An Assessment of the Implementation of the Public Sector Home Ownership Scheme and Mortgage Lending in the Public Service in Ghana

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Date
2012-02-06
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Ghana’s housing industry is at a rudimentary stage. The Bank of Ghana (BoG) in 2007 suggested that the high property prices particularly in the urban centres such as Accra, Tema, Kumasi and Takoradi have been fuelled by a rapidly growing middle-class, as well as rapid and uncontrollable urbanization. This has turned the housing industry into one of the critical developmental issues facing policymakers. The government of Ghana in 2007 established the Public Sector Home Ownership Scheme which was aimed at addressing housing needs of public sector employees. Public Sector Home Ownership Scheme is implemented by the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning with explicit collaboration with HFC Bank (Ghana) serving as the disbursing bank. This research tried to juxtapose the continuous public sector housing challenges against the five years implementation of the government’s home owner scheme and sought answers for the question of whether public servants have taken advantage of the scheme, how accessible has the scheme been and the implementation challenges of the scheme. The study utilised 100 respondents from Customs Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS) and a respondent from HFC Bank. This research found that public servants in Ghana still find investing in home ownership as most important investment option however, low salaries, difficulty in land acquisition, high cost buildings and building materials as well as lack of confidence in the Ghanaian financial system have deprived a lot of public servants of owning a house in Ghana. The introduction of the government’s housing scheme has not improved the situation either. This is because most respondents did not know about the existence of such a scheme and also annual capital injection by the government has put limitation on how much HFC Bank can disburse as mortgage to willing and able public servants in Ghana. Following the limitations and outcome of this study, it was recommended that in order to enable public sector workers in general to acquire a home for themselves, there was the need for governments to improve on the general income levels of public sector workers in the country and to increase the capital dedicated to HFC Bank to disburse as mortgages.
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A Thesis submitted to the Institute of Distance Learning, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Commonwealth Executive Masters of Business Administration,
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