work, are able to work through representatives to lease land, remit between f2 000 and f3 000 per year and build houses in Accra and Kumasi ready for their return. The informal manner through which money is sent is described and suggestions are made to improve the efficiency of the system. Johnson Diko is a Housing Officer with the London Borough of Camden and formerly a Research Student at the Centre for Architectural Research and Development Overseas, University of Newcastle. upon Tyne. Graham Tipple is Senior Research Officer at the same centre. ‘A.G. Tipple and K.G. Willis, ‘Why should Ghanaians build houses in urban areas? An introduction to private sector housing SUDDIV in Ghana’, Cities. Februarv 1992, pp’&74. ‘S.J. Malpezzi, A.G. Tipple and K.G. Willis, ‘Costs and benefits of rent control: a case study in Kumasi, Ghana’, World Bank Discussion Papers 74, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 1990. 31bid. “A.G. Tipple and K.G. Willis, ‘Tenure choice in Kumasi, Ghana’, Third World Planning Review, Vol 13, No 1, February 1991, pp 27-45.
288
There is a major housing problem in Ghana, not only for the low income majority but also for relatively senior workers in the public and private sectors. In the past, except in a relatively small government-built sector, all urban housing has been built by individuals or families acquiring land and engaging building workers to build one or a few houses for their dependants and some tenants. In a recent paper, Tipple and Willis’ show that the building process is complex and fraught with potential pitfalls, especially with respect to bottlenecks in the supply of land, materials and finance. Furthermore, although the traditional nonmonetary motives for house building in Ghana (status, security and family obligations) still persist, the profit motive, to build housing for rent, has largely been eroded by years of surprisingly effective rent control? Over many years, the effects of inflation and failure to maintain the value of wages have resulted in a particularly high house-cost;to-salary ratio. While rental housing has been relatively cheap over the last decade (only 2% of income at the median),3 its imposed low price has contributed to its being in increasingly short supply. Not only have new starts been foregone, but rooms have been taken out of renting and used for fulfilling family obligations to shelter re1atives.4 Recent demands for large advance rent payments have caused severe problems in the search for a home for even the middle income groups. Accommodation in urban Ghana is sharply divided between the majority which provides single rooms in compounds with each household sharing whatever services there are, and the minority which provides self-contained accommodation in villas, bungalows and apartments. Separate dwellings with several rooms and full services, which middle income households in other African countries might enjoy, have been in short supply in urban Ghana both for rent and purchase. In 1989 in Accra, a three bedroomed flat rented for between Cl0 000 and C30 000 per month (&20-60) at a time when a bank clerk’s salary was typically Cl8 000 (f36) p er month and that of a university lecturer was C40 000 (f80) per month. At that time, the cheapest State Housing Corporation
0264-2751/92/040288-07
0 1992 Butterworth-Heinemann
Ltd
Migrants build at home
‘J.E. Hardoy and D. Satterthwaite, Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World, Earthscan, London, 1989; G. Payne, Informal Housing and Land Subdivisions in Third World Cities: A Review of the Literature, Oxford Polytechnic for the Overseas Development Administration, Oxford, 1989. 6K.0. Konadu-Agyemang, ‘Reflections on the absence of squatter settlements in West African Cities: the case of Kumasi, Ghana’, Urban Studies, Vol 28, No 1, February 1991, pp 139-l 51; M. Peil, ‘African squatter settlements: a comparative study’, Urban Studies, Vol 13, No 2, June 1976, pp 155-166; A.G. Tipple, ‘Housing policy and culture in Kumasi, Ghana: a study of constraints and resources’, fnvironment and Behavior, Vol 19, No 3, May 1987, pp 331-352. ‘R.G. Burgess, In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1984.
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November
1992
house (with two rooms) cost approximately C4 million (f8 000) - eight years’ salary for a lecturer. In many developing countries, there is an informal market in land in squatter settlements and on illegal subdivisions.5 This tends to provide a safety net for at least a proportion of middle and low income households who can build cheaply outside building and planning regulations. However, the traditional land ownership system in Ghana prevents this both by providing a closely-knit system of controls and by instilling an unwillingness to act against the land-holding entities.’ The equivalent of squatter housing in urban Ghana - the mud-walled compound on traditionally leased land on the urban periphery - is cheaper than formal sector housing built to comply with urban building regulations. However, its size (usually ten rooms or more) renders it quite a costly investment and few status conscious urban Ghanaians would be willing to build only one or two rooms as would be the case in other countries in the informal sector. Thus, the achievement of very cheap owneroccupied accommodation through the informal sector is not open to the enterprising Ghanaian. There is very little accommodation for sale in Ghana because of a strong cultural feeling against selling real property. Neither is there a well developed contractor system delivering quantities of new houses for people on, or near, average incomes. These supply constraints militate against the wish to own a house which is deeply ingrained in the Ghanaian psyche. House ownership bestows status: it allows obligations of hospitality to kin to be fulfilled and it provides a context for a seemly funeral. A man or woman would certainly want to build a house in his or her home village, the nearest town or, for preference in the 199Os, in Accra or Kumasi. However, only a few months of work need pass before they realize that the monthly salary, plus trading profits and ‘the Grace of God’, are only sufficient for survival. They will never allow the building of the sort of house to which the person aspires nor, in many cases, any sort of house. Migration has presented opportunities for betterment since time began and Ghanaians have not been slow to travel in search of a better life. The streets of London may not be paved with gold, but it is certain that a job there will pay better than one in Ghana. Over the past decades Ghanaians have flocked to London (and other major European cities to a smaller extent) - for the English language is a useful common denominator - in order not only to better their lifestyles but to save towards a house back home. The Ghanaian migrant with a house in Ghana as a target has been the subject of a recent study at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. More than 40 such Ghanaians living in London were interviewed in order to assess the process of saving for and constructing a house in Ghana while living in London. The interviews were conducted by a Ghanaian, using a snowball sample’ or chain of introductions to find the population. Many of the interviews were conducted at social functions: town association meetings, weddings, customary marriages, funerals, child-naming ceremonies, etc, as these were the most convenient times to talk to people who work many hours overtime. The survey shows that, even by having a relatively low-paid job in London, Ghanaians can succeed in building a well appointed, self-contained house in Accra or Kumasi which would have been out of their reach had they remained in a much higher status occupation in Ghana.
Migrants build at home
Characteristics
of Ghanaian migrants in London
Migrants tend to have lower status employment in London than they had in Ghana. Regardless of their qualifications, 85% of the male migrants are employed in unskilled manual work. A hospital administrator was found to be working as a hospital porter, a personnel officer in Ghana drove a fork-lift truck in London, a skilled mechanic had menial work in a hotel kitchen, a nurse worked as a cleaner. Of the few with businesses in Britain, most are in some form of business with close connections with Ghana. Some wholesale goods for travelling traders from Ghana, some work in clearing agencies specializing in exports with West African destinations, others retail West African foodstuffs or provide hairdressing and other services for Ghanaians. As Ghanaians have tended to concentrate in certain parts of London, they have been able to support services suited to their own needs. Although many have lived in a high status company house in Ghana or had rooms in a family house, in Britain they tend to be council tenants or live in a room hired from a Ghanaian landlord in a low income area of London. Some are even subtenants to council tenants. The mean monthly income of the sample is 2745 per month which is low by British standards. Three-quarters of the sample rent accommodation at a mean of &200 per month. They tend towards the lower end of the London rental property market in order to minimize their local costs and maximize savings. The remainder, among the higher paid migrants, are owners of houses in London and pay between f580 and &680 per month on mortgage payments. Before sending savings home, the migrants invest them in banks and building societies and many couples have joint accounts - a rarity in Ghana where marriage does not generate economic unity. Even though they are at the foot of the employment ladder, living in an expensive city, translated into Ghanaian cedis their savings are princely. Through care born of hard times in Ghana, the migrants live simply, save prodigiously, and manage to send between f2 000 and &3 000 per year back to Ghana towards their house building and to keep up with obligations to help pay for such things as funeral debts.
The house building process The long-distance house building process is a model of Ghanaian ingenuity and social cohesion. It might be expected that a migrant would accumulate assets, principally in the form of savings, within the UK which would be liquidated for repatriation on his or her return to be used for the purchase of a house. In the absence of a thriving market in houses in Ghana and the difficulties of buidling quickly, however, a very different process takes place which demonstrates a remarkable degree of social cohesion and economic inter-relation between Ghanaians in both countries. The Ghanaian migrant enters into a building process which lasts several years and whose end signals the ability to go back home. It begins with an established relationship between a migrant and a resident of Ghana. This may be a sibling, a cousin, or a close friend. Their role as the representative of the migrant and caretaker of the house being built is very important to the whole process. The first stage of development is finding and obtaining a piece of land. As negotiating a
290
CITIES November
1992
Migrants build at home
*P.K. Asabere, ‘The price of urban land in a chiefdom: empirical evidence on a traditional African city, Kumasi’, Journal of Regional Science, November 1981, pp 329339; S.K. Asante, ‘Interests in land in the customary law of Ghana - a new appraisal’, Yale Law Journal, No 74, 1965, pp 848-885; Tipple, op tit, Ref 6.
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1992
lease on a plot of land is through a personal encounter, this is usually done by the representative who meets the land holding chief or family head on the migrant’s behalf to negotiate the ‘price’ of the lease and offer the relevant sacrifices to the ancestors of the land holding community.’ ‘Prices’ paid by migrants in the late 1980s in Accra and Kumasi were between f700 and fl 000. In recent years, an alternative method has been instigated by a few speculators who have bought leases on land and then sold them on; the land being either in an undeveloped state or with an unfinished building on it. Unfinished houses had been bought from speculators by 10% of the sample. One example of this was a migrant who had returned in 1988 over the Christmas holiday to search for a house to buy. He paid f9 800 (including fees) for a five roomed house, already roofed, in Domi near Accra. Although more expensive than starting from scratch, this process can be easier for a migrant, avoiding problems over clouded titles, and usually taking less time before the building is complete. Most migrants in London build in Accra, rather fewer choose Kumasi, and very few build in their village. Having obtained the land, building work usually starts quickly with the representative acting as caretaker for the project. Some progress reports are usually sent to the migrant, occasionally accompanied by a photograph. Finance is sent to Ghana in any of three ways. For example, a trader (usually a woman) visiting London calls on a Ghanaian to collect money for her trading. Migrants building at home will come to give her, typically, El 200 at a time. With this and money collected from others doing similar transfers, she buys goods in London which are carried back to Ghana or dispatched as airfreight (often through a Ghanaianowned freight agency). On arrival in Ghana, after delays for transport and customs clearance, the goods must be sold before the cedi equivalent is given to the caretaker for use in the building work. On the next trip, the trader may carry a photograph of the building to encourage the migrant to entrust some more money to her in this manner. Although this method seems fraught with problems, 73% of the sample use it and a surprising number of such transactions seem to occur with complete success. When problems do arise, however, the migrant may lose considerable sums of money. About 25% of the sample had experienced long delays and the consequent problem of inflation depleting the value of materials which their remittance could purchase. Other migrants (only 10% of the sample) prefer to make deposits with the Ghana Commercial Bank in London in favour of their account in Ghana. The caretaker is informed and he or she then withdraws the amount in cedis in Ghana and continues to finance the building. Alternatively, money can be paid into the London account of a Ghanaian who then pays the caretaker in cedis and has the benefit of the foreign exchange. One respondent pays f300 per month in this way. These deposits are consistently honoured and all receipts in Ghana are documented. The last two methods appear to be reasonably straightforward but there is a lingering mistrust of Ghanaian banks (memories of OdarteyWellington’s currency change in 1979 and the Citizen’s Vetting Committees of the early 1980s die slowly) which keeps the first in operation. Both the first and the third methods undoubtedly provide important finance for informal sector international trading. The representative in
Migrants build at home
Ghana, whose role was not reviewed in detail in this study, acts as the contractor on the building site; engaging building tradesmen, supervising their work, ordering materials, and dealing with the building regulation and planning authorities. By these means, Ghanaians in London finance and complete houses usually costing between f1.5 000 and f25 000 (Cl0 million to Cl6 million) over a five to seven year period. Most of the sample in the study intend to return to Ghana about a year after the house is complete, having saved some more money for furnishings or business equipment, and live in the house with their immediate family.
Characteristics
of the houses being built
Although most houses in Ghanaian cities are multi-household compounds, almost all houses built by the migrant sample are villas (ie, single household dwellings standing on their own plot). Typically, they have five or six rooms, with or without servants’ quarters, which may be occupied by relatives, especially aged parents or a brother or sister. Although migrants are aware that they have obligations to house some members of their extended families (21% were building with that specifically in mind), they prefer to have them in their single household villas (or in the ‘boys’ quarters’ with which 33% of the houses are being built) rather than building the 10 to 15 roomed compound houses which are considerably cheaper per room, but more expensive in total. Undoubtedly, the houses being built are in the higher echelons of the current Ghanaian housing stock, both in the space provided for one household and the standards of finish. However, when viewed from the migrants’ UK base, they are very cheap; even a very small house in London may cost three times as much as their spacious new villa in Accra. It is usual in Ghana to build a house in stages, separated by prolonged periods of idleness while resources are gathered. In many African countries, incremental construction is carried out horizontally, that is, one or two rooms are completed and added to until the house is complete. However, in Ghana incremental building is carried out vertically - all the foundations are laid, then all the walls built, the roof added, and then all services and finishings added to complete the whole house. Each stage appears to cost roughly 2&30% of the total. Migrants appear to follow this process, but the usually long idle periods between stages are sharply curtailed because money is more readily available for them than for developers earning Ghanaian salaries.
Recommendations
for increasing efficiency
The efficiency of the house building activities of expatriate Ghanaians could be increased by measures similar to those which would improve the whole housing supply. As land is the sine qua nolz of any building operation, its orderly supply is axiomatic. Currently many land transactions (especially in Accra) lead to clouded or disputed titles. The current land registration exercise should help mitigate this problem for indigenous and expatriate Ghanaian developers alike. The high cost of building materials relative to wages arises partly because of intermittent supplies. The indigenous capacity to produce materials must be increased. In addition, the local construction industry
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Migrants build at home
not capable of producing enough housing to satisfy demand. The encouragement of all builders, but especially small contractors, would assist in increasing the efficiency of housing supply. Developers who rely on local financial resources are severely limited in their ability to raise loans. However, the financial problems for the expatriates are more related to arrangements for repatriating foreign exchange and having it paid to the building contractors than to any increased efficiency of Ghana’s housing finance mechanisms. The Ghana Commercial Bank, Barclays Bank, and other financial institutions, which are present both in Ghana and London, should be able to offer services to assist the migrant worker to transfer money without loss. The ability to hold funds in sterling in Ghana would assist in defeating the inflationary trends in building costs caused by the fluctuation in the exchange rate. In addition, these financial houses could provide mediation between estate developers (a group just beginning to have impact on the housing supply in Ghana) and migrants seeking housing to buy. All this is predicated by a need to increase trust in the Ghanaian banking system. There is also a need for housing developers who can use their experience and economies of scale to supply housing in completed form. The current practice of each householder having to initiate and supervise a multitude of individual building operations is expensive in terms of both effort and risk. There seems to be a latent market for housing built for sale when complete or partly complete, as long as delivery is assured. In the past, payments of large deposits against houses which did not materialize have given such operations a bad reputation, but this could be restored by only a few successful schemes. The housing provided through expatriate efforts tends to be very low density and tends to benefit only the owners and members of their families. In terms of housing supply in Ghana, this type of house is expensive of resources, making only limited use of the imported capital for providing shelter. A greater efficiency in housing supply for all echelons of society could be achieved by introducing measures which encourage expatriates to build some rental rooms. This could be assisted by altering current rent control legislation to remove new housing from such controls with immediate effect. This should restore the economic rationale of building the compound houses, with a few rooms to rent, which have served urban Ghanaians for so long, and would show whether there is still a demand for that type of housing. More importantly, it could attract expatriate capital into restoring some of the ground lost by the private rental sector over the last 20 years.’
is
Conclusion
Tipple
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and Willis, op cif, Ref 4.
November
1992
It must be remembered that Ghanaian migrants occupy a low position in the employment hierarchy in Britain. Racial prejudice and their temporary status mitigate against their taking up positions commensurate with their education and experience. However, in spite of these disadvantages, they succeed where most resident Ghanaians do not; they build a house relatively quickly and in a style which they could not afford by working in Ghana. There are inefficiencies in the current system but these should not be regarded as immutable. Some reasonably straightforward interventions by banking institutions, and the type of supply-side measures required
Migrants build at home
to increase efficiency in the housing market generally, could increase the effectiveness of Ghanaian migrants’ activity in housing supply. In addition, increasing the supply of housing for direct acquisition would be a great help to expatriate Ghanaians. The issues here are not simply about increasing housing supply; reducing the time taken for the migrant to achieve the target of a house could contribute greatly to speeding up the return of Ghana’s skilled workforce.
294
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1992
Johnson Diko and A. Graham Tipple
In times of serious housing supply problems leading to high income-tohousing-cost ratios, Third World households may solve their housing problem by migrating to Europe or North America where salaries allow savings sufficient to build or buy a house back home. This study of Ghanaians living in London shows how highly qualified workers, taking comparatively menial work, are able to work through representatives to lease land, remit between f2 000 and f3 000 per year and build houses in Accra and Kumasi ready for their return. The informal manner through which money is sent is described and suggestions are made to improve the efficiency of the system. Johnson Diko is a Housing Officer with the London Borough of Camden and formerly a Research Student at the Centre for Architectural Research and Development Overseas, University of Newcastle. upon Tyne. Graham Tipple is Senior Research Officer at the same centre. ‘A.G. Tipple and K.G. Willis, ‘Why should Ghanaians build houses in urban areas? An introduction to private sector housing SUDDIV in Ghana’, Cities. Februarv 1992, pp’&74. ‘S.J. Malpezzi, A.G. Tipple and K.G. Willis, ‘Costs and benefits of rent control: a case study in Kumasi, Ghana’, World Bank Discussion Papers 74, The World Bank, Washington, DC, 1990. 31bid. “A.G. Tipple and K.G. Willis, ‘Tenure choice in Kumasi, Ghana’, Third World Planning Review, Vol 13, No 1, February 1991, pp 27-45.
288
There is a major housing problem in Ghana, not only for the low income majority but also for relatively senior workers in the public and private sectors. In the past, except in a relatively small government-built sector, all urban housing has been built by individuals or families acquiring land and engaging building workers to build one or a few houses for their dependants and some tenants. In a recent paper, Tipple and Willis’ show that the building process is complex and fraught with potential pitfalls, especially with respect to bottlenecks in the supply of land, materials and finance. Furthermore, although the traditional nonmonetary motives for house building in Ghana (status, security and family obligations) still persist, the profit motive, to build housing for rent, has largely been eroded by years of surprisingly effective rent control? Over many years, the effects of inflation and failure to maintain the value of wages have resulted in a particularly high house-cost;to-salary ratio. While rental housing has been relatively cheap over the last decade (only 2% of income at the median),3 its imposed low price has contributed to its being in increasingly short supply. Not only have new starts been foregone, but rooms have been taken out of renting and used for fulfilling family obligations to shelter re1atives.4 Recent demands for large advance rent payments have caused severe problems in the search for a home for even the middle income groups. Accommodation in urban Ghana is sharply divided between the majority which provides single rooms in compounds with each household sharing whatever services there are, and the minority which provides self-contained accommodation in villas, bungalows and apartments. Separate dwellings with several rooms and full services, which middle income households in other African countries might enjoy, have been in short supply in urban Ghana both for rent and purchase. In 1989 in Accra, a three bedroomed flat rented for between Cl0 000 and C30 000 per month (&20-60) at a time when a bank clerk’s salary was typically Cl8 000 (f36) p er month and that of a university lecturer was C40 000 (f80) per month. At that time, the cheapest State Housing Corporation
0264-2751/92/040288-07
0 1992 Butterworth-Heinemann
Ltd
Migrants build at home
‘J.E. Hardoy and D. Satterthwaite, Squatter Citizen: Life in the Urban Third World, Earthscan, London, 1989; G. Payne, Informal Housing and Land Subdivisions in Third World Cities: A Review of the Literature, Oxford Polytechnic for the Overseas Development Administration, Oxford, 1989. 6K.0. Konadu-Agyemang, ‘Reflections on the absence of squatter settlements in West African Cities: the case of Kumasi, Ghana’, Urban Studies, Vol 28, No 1, February 1991, pp 139-l 51; M. Peil, ‘African squatter settlements: a comparative study’, Urban Studies, Vol 13, No 2, June 1976, pp 155-166; A.G. Tipple, ‘Housing policy and culture in Kumasi, Ghana: a study of constraints and resources’, fnvironment and Behavior, Vol 19, No 3, May 1987, pp 331-352. ‘R.G. Burgess, In the Field: An Introduction to Field Research, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1984.
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1992
house (with two rooms) cost approximately C4 million (f8 000) - eight years’ salary for a lecturer. In many developing countries, there is an informal market in land in squatter settlements and on illegal subdivisions.5 This tends to provide a safety net for at least a proportion of middle and low income households who can build cheaply outside building and planning regulations. However, the traditional land ownership system in Ghana prevents this both by providing a closely-knit system of controls and by instilling an unwillingness to act against the land-holding entities.’ The equivalent of squatter housing in urban Ghana - the mud-walled compound on traditionally leased land on the urban periphery - is cheaper than formal sector housing built to comply with urban building regulations. However, its size (usually ten rooms or more) renders it quite a costly investment and few status conscious urban Ghanaians would be willing to build only one or two rooms as would be the case in other countries in the informal sector. Thus, the achievement of very cheap owneroccupied accommodation through the informal sector is not open to the enterprising Ghanaian. There is very little accommodation for sale in Ghana because of a strong cultural feeling against selling real property. Neither is there a well developed contractor system delivering quantities of new houses for people on, or near, average incomes. These supply constraints militate against the wish to own a house which is deeply ingrained in the Ghanaian psyche. House ownership bestows status: it allows obligations of hospitality to kin to be fulfilled and it provides a context for a seemly funeral. A man or woman would certainly want to build a house in his or her home village, the nearest town or, for preference in the 199Os, in Accra or Kumasi. However, only a few months of work need pass before they realize that the monthly salary, plus trading profits and ‘the Grace of God’, are only sufficient for survival. They will never allow the building of the sort of house to which the person aspires nor, in many cases, any sort of house. Migration has presented opportunities for betterment since time began and Ghanaians have not been slow to travel in search of a better life. The streets of London may not be paved with gold, but it is certain that a job there will pay better than one in Ghana. Over the past decades Ghanaians have flocked to London (and other major European cities to a smaller extent) - for the English language is a useful common denominator - in order not only to better their lifestyles but to save towards a house back home. The Ghanaian migrant with a house in Ghana as a target has been the subject of a recent study at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. More than 40 such Ghanaians living in London were interviewed in order to assess the process of saving for and constructing a house in Ghana while living in London. The interviews were conducted by a Ghanaian, using a snowball sample’ or chain of introductions to find the population. Many of the interviews were conducted at social functions: town association meetings, weddings, customary marriages, funerals, child-naming ceremonies, etc, as these were the most convenient times to talk to people who work many hours overtime. The survey shows that, even by having a relatively low-paid job in London, Ghanaians can succeed in building a well appointed, self-contained house in Accra or Kumasi which would have been out of their reach had they remained in a much higher status occupation in Ghana.
Migrants build at home
Characteristics
of Ghanaian migrants in London
Migrants tend to have lower status employment in London than they had in Ghana. Regardless of their qualifications, 85% of the male migrants are employed in unskilled manual work. A hospital administrator was found to be working as a hospital porter, a personnel officer in Ghana drove a fork-lift truck in London, a skilled mechanic had menial work in a hotel kitchen, a nurse worked as a cleaner. Of the few with businesses in Britain, most are in some form of business with close connections with Ghana. Some wholesale goods for travelling traders from Ghana, some work in clearing agencies specializing in exports with West African destinations, others retail West African foodstuffs or provide hairdressing and other services for Ghanaians. As Ghanaians have tended to concentrate in certain parts of London, they have been able to support services suited to their own needs. Although many have lived in a high status company house in Ghana or had rooms in a family house, in Britain they tend to be council tenants or live in a room hired from a Ghanaian landlord in a low income area of London. Some are even subtenants to council tenants. The mean monthly income of the sample is 2745 per month which is low by British standards. Three-quarters of the sample rent accommodation at a mean of &200 per month. They tend towards the lower end of the London rental property market in order to minimize their local costs and maximize savings. The remainder, among the higher paid migrants, are owners of houses in London and pay between f580 and &680 per month on mortgage payments. Before sending savings home, the migrants invest them in banks and building societies and many couples have joint accounts - a rarity in Ghana where marriage does not generate economic unity. Even though they are at the foot of the employment ladder, living in an expensive city, translated into Ghanaian cedis their savings are princely. Through care born of hard times in Ghana, the migrants live simply, save prodigiously, and manage to send between f2 000 and &3 000 per year back to Ghana towards their house building and to keep up with obligations to help pay for such things as funeral debts.
The house building process The long-distance house building process is a model of Ghanaian ingenuity and social cohesion. It might be expected that a migrant would accumulate assets, principally in the form of savings, within the UK which would be liquidated for repatriation on his or her return to be used for the purchase of a house. In the absence of a thriving market in houses in Ghana and the difficulties of buidling quickly, however, a very different process takes place which demonstrates a remarkable degree of social cohesion and economic inter-relation between Ghanaians in both countries. The Ghanaian migrant enters into a building process which lasts several years and whose end signals the ability to go back home. It begins with an established relationship between a migrant and a resident of Ghana. This may be a sibling, a cousin, or a close friend. Their role as the representative of the migrant and caretaker of the house being built is very important to the whole process. The first stage of development is finding and obtaining a piece of land. As negotiating a
290
CITIES November
1992
Migrants build at home
*P.K. Asabere, ‘The price of urban land in a chiefdom: empirical evidence on a traditional African city, Kumasi’, Journal of Regional Science, November 1981, pp 329339; S.K. Asante, ‘Interests in land in the customary law of Ghana - a new appraisal’, Yale Law Journal, No 74, 1965, pp 848-885; Tipple, op tit, Ref 6.
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November
1992
lease on a plot of land is through a personal encounter, this is usually done by the representative who meets the land holding chief or family head on the migrant’s behalf to negotiate the ‘price’ of the lease and offer the relevant sacrifices to the ancestors of the land holding community.’ ‘Prices’ paid by migrants in the late 1980s in Accra and Kumasi were between f700 and fl 000. In recent years, an alternative method has been instigated by a few speculators who have bought leases on land and then sold them on; the land being either in an undeveloped state or with an unfinished building on it. Unfinished houses had been bought from speculators by 10% of the sample. One example of this was a migrant who had returned in 1988 over the Christmas holiday to search for a house to buy. He paid f9 800 (including fees) for a five roomed house, already roofed, in Domi near Accra. Although more expensive than starting from scratch, this process can be easier for a migrant, avoiding problems over clouded titles, and usually taking less time before the building is complete. Most migrants in London build in Accra, rather fewer choose Kumasi, and very few build in their village. Having obtained the land, building work usually starts quickly with the representative acting as caretaker for the project. Some progress reports are usually sent to the migrant, occasionally accompanied by a photograph. Finance is sent to Ghana in any of three ways. For example, a trader (usually a woman) visiting London calls on a Ghanaian to collect money for her trading. Migrants building at home will come to give her, typically, El 200 at a time. With this and money collected from others doing similar transfers, she buys goods in London which are carried back to Ghana or dispatched as airfreight (often through a Ghanaianowned freight agency). On arrival in Ghana, after delays for transport and customs clearance, the goods must be sold before the cedi equivalent is given to the caretaker for use in the building work. On the next trip, the trader may carry a photograph of the building to encourage the migrant to entrust some more money to her in this manner. Although this method seems fraught with problems, 73% of the sample use it and a surprising number of such transactions seem to occur with complete success. When problems do arise, however, the migrant may lose considerable sums of money. About 25% of the sample had experienced long delays and the consequent problem of inflation depleting the value of materials which their remittance could purchase. Other migrants (only 10% of the sample) prefer to make deposits with the Ghana Commercial Bank in London in favour of their account in Ghana. The caretaker is informed and he or she then withdraws the amount in cedis in Ghana and continues to finance the building. Alternatively, money can be paid into the London account of a Ghanaian who then pays the caretaker in cedis and has the benefit of the foreign exchange. One respondent pays f300 per month in this way. These deposits are consistently honoured and all receipts in Ghana are documented. The last two methods appear to be reasonably straightforward but there is a lingering mistrust of Ghanaian banks (memories of OdarteyWellington’s currency change in 1979 and the Citizen’s Vetting Committees of the early 1980s die slowly) which keeps the first in operation. Both the first and the third methods undoubtedly provide important finance for informal sector international trading. The representative in
Migrants build at home
Ghana, whose role was not reviewed in detail in this study, acts as the contractor on the building site; engaging building tradesmen, supervising their work, ordering materials, and dealing with the building regulation and planning authorities. By these means, Ghanaians in London finance and complete houses usually costing between f1.5 000 and f25 000 (Cl0 million to Cl6 million) over a five to seven year period. Most of the sample in the study intend to return to Ghana about a year after the house is complete, having saved some more money for furnishings or business equipment, and live in the house with their immediate family.
Characteristics
of the houses being built
Although most houses in Ghanaian cities are multi-household compounds, almost all houses built by the migrant sample are villas (ie, single household dwellings standing on their own plot). Typically, they have five or six rooms, with or without servants’ quarters, which may be occupied by relatives, especially aged parents or a brother or sister. Although migrants are aware that they have obligations to house some members of their extended families (21% were building with that specifically in mind), they prefer to have them in their single household villas (or in the ‘boys’ quarters’ with which 33% of the houses are being built) rather than building the 10 to 15 roomed compound houses which are considerably cheaper per room, but more expensive in total. Undoubtedly, the houses being built are in the higher echelons of the current Ghanaian housing stock, both in the space provided for one household and the standards of finish. However, when viewed from the migrants’ UK base, they are very cheap; even a very small house in London may cost three times as much as their spacious new villa in Accra. It is usual in Ghana to build a house in stages, separated by prolonged periods of idleness while resources are gathered. In many African countries, incremental construction is carried out horizontally, that is, one or two rooms are completed and added to until the house is complete. However, in Ghana incremental building is carried out vertically - all the foundations are laid, then all the walls built, the roof added, and then all services and finishings added to complete the whole house. Each stage appears to cost roughly 2&30% of the total. Migrants appear to follow this process, but the usually long idle periods between stages are sharply curtailed because money is more readily available for them than for developers earning Ghanaian salaries.
Recommendations
for increasing efficiency
The efficiency of the house building activities of expatriate Ghanaians could be increased by measures similar to those which would improve the whole housing supply. As land is the sine qua nolz of any building operation, its orderly supply is axiomatic. Currently many land transactions (especially in Accra) lead to clouded or disputed titles. The current land registration exercise should help mitigate this problem for indigenous and expatriate Ghanaian developers alike. The high cost of building materials relative to wages arises partly because of intermittent supplies. The indigenous capacity to produce materials must be increased. In addition, the local construction industry
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not capable of producing enough housing to satisfy demand. The encouragement of all builders, but especially small contractors, would assist in increasing the efficiency of housing supply. Developers who rely on local financial resources are severely limited in their ability to raise loans. However, the financial problems for the expatriates are more related to arrangements for repatriating foreign exchange and having it paid to the building contractors than to any increased efficiency of Ghana’s housing finance mechanisms. The Ghana Commercial Bank, Barclays Bank, and other financial institutions, which are present both in Ghana and London, should be able to offer services to assist the migrant worker to transfer money without loss. The ability to hold funds in sterling in Ghana would assist in defeating the inflationary trends in building costs caused by the fluctuation in the exchange rate. In addition, these financial houses could provide mediation between estate developers (a group just beginning to have impact on the housing supply in Ghana) and migrants seeking housing to buy. All this is predicated by a need to increase trust in the Ghanaian banking system. There is also a need for housing developers who can use their experience and economies of scale to supply housing in completed form. The current practice of each householder having to initiate and supervise a multitude of individual building operations is expensive in terms of both effort and risk. There seems to be a latent market for housing built for sale when complete or partly complete, as long as delivery is assured. In the past, payments of large deposits against houses which did not materialize have given such operations a bad reputation, but this could be restored by only a few successful schemes. The housing provided through expatriate efforts tends to be very low density and tends to benefit only the owners and members of their families. In terms of housing supply in Ghana, this type of house is expensive of resources, making only limited use of the imported capital for providing shelter. A greater efficiency in housing supply for all echelons of society could be achieved by introducing measures which encourage expatriates to build some rental rooms. This could be assisted by altering current rent control legislation to remove new housing from such controls with immediate effect. This should restore the economic rationale of building the compound houses, with a few rooms to rent, which have served urban Ghanaians for so long, and would show whether there is still a demand for that type of housing. More importantly, it could attract expatriate capital into restoring some of the ground lost by the private rental sector over the last 20 years.’
is
Conclusion
Tipple
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1992
It must be remembered that Ghanaian migrants occupy a low position in the employment hierarchy in Britain. Racial prejudice and their temporary status mitigate against their taking up positions commensurate with their education and experience. However, in spite of these disadvantages, they succeed where most resident Ghanaians do not; they build a house relatively quickly and in a style which they could not afford by working in Ghana. There are inefficiencies in the current system but these should not be regarded as immutable. Some reasonably straightforward interventions by banking institutions, and the type of supply-side measures required
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to increase efficiency in the housing market generally, could increase the effectiveness of Ghanaian migrants’ activity in housing supply. In addition, increasing the supply of housing for direct acquisition would be a great help to expatriate Ghanaians. The issues here are not simply about increasing housing supply; reducing the time taken for the migrant to achieve the target of a house could contribute greatly to speeding up the return of Ghana’s skilled workforce.
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