Floods are common events that confront many cities in the developing world. Ghana, a developing country, is persistently challenged with flood events, especially in its major cities. In informal Accra, for instance, despite the severity of flood effects and its associated threats, poor informal residents continue to stay. As a result, these poor urban dwellers have developed local coping strategies made up of mitigation and reactive measures to manage and adapt to flood hazards through their preceding experiences. In this article, we have embraced the convergent parallel mixed method of case study design to echo and explore (1) the major effects of preceding floods on informal households, (2) the local informal coping strategies adopted by households to mitigate and respond to flooding and its effects in the future and (3) the determinants of the coping strategies of households that underpin their continual stay in spite of flood risks in Alajo, an urbanised suburb in Accra metropolis noted as one of the slum communities that easily flood in Ghana. Our analysis has used a mix of qualitative and quantitative data collected from both secondary and primary sources as well as a conceptualised model known as disaster resilience of place. The key findings (Alajo has low degree of adaptive resilience to major floods which might occur in the future because of the lack of social learning in the coping strategies developed through several years of lessons learnt from perennial floods) and proposals (local coordination in implementing the coping strategies to flooding, state support of the local strategies and adoption of rainwater harvesting) also make contributions to managing urban floods in informal settlements in the developing world.

The water industry in Ghana has recently experienced a massive proprietary change, from its public monotonic system to a public–private system mixed with localized private participation options. Although these changes have contributed to local and national revenue generation, the consumption bracket continually de-equalizes due to inaccessibility and unavailability patterns of water provision. This has made water a scarce commodity for some, whilst others are over-supplied and over-satisfied. In this research, the manifestation of private sector participation in Ghana's urban water sector in the midst of the public water system and its implications on water supply have been investigated using both secondary and primary data. The study reveals significant deficiencies in urban water needs and wider inequality outcomes amongst urbanites despite government's neo-liberal interventions in the water sector. The major proposals include the need for re-alignment of private sector engagements characterized by proper state's regulatory control mechanisms and encouragement of community/neighborhood joint water supply systems to complement state and private interventions in order to reverse the access and consumption deficiencies in the urban water sector.

The disparity in land and food access in Ghana often overlooks the possibility of an underlying gender disparity. This paper explores and interrogates the disparity between land and food access with respect to gender and the evolution of this relationship over the years as a result of the settlement expansion and urban growth within the Adenta Municipality in Ghana. Adopting a mixed pairwise approach of combining spatial analytical tools, vulnerability indexing and resilient indicators, the paper examines the levels and rates of land accessibilities within the stream of modern cities. It assesses the land market system complexities within developing economies and attempts to address the potential threats of gender-land access gaps. The paper finally assigns weights of ranks to model the phenomenon and recommends trends that can facilitate predictions and early cautionary systems for effective urban land governance in Ghana. The paper concludes that though it is noticed that women engage in power structures on a daily basis, this both benefits and burdens them, depending on their socio-cultural status and other factors in terms of access to land and food.