Towards a sustainable coastal tourism development in Ghana.

Abstract

Beaches are great resources for coastal tourism development. They attract a large number of domestic and international tourists. This study focuses on ensuring clean beaches in Ghana for robust and sustainable coastal tourism development. The study specifically addressed the following objectives: policies to ensure clean beach, stakeholders’ participation, promotional activities and sanitation challenges facing beaches in Ghana. The study employed both quantitative and qualitative approaches. This involved administering semi-structured questionnaires to a total of 150 residents from the study community through convenience sampling. Using purposive sampling, key stakeholders from the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture, Environmental Protection Agency, Accra Metropolitan Assembly and Ministry of Sanitation were interviewed. Also, through purposive sampling, management from Labadi Beach Resort, La Pleasure Beach Resort, Coco Beach, Next Door Beach, Laboma Beach, Bojo Beach, and La Palm Royal Beach were interviewed towards addressing the study objectives. The quantitative data were analysed using descriptive and inferential statistics with the aid of IBM SPSS Version 20.0. The data from the interviews were subjected to thematic explication. The findings revealed that there are some policy measures and practices in place to clean beaches, especially in Accra. However, factors such as limited local participation in beach cleaning, a poor image in some of the sites due to poor sanitation, poor facilities, ineffective coordination among stakeholders remain to be addressed towards achieving sustainable coastal tourism in Ghana.

Keywords

• Coastal tourism
• policies
• sanitation
• stakeholders
• Accra
• Ghana