Accra’s Flood Bill Is a Plastics Problem — and a Building-Materials Opportunity

Infrastructure

ACCRA, GHANA  |  5 AUGUST 2026  |  PROPERTY NEWS AFRICA

On 29 June, roughly 140 millimetres of rain fell on Accra in a single day. President John Dramani Mahama, citing preliminary data, called it the highest in several years and noted that the heaviest single-day rainfall of the previous year had been about 56 millimetres — the June deluge was close to triple it. At least 12 people died, according to the Ghana National Fire Service, with relief agencies subsequently putting the toll at 13. More than 470 people were rescued, as reported by Al Jazeera and wire services.

Initial relief assessments put the human cost far higher than the death toll suggests: roughly 7,761 households affected and close to 38,800 people displaced across Accra, Tema and Kasoa, with Alajo, Mallam, Achimota, Weija, Kaneshie and the area around the Kwame Nkrumah Interchange among the worst hit. President Mahama ordered the release of 300 million cedis — around US$27–29 million — in contingency funds for relief and flood mitigation, and deployed the armed forces and police alongside the National Disaster Management Organisation.

Accra has flooded in almost every year since 1935. What has changed is the diagnosis. Increasingly, Ghanaian institutions describe the capital’s flood exposure less as a rainfall problem than as a solid-waste problem — specifically, plastic clogging the drains. Days after the flood, the Ghana Circular Economy Centre urged the government to prioritise investment in waste collection. It lands in the same season as a broader policy reset, with Ghana overhauling its national urban policy and housing finance framework. For property owners, developers and lenders with Greater Accra exposure, that reframing has direct consequences — and it has quietly opened a small building-materials market alongside it.

A drainage liability, not a weather event

The scale of what is at stake is economic as much as humanitarian. The World Bank notes that Greater Accra accounts for more than 40 per cent of Ghana’s non-oil GDP, and that urban flooding there has grown more frequent and more intense — driven by rapid development on flood-risk land, inadequate and unmaintained drainage, and solid waste accumulating along waterways.

The benchmark event remains 3 June 2015, when floodwater and a fuel-station fire at Kwame Nkrumah Circle killed more than 150 people in a single night. The World Bank’s own assessment of that disaster records 53,000 people affected, damage and losses of about US$55 million across housing, transport, water and sanitation, and an estimated US$105 million reconstruction bill.

After this year’s flood, the presidency and a Post-Flood Mitigation Committee declared 10 and 11 July national general cleaning days, with security personnel and local assemblies desilting choked gutters across the capital. The intervention was widely characterised in the Ghanaian press as reactive — a clean-up rather than a system fix.

The distinction matters commercially. Rainfall is a hazard no developer can price away. Drainage capacity, by contrast, is an infrastructure attribute attached to a specific site — and one that is degrading in identifiable corridors.

The numbers do not agree — and investors should know that

Ghana’s plastic waste data is contested, and Property News Africa flags this rather than picking a convenient figure. The Ghana Circular Economy Centre — a national initiative led by the Ministry of Environment, Science, Technology and Innovation with the United Nations Industrial Development Organization — works from an estimate of 1.1 million metric tonnes generated annually. Its project lead, Joseph Yeboah, told the Ghana News Agency that the country currently collects around 17 per cent of that volume and recycles roughly 5 per cent.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Plastic Action Partnership puts the figure considerably lower, at about 840,000 tonnes a year, with roughly 9.5 per cent collected for recycling. A widely circulated claim that Accra alone discards 300 tonnes of plastic daily could not be traced to a primary source during our checks, and we do not rely on it here.

What the sources agree on is the shape of the problem: the overwhelming majority of Ghana’s plastic is never collected for recycling, and by the government’s own reckoning mishandled plastic costs the country in the order of US$100 million a year. Analysts cited in the same reporting project that plastic leakage into Ghana’s water bodies could nearly triple between 2020 and 2040 on current trends.

The materials response: giving waste a price

The structural obstacle is economic. As Heather Troutman of the Ghana National Plastic Action Partnership has put it in interviews, recycling plastic in Ghana is expensive, technical and complicated, while burning it is easy. Until collected plastic is worth more than the cost of collecting it, it will keep going into the drain or the bonfire.

That is the gap a small sand-polymer materials industry is trying to fill. The best-known operator is Nelplast Eco Ghana, founded by Nelson Boateng and operating from Ashaiman in Greater Accra since September 2018. Its process shreds, washes and dries collected plastic, melts it through a multi-zone extruder, blends it with sand and hydraulically presses the paste into pavers and interlocking blocks — with no cement or bitumen. Feedstock is bought from informal waste pickers, a network the company says is majority women.

A necessary caveat. Nelplast’s published product claims vary substantially across nine years of coverage. Reported mix ratios range from 60 per cent plastic to 40 per cent sand, to 70 per cent sand to 30 per cent plastic, to the reverse. Strength claims range from “stronger than ordinary pavement blocks” to multiples of grade-A concrete. Pricing widely quoted at around US$1 per block against roughly US$1.50 for concrete dates to approximately 2018. These are company claims and historical figures — not independently verified performance data, and buyers should demand current, third-party test certification before specifying the product at scale.

Scale is the other constraint. Reported output has historically been measured in the low hundreds of blocks per day against ambitions to process low thousands of tonnes a year — meaningful for a demonstration project, marginal against a waste stream measured in hundreds of thousands of tonnes.

Snapshot

Where sources conflict, both figures are shown. Product performance and pricing claims by private manufacturers are company statements and have not been independently verified.

Where the capital actually is — and why it is moving slowly

The serious money in Accra’s flood response is not in pavers. It is in the World Bank-financed Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project (GARID), approved in May 2019 with US$200 million and topped up with a further US$150 million in additional financing in 2023 — a US$350 million programme targeting more than 2.5 million residents of the Odaw River Basin and aiming to protect over 138,000 households.

Delivery is the problem. Speaking on Joy FM the day after the flood, GARID project coordinator Ohene Sarfoh disclosed that roughly US$150 million had been committed to date — covering contracted works and consultation spending across 17 assemblies in Greater Accra. He also confirmed that US$65 million of the original envelope had been redirected to Ghana’s COVID-19 response, reducing the money available for drainage and flood works to about US$285 million. A World Bank implementation support mission recorded cumulative disbursement of US$127.1 million, or 36.3 per cent of the credit, and noted that contractor payments were lagging behind physical progress. The closing date has already been pushed to 31 December 2027.

For anyone underwriting Greater Accra property, that schedule is the variable worth tracking — more so than any single materials innovation. Drainage capacity in the Odaw basin is being rebuilt on a public timetable that has slipped once, lost US$65 million to a competing emergency, and is disbursing at roughly a third of its credit seven years after approval.

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