Evaluating access to opportunities: The three A’s inclusive framework

Affordability

• A large portion of the population in Ghanaian cities cannot afford public transport. For those in the bottom 20 percent, two daily trips amount to 60 percent of daily household income in Accra and 111 percent in Kumasi. • The significant unaffordability affecting a large number of households in Accra, Kumasi, and

Tamale shapes people’s choices of mode of transport and limits their mobility options to walking. • Women and people with disabilities pay on average more to travel using public transport. The reasons are that they must pay extra for traveling with goods or equipment, must take more shorter trips (women), and must rely on more expensive modes for their accessibility (people with disabilities).

Acceptability

• Sexual harassment, health safety in public transport, road safety, and social norms play an important role in the decision to use public transport, especially for vulnerable groups— women, people with disabilities, and children.

COVID-19 significantly influences the acceptability of public transport. People avoid using public transport to reach jobs and services because they fear transmission of the virus, especially in informal transport.

EVALUATING ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITIES: THE THREE A’S INCLUSIVE FRAMEWORK

For competitive, inclusive growth in Ghanaian cities, residents must have access to jobs and social services. Access to higher levels of employment opportunities in a city, matching demand for and supply of jobs, increases the chances that individuals and organizations can take advantage of agglomeration economies. It also increases the labor market pool so that employers can find the right candidate for a job. When a high proportion of the population receives access to many employment opportunities, the economic performance of urban regions benefits.

Accessibility is not equally distributed between different groups, which is an important element of social exclusion (World Bank 2002). Although high-income groups tend to have more job opportunities because they own private vehicles to transport them to access such opportunities, people in low-income groups must depend on public transport or nonmotorized modes to access jobs and social services. Spatial exclusion among low-income groups limits access because it is affected by the ability to afford a fare. Consideration of the equity of disadvantaged groups is important in the design of inclusive urban transport systems.

Analysis of the social value of a city’s transport system from the perspective of accessibility allows integration of an inclusive perspective in the planning. A vast literature on accessibility has emerged to complement the more traditional transport planning methodologies that focused on network efficiency. In it, the scope has widened to accessibility, measuring the ability to reach opportunities and changing the perspective of analyses from the mere optimization of generalized cost to perspectives on a trip’s purpose such as access to jobs, social services, and its beneficiaries.

This study developed an inclusive framework to evaluate access to jobs in Ghanaian cities. The framework uses the concept of the three A’s of access— accessibility that is spatial and temporal, affordability, and acceptability1—to