During July Kweku Koranteng represented the CST in Ghana when he was invited to present his on-going studies at the just ended, International Climate Change and Population Conference on Africa [CCPOP-Ghana], University of Ghana. The conference aims to harmonize ideas and lessons by scientists globally to benefit the African continent. The home of the conference is the Regional Institute for Population Studies (RIPS), a centre of excellence in demography, population health and environment.
Kweku spoke about exploring the potential of transdisciplinary research experiments to imagine future cities of Africa. Drawing on his research in informal settlements in Ghana and South Africa, his presentation argued for exploring the boundaries of sustainable service delivery models for resource poor households within the urban landscape, drawing on experimentations to influence social behavior toward a transformation and sustainable pathway.
He shared a case study that offers a sustainable enterprise approach which involves continual modifications and adjustments of the operational infrastructure, premised on enterprise discipline, cost-recovery and financial sustainability principles. A second model shared is a community-driven approach with a highly socially configured infrastructure, premised on community mobilization, savings groups, partnerships, affiliations, and coalitions. This second model places less emphasis on operational systems and enterprise capacity.
The key highlights of the presentation explored the potential for a blended financing model premised on non-profit ‘public-private-partnerships’ in the delivery of interim services, and balancing financial sustainability with maximizing broader socio-economic co-benefits economic such as jobs, wealth creation and skills development.
These experiments strive to serve as seeds of social transformation to sustainability with lessons from resource poor contexts on how to avoid “The Future We Do Not Want” – the conference theme for the CCPOP -Ghana 2018.