Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project — Flood Control and Sewage Treatment, at a Costly Human Toll

Korle Lagoon sits at the mouth of the Odaw River in central Accra, and by the 1990s had become one of the most polluted water bodies in the world, choked with industrial effluent and solid waste that also blocked the city's main flood-drainage outlet to the sea.

The Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project (KLERP), approved in 1995 and executed by Ghana's Ministry of Works and Housing with the Accra Metropolitan Assembly, dredged the lagoon and improved the Odaw drainage channel, laid roughly 3,100 metres of new drains, and built sewage-treatment capacity of about 1,300 cubic metres per day. Total project cost reached US$37.74 million, financed by the OPEC Fund for International Development (US$6 million), the Kuwait Fund for Arab Development, the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, and the Government of Ghana.

The project's flood-control rationale was used repeatedly to justify demolitions in Old Fadama, the adjoining informal settlement of an estimated 55,000–200,000 residents. Households were evicted in 1993 (about 400), 2002, 2012, and again in June 2015 when up to 2,000 households were removed with little or no notice and no resettlement plan. Amnesty International Ghana publicly condemned the evictions, with its director stating that "development should never come at the cost of human rights."

KLERP therefore illustrates a real but double-edged case: it delivered measurable engineering capacity for flood and wastewater management, but the accompanying displacement — carried out without adequate compensation, consultation or resettlement — is a documented governance failure that any replication should explicitly design against.

Read the full analysis: https://opecfund.org/where-we-work/list/korle-lagoon-ecological-restoration-project