Rural Industrial Complex, Awaham Nkwanta

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Date
1986-09-10
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Development strategies the world over have for long laid undue emphasis on the use of high level technology in industry, most often inappropriate to existing economic, social and physical situations. Diligent industrial developments often thrive in urban areas at the expense and strangulation of rural communities, in so far as they largely incite and perpetuate a rural-urban migration of the youth who are by all means ‘the blood of rural settlements’. Urbanisation has not only led to intractable problems in banditry, vandalism and wanton unemployment, but has largely exposed men to ludicrously complicated urban and city management systems. These problems have often disposed several governments to awkward and desperate situations, and motivated them towards evolving measures to either check, or reverse wanton migration to cities from the countryside. Incontestably however, all such attempts are deemed to exquisite failure unless rural areas are given their fair share of the national cake by way of physical development in the first instance. The Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) government of Ghana has drawn up an Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) which emphasises the consolidation of our national agricultural base; a laudable idea which together with its policy of decentralization of the national administrative machinery promises to constitute a suitable platform for take-off to regional development. In the very short term therefore, rural industrial concerns that will largely employ agricultural products as basic input deserve emphasis. Such rural industrial concerns may not only discourage rural-urban migration, but sliinore-pT-ticu1arly become growth poles thereby presenting formidable joints for both backward and forward industrial linkages for the total development of Ghana. Fortunately, a few conscientious Ghanaian Industrialists, who certainly deserve all encouragement and support from central government as well as the blessings and prayers of the rural poor, have decided to take advantage of the government rural industrialisation policy. One of such pragmatic nationalist’s is Mr. J.K. Kwaw of Gokab Limited, who has acquired a tract of land of about 11,34 hectares ( 28 acres) at Awaham Nkwanta, between Asaniankese and Osenase, in the Eastern Region of Ghana for a rural industrial complex. There are cogent signs that Ghanaians may soon be ushered into a true ‘rural industrial revolution’, and era that will rely on the use of appropriate technology and locally available input in rural industrial concerns. It is one of the objectives of this thesis to create an architectural entity for the proposed Rural Industrial Complex at Awaham Nkwanta, in order to demonstrate physically the feasibility of the concept of rural industrialization.
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A thesis presented in the Faculty of Architecture, University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Post-Graduate Diploma in Architecture,1986.
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