Aid and environment in Ghana

In this paper we discuss aid and the environment in Ghana. Our analysis indicates that expenditure by the government of Ghana has increased consistently since 2000, with seven sectors weakly linked to the environment taking about 78.9 per cent of all government expenditure. Also, the rate of increase of environmental expenditures has not kept pace with overall expenditure. External aid disbursement to environmental sectors has expanded and efforts are being made by the development partners to steer more grants instead of loans to environment-related activities. A 19-sector analysis of data from the AidData dataset from 1993 to 2009 indicates that the environmental sector ranks 11th in terms of project numbers, commitments and disbursements. A worrying phenomenon is the average disbursement rate of 27.8 per cent which is lower than the average rate of disbursements for all the 19 sectors (29 per cent), indicating the poor implementation of environmental projects. Also, cross-cutting issues such as climate change, biodiversity and desertification appear to be important only for the environmental sectors even though some of these, such as education, can be used to combat environmental degradation. Poor commitment of aid to the environmental sectors reflects the views of the development partners that the non-environmental sectors require more aid than the environmental sectors, even though donors recognize that non-environmental sectors have environmental impacts and are addressing them in their activities.