The purpose of this study was to assess how Ghana’s educational system is promoting educational equity. In terms of data collection, the study relied on secondary sources whilst Scott’s goals of educational equity served as the theoretical basis for data analysis. The results show marked disparities in Ghana’s educational system that manifest in terms of gender, geographic location, and income levels. In the area of gender, the results show that gender parity worsens as the educational level increases. This fuels the variations in literacy rates between the male and female population in Ghana. In terms of geographic location, a performance gap was observed between urban and rural Ghana, which could be explained by the uneven distribution of educational facilities and resources. It was further observed that the current educational system is skewed more towards formal academic development to the neglect of vocational and technical training, especially in the informal sector. To address this form of educational inequity, policies should be put in place to expand Ghana’s educational system to areas such as sports development, the creative arts, vocational, and technical education.

The complex and multidimensional effect of climate change, coupled with low socioeconomic development, in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) makes the region vulnerable to the changing climate and threatens its inhabitants’ survival, livelihood, and health. Subnational actions have been widely acclaimed as effective in combatting climate change. Local governments in SSA have been developing and implementing climate action plans to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In this article, we qualitatively assessed climate change mitigation technical pathways at the city level by studying four major African megacities’ climate plans and actions. The cities studied are Accra, Ghana; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Lagos, Nigeria; and Nairobi, Kenya. This study provides insight into the novel and innovative policy design and instrumentation options to sustainably address climate change mitigation in SSA. With the past literature focusing on climate adaptation for the Global South, this study shows leading context-specific efforts in climate change mitigation that simultaneously address local sustainable development needs. Our assessment identified the prioritized technical pathways for climate change mitigation in the selected cities, as well as innovative techniques and areas for improvement. Given that it also identifies emerging best practices, this study’s findings can be helpful to local governments and practitioners pursuing local deep decarbonization and international organizations supporting these programs.

Scenario planning is a valuable tool for dealing with uncertainty, but little is known about its consideration of social equity. We investigated if and how studies of scenario planning in the peer-reviewed literature address issues of social equity. After reviewing 157 peer-reviewed articles on scenario planning, we find that social equity is either ignored or underemphasized in scenario processes. Integrating social equity principles into the scenario planning method promises to help planners prepare for different social equity outcomes in the future. We suggest ways to incorporate social equity principles, such as recognition, representation, and redistribution, into the scenario planning method.