"Against a background of water scarcity, urban farmers in Accra lacking access to clean piped water to irrigate their crops, or unable to afford to use the water available, have been turning to wastewater as a solution. Accra’s expanding metropolitan population is putting greater demand on the water supply, leading authorities to declare it illegal to used piped water for irrigation without paying a surcharge. As a result, farmers and their forebears who in many cases have cultivated their plots for over 50 years have been filtering water out of the waste stream. Adopting this practice has enabled them to maintain their livelihoods and their own sustenance, and to contribute to the greater food security of local communities and by implication the city itself. With clean water difficult to come by, wastewater has a vital enabling role in urban agriculture practice, which itself is the building-block for a value chain of related employment activities in the informal sector"

Text by Matthew Wood-Hill in https://www.resourcepanel.org/file/323/download?token=oYh3a-SH

"Using wastewater for crop irrigation has numerous potentials. Primarily it can provide a fundamental service for the city by reusing liquid effluent discharged by local districts. Removing liquid effluent from the waste stream contributes towards closing resource loops by turning outputs of the system into useful inputs, which contain a greater nutrient value than treated piped water."

"In transforming wastewater into a resource, the overall amount of discharge (or net throughput) in the city’s drainage channels is decreased, reducing the amount of contaminated water that could potentially affect communities and individuals further downstream

Composted organic waste materials can be used to enrich the soil and further reduce the demand for fossil fuel-derived fertilisers

Broader benefits of urban agriculture include protecting food prices from increasing transport costs

Approximately 1,000 farmers are engaged in urban agriculture in Accra, but absolute numbers are unknown given the informal nature of the activity"

"Key obstacles to the institutionalisation and gradual scaling-up of the practice include the threats posed by buildings encroaching on farmland, and by the non-committal attitudes of governmental authorities and the traditional council."