Statistics from the World Health Organization indicate that more than 55 percent of the world’s population lives in urban areas and this is set to rise to 68 percent by 2050. Almost 40 percent of urban dwellers have no access to safely managed sanitation services and many lack access to adequate drinking water.
Urbanisation continues at an ever-increasing rate across Low-income and Middle-income Countries, LMICs, such as Ghana, bringing with it changes to the disease burden and to the structural and intermediate determinants of health. Health inequalities in urban areas continue to grow, yet the focus on urban health has not increased at a commensurate rate.
It is against this backdrop that the Community-Led Responsive and Effective Urban Health Systems, CHORUS Ghana, is undertaking a six-year research project to look at challenges in the health system in two communities in Ghana. The CHORUS project which began in 2020 to 2026, is a multi-country Research Programme Consortium (RPC) focusing on building resilient urban health systems with funding from the United Kingdom’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
The project aims to undertake research that responds to the practical challenges of delivering equitable health services in urban areas of four partner countries namely Bangladesh, Ghana, Nepal and Nigeria. In Ghana the project is being carried out in two communities each in Ashaiman and Madina.
CHORUS is working in two cities in the partner countries together with policymakers, health professionals, and communities who are being engaged in the entire research process through problem identification, project design and implementation.
In an exclusive interview with GBC, a Researcher with CHORUS, Selase Odopey, said the programme aims to conduct research to understand, explore and evaluate interventions to build resilience and respond to the health challenges of increasing rapid and uncontrolled urbanisation across Low and Middle-Income Countries, LMICs.
She said urban health systems in LMICs have to respond to the double burden of communicable and non-communicable diseases, dominance of the non-government sector and the need to act across sectors on the wider determinants of health.
Madam Odopey noted that urbanization has come with a lot of challenges, especially in the health sector and urged the media to partner with CHORUS in order to report on urban health policy and systems issues.
