The State Housing Company, under the new Managing Director, John Sheriff Bawah, is revolutionizing how homes are built in Ghana, with a renewed focus on the real needs of people and communities rather than the old boardroom assumptions.
The Managing Director says the company is now departing from the traditional housing development approach where the management will sit in their boardrooms and decide the type of houses to build on a land they have acquired or have been allocated.
This model, the company says, has been found to be out of touch with the reality or the housing needs of the people and the communities within which the housing developments are located.
John Sheriff Bawah unveiled this game-changing approach while addressing the media on the sidelines of the 2025 Ghana Green Summit, emphasizing that the company is now building with the end-user in mind. It is departing from the old methods of imposing pre-designed structures on communities without assessing their needs.
“In the past, you would have a situation where we go buy land or we get allocated land. We decide in our offices what we’re going to do; three-bedroom, four-bedroom, two-bedroom and then we go and start building, and then we start selling,” Mr. Bawa recounted.
In changing the narrative and the approach, he said: “we are changing the process around such that we’re looking at the communities in which we believe there’s a need or there’s a gap that needs to be filled between the low-end and the very high-end. We’re looking at exploring those communities and finding out what kind of homes people are looking for in those communities. What can people afford, most importantly? And that is what is going to drive the communities that we plan to the various area.”
The new people-centred strategy involves engaging directly with communities to understand what kind of homes people are actually looking for and, more importantly, what they can afford.
This, he said, will shape the design, planning, and construction of new housing units across the country.
This new approach, if implemented well, is expected to help address the persistent mismatch between the available housing stock and the financial capacity of ordinary Ghanaians, a key issue fueling the nation’s housing deficit.
