Ghana is located in
West Africa between Côte d'Ivoire, Togo and Burkina Faso and it borders the Gulf of
Guinea. Ghana covers an area of 238,537 square kilometres and has an estimated
population of over 18.8 million people, of which 70% live in rural areas. A former
British colony of the Gold Coast, the country gained its independence in 1957, but since
that time Ghana has spent more than half of its years of independence under military rule.
Ghana is well-endowed with natural resources such as good agricultural land, forests (in
the south-west), and mineral deposits of gold, diamonds, manganese and bauxite. Gold,
timber and cocoa are the major sources of foreign exchange. With an annual production of
about 45 tons of gold, Ghana has become the second largest gold producer in Africa, after
South Africa. The domestic economy continues to revolve around subsistence agriculture,
which accounts for 41% of GDP and employs 60% of the workforce, mainly small landholders.
In 1983, Ghana
embarked in an economy recovery programme, backed by the IMF and the World Bank. Despite
strong opposition from the public in response to the hardships caused by the economic
reform measures, the economy started to grow significantly in the early 1990s, with
an average growth of 4% per year. Despite Ghana's good record of debt servicing, its
inflationary deficit financing, depreciation of the Cedi, and public discontent with
the austerity measures remain challenges. Recently the government has been privatising
nearly 200 state corporations which is costing many thousands of jobs but
improving the state's fiscal position.
Ghana's telephone
network has a capacity of over 158,600 lines and a telephone density of 0.81 lines per
hundred population. The penetration of telephone lines is highly biased toward the urban
areas, with the capital city Accra accounting for over 70% of the total lines. Ghana
deregulated the telecommunications sector in 1994, launching the Accelerated Development
Programme 1994-2000 in order to increase the density of telephone services in the country,
to allow private participation in some sectors of the industry, and to permit other
network operators to have the same rights and privileges as Ghana Telecommunications,
including the right to install nation-wide networks.
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