An exciting new community radio project is helping communities in Ghana to share valuable experiences of adaptation with other villages and towns, as well as local decision-makers. Researchers can also hear directly from these communities, giving an unprecedented picture of what women, men and children are already doing in their daily lives to adapt to a changing climate.

Google literally brought Accra - the capital of Ghana in West Africa - to a standstill with the public launch of its new product Google Trader. It is a free online classifieds service that allows Ghanaians to buy and sell products and services, as well as search for jobs or just about anything else. According to Google, Trader can be used by anyone in Ghana, but is expected to have the biggest uptake in major towns and cities across the country. 'Individuals can post short ads to buy and sell items and services, whilst businesses of any size can also use the site to reach more customers and increase their sales,' a statement read.

Well-implemented inclusive education should address the learning needs of all children vulnerable to being marginalised and excluded from education. Inclusive approaches often do not take account of children who once had access to education, but have since dropped out of school. This article looks at inclusion in Ghana from the point of view of dropouts. To date, policy on inclusive education in Ghana has focused mainly on girls and/or children with physical disabilities. Yet, drop-out rates can be up to 15 per cent at primary level, and 35 per cent at junior high school level.

Ghana's efforts to provide universal healthcare coverage for its nearly 24 million people won the hearts of researchers and medics gathered for the world's first-ever conference on health research. A modest West African nation usually classified as just one of the few developing countries closer to meeting the UN poverty goals, Ghana has been increasing its healthcare funding in line with the Abuja declaration on healthcare funding.

More than 250 health care providers, advocates, parliamentarians, women’s groups, community members and allied agencies from across Africa are meeting in Accra, to share best practices and lessons and initiate an agenda for action. The four-day conference focuses on unsafe abortion as a critical issue for reproductive health and rights in Africa, and for achieving the Millennium Development Goal 5, to reduce maternal mortality.

Ghana has lifted its ban on a business caught smuggling cocoa out of the country, after lobbying by Britain at the request of the company’s owner. As long as African countries are dependent on aid, they will find it hard to refuse the demands of potential donors, muses Cameron Duodu.

Chief Sumani Amidu of Kpachaa village in northern Ghana, has sat by as over half of his 100 villagers abandon him to seek new jobs and sources of food for their families. Three years ago the chief sold the village land for GH¢100 for a promise that never came. Now forced to farm himself to keep the children of the village alive, each morning on his 40-minute walk to the village’s last farm ing plot, he passes his old farmland now owned by a Norwegian biofuel company.

Kofi Akosah-Sarpong tackles excessive spending on funerals in Ghana. More attention should be spend on the living, he argues.

School is back in session for post-secondary students in Ghana, but Ramatu Sidic has been hitting the books for weeks. She's getting ready for the biggest test of her life - becoming a voice for Ghanaian youth and a global ambassador for peace. The Accra native recently took the crown at the 2010 Miss ECOWAS Ghana Peace Pageant.

This report on the electoral commission of Ghana is part of a broader project on 'Modelling Success: Governance and Institution-building in West Africa', being implemented by the Consortium for Development Partnerships (CDP). This report demonstrates that there are governance institutions in Africa that perform creditably well, referring to Ghana's electoral commission as an example.

Ghana ‘may be the political success story of West Africa’, but its socio-economic indices are ‘disastrous’, reports Dibussi Tande in this week’s round-up of the African blogosphere, which also features posts on ‘counterproductive’ US digital activism, election fever in Zanzibar and rethinking development goals in Madagascar.

Despite Nottingham University’s Professor Oliver Morrissey’s claim that Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) will accrue only 0.01 per cent of Ghana’s GDP to consumers, and imports from the European Union will go up by six per cent, he is emphatic that Ghana should “not fear the EPA.”

At least 17 people have drowned in northern Ghana in recent weeks after nearby Burkina Faso opened spillway gates to dams following heavy rains, the country's relief agency said on Friday. "As at yesterday, the death toll in the three northern regions stood at 17 and a number of farmlands have been destroyed," National Disaster Management Organisation (NADMO) spokesman Nicholas Mensah told AFP.

This research reveals that Low Income Countries such as Ghana remain under the influence of the Bank, especially regarding the management of their primary industries and natural resources and in relation to the design of sensitive policy areas such as fiscal policy and public sector reform. August 2010.

The French government through the French Development Agency is sponsoring the execution of development projects totalling 200 million Euros throughout the West African Nation of Ghana. The projects, which are mainly on the provision of potable water, electricity and sanitation, are currently being executed in the Brong Ahafo, Ashanti, Northern and Volta Regions.

The World Bank continues to influence developing country economic policies through placing conditions on loan agreements, despite concrete commitments by the Bank to significantly reduce the economic policy reforms required for the receipt of Bank funds in order to ensure an increase in recipient country policy space. What is new, however, are the more discreet channels of influence. This briefing finds that the conditions for the receipt of loans are increasingly being pushed in through the side door, for example by being stipulated outside of the loan agreement itself in side documents and letters, contravening responsible financing principles.

As Ghana gears up to develop its petroleum industry, Cameron Duodu strongly laments the absence of greater public sharing of information around the sector. Duodu stresses that Nigeria’s tumultuous history with petroleum ‘is a rehearsal of what could be waiting for us’ and that Ghana should pay particular attention to its neighbour’s experience if it is to avoid ‘so much cheating and thievery’.

Ghana has achieved 99.99 per cent reduction of the Guinea Worm disease since its inception two decades ago. From a high of 4,136 cases recorded during the peak of its outbreak in 2006, only eight cases have been reported in Ghana since the beginning of January 2010, the last case was recorded in May.

Unsafe abortions account for more than one in 10 women who die in pregnancy in Ghana, according to new research by the US-based Guttmacher Institute, with ignorance of the law and inadequate facilities partly to blame, say health authorities. Abortion was declared legal in 1985 for women who have been raped, in cases of incest, or where the pregnancy will cause the mother physical or mental harm, but decades on, only 4 percent of women are aware of the law, according to 2009 government health statistics (based on 2007 data).

United Nations development chief Helen Clark has lauded the progress made by Ghana towards women’s empowerment and gender equality, one of the eight social and economic objectives known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that world leaders have pledged to achieve by 2015. Miss Clark, who is Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), was impressed by the “tremendous amount of activity on the legal framework for women,” she said yesterday as she began her three-day visit to the country.