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The study investigates the influence of financial transparency on citizens' trust and revenue paying behaviour of citizens of local governments in sub-Saharan Africa. It relies on the theories of stewardship and public choice in explaining the relationship between financial transparency, trust and willingness to pay.

The study applied a Partial Least Square Structural Equation Model (PLS-SEM) to survey data of 404 respondents selected from four Metropolitan and Municipal Assemblies of Ghana to test the hypotheses of the study.

It establishes the fact that financial transparency positively influences trust of citizens in local government and their willingness to pay taxes and levies. The study also found that both financial transparency and trust are low in the local governments of Ghana.

The study emphasises the importance of financial transparency in improving trust and willingness to pay. Thus, local governments are encouraged to seek innovative ways to enhance the quality and access to financial information by the citizens.

While prior studies focus on the measurement and determinant of financial transparency, this study links financial transparency to revenue mobilisation in the local government of sub-Saharan Africa.

Population growth and urbanization pose several threats to terrestrial ecosystems, especially in forest ecological zones worldwide. This study examines the drivers of average willingness to pay (WTP) to restore urban forests in a developing country.

It utilizes survey data of households and employs a robust Heckman two-step estimator with bootstrapping to address the research objective.

The study underscores the role of income, gender, education and perception of the health benefits of forests as the underlying determinants of restoration bids by respondents. These drivers have a positive and statistically significant effect on forest restoration. Education and gender appear to be the most effective by magnitude, followed by the perception of health benefits, then income. Attention is therefore drawn to relevant economic, sociocultural and psychological factors towards the goal of forestry to improve well-being in urban centres.

This paper seeks to add methodological insights to the literature on reforestation and land use changes in the Accra metropolitan area and the local population’s WTP for reforestation in this area. In principle, this is a case study informing about the values people hold for forests in Ghana and Africa, where a knowledge gap exists with respect to their socio-economic valuation.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2022-0618

Kente weaving business is increasingly seen as a promising investment and enhances sustainable livelihood in Ghana. However, it has not received the needed attention from scholars and government in recent times. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors influencing the kente weaving industry with the aim of evolving effective promotional strategies to encourage the weaving and use of kente in Ghana.

Using a quantitative inquiry approach, primary data were collected from 70 respondents in Bonwire within the Ejisu-Juabeng Municipal Assembly in Ghana. The mean ranking technique, the Mann–Whitney U test and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) were the statistical tools that aided the data analysis.

The EFA revealed that the underlying threats affecting the weaving of kente were limited demand and supply of kente, data and motivation management system, lack of export promotion and obsolete production techniques. Furthermore, this study revealed that the kente weaving industry can be promoted through kente festivals and the efforts of the association of weavers and government.

The findings provide a valuable reference for the government, stakeholders and textile industrialists to institute a mechanism for evaluating performance periodically to identify threats associated with the textile industry at large.

This study aims to build on the emerging understanding that small enterprise growth results from a confluence of different factors. This study seeks to provide additional insights into the nature of these factors and how they influence the growth process of small businesses in rural communities in Ghana.

This study undertook a qualitative investigation of 28 small enterprises in three Ghanaian rural districts. Interviews were conducted with owners of the businesses.

The results indicate that growth-enabling conditions such as entrepreneurial ambition, market demand and infrastructure combine with finance to define small enterprise growth trajectories in rural Ghana. However, finance may not always be the major factor driving the growth.

Most past studies about small enterprise growth in Africa have concentrated on firms in urban communities and see finance gap as the most serious constraint to growth. This study joins the few recent studies about rural enterprise growth in Ghana, showing that the growth of these businesses depends on an interplay of a variety of factors.

In Ghana, legal and illegal artisanal small-scale mining (ASM) activities have attracted the attention of the general populace and academia with varied opinions. This study examined how adopting the coping strategies for ASM operations affected the welfare of farm households.

Primary data were solicited from respondents using a semi-structured questionnaire. This paper used the endogenous treatment effect model to quantitatively estimate whether or not farmers who adopt coping strategies for activities of ASM have improved or deteriorated welfare.

The results revealed that households adopted coping strategies such as diversification, social networking, land reclamation, borrowing, dependence on the market for food and resettlement in other communities. The endogenous treatment effect model results show that households that adopted land reclamation and social networking had improved welfare regarding consumption expenditure and food security compared to non-adopters. Conversely, diversification was associated with lower consumption expenditures and high food insecurity among adopters.

This paper recommends that farm households in mining communities form cooperatives and farmer-based organizations to ensure improved access to joint resources for enhanced capacity to cope with ASM-induced shocks. There is a need for government and civil society organizations to encourage and support land reclamation measures.

This paper covers a broader perspective and deploys more than one welfare proxy, which has not been considered before in previous studies.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the social sustainability strategies of multinational mining companies in addressing risks in areas of exploratory intensity and contributing to social capital in local communities.

This study is situated within an interpretivist paradigm and uses a qualitative research methodology, drawing on data from semi-structured interviews with multinational mining companies operating in Ghana and key stakeholder groups.

The results of this study show that multinational mining companies use strategies broadly categorised as social responsibility, social compliance, local content and relationship proximity to address challenges embedded in the extractive process.

By examining the strategies in addressing risks to sustainable social development in mining communities, this study contributes to fill the social sustainability gaps in mining research and adds to relevant literature.

This paper aims to investigate the prevalence of corruption in Ghana to understand how and why it has turned public procurement into a mere money-making scheme instead of a means to provide needed public goods and services.

The study focuses on Ghana as a case study and mobilizes the monetization of politics lenses. Data are collected via interviews with key officials across the procurement sector (including the government, donors and civil society), documents, documentaries and news articles.

The findings suggest that the increasing costs of elections and political financing coupled with the costs of vote-buying, which has become informally institutionalized, intensify corruption practices and, consequently, turns public procurement into a mere source of cash for political ends. Political appointments and legalized loopholes facilitate this by helping to nullify the safeguard accounting and other control institutions are designed to provide. Likewise, enduring poverty and rising inequality “force” citizens into a vote-buying culture which distorts democratic premises that may drive out unscrupulous politicians; thus, perpetuating capture schemes. Civil society's efforts to remedy these have had little success, and corruption and inequality remain rife.

The main practical implication of the study lies in the need for a gradual demonetization of elections, and the consideration of the fundamental function of public procurement as a policy instrument embedded in economic, social, cultural and environmental plans. Additionally, given the connectedness of the various corruption issues raised, a comprehensive system-based approach in dealing with them would be more effective than a piecemeal approach targeting each issue/problem in isolation.

While extant literature has examined the issue of endemic corruption in developing countries using state capture, few have attempted to explain why it remains enduring, particularly in public procurement. This study, therefore, contributes to the literature on corruption and state capture theoretically and empirically by drawing on monetization of politics from political science to explain why corruption and state capture endure in certain contexts (with Ghana as an illustrative example) which reduce public procurement to a cash-milking scheme.

The effective and efficient implementation of daily work activities necessitates tacit knowledge sharing, boosting firm productivity. However, the link between tacit knowledge sharing within a company and its effects on organizational performance is unclear, so the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of sharing tacit knowledge on the success of a company.

Construction managers and senior managers were the study’s target participants. The correlation matrix was used to assess the significant correlation between study frameworks and the statistical approach of multiple regression was also used to test the hypotheses using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) v.26.

The findings suggest that companies will be more willing and capable of making decisions based on experience when knowledge systems are used successfully. Furthermore, new organizational knowledge and particular evaluation procedures, such as anxiety and conflict resolution preparation, personal relationship and training improvement, mediation and task clarity, are explained, which can aid in success.

The study contributes to construction companies’ perception of knowledge sharing and recommends organizations to build capacity to encourage, improve engagement and review to maintain the dissemination of knowledge.

While the causes and effects of begging are well known, solutions on how to eradicate begging are still elusive in many parts of the developing world. The purpose of this study is to examine the different ways through which community leaders at the local level can contribute to the eradication of begging in one of Ghana’s most densely populated suburbs in the city of Accra.

This study was undertaken using the qualitative approach, and primary data was collected through interviews, participants observation and focus group discussions with beggars, community leaders and officials of non-governmental organisations at Nima, a suburb of Accra.

Begging in the suburb of Nima is increasingly becoming a business venture. It is no more an activity that is the preserve of only the weak, the poor, the elderly, the physically challenged, the needy and the marginalised in society. This paper argues that the eradication of begging requires multiple approaches and that community-based leaders must play a central role. This paper identified the provision of alternative sources of livelihood, the naming, shaming and condemnation of unjustified begging in the community, strict boarder control, returning foreign beggars to their home countries, the formulation and enforcement of community anti-begging by-laws and regular sensitisation programs on begging as crucial in reducing or eliminating begging.

While focusing on one Muslim-dominated suburb in Accra ensures a detailed discussion of strategies of eliminating begging from a cultural and religious perspective, the findings of this study may not be applicable to non-Islamic settings and communities where cultural or religious leadership structures do not exist.

This study has demonstrated that the eradication of begging in society cannot have one-size-fit all solution. This paper shows that in societies where cultural and religious leadership structures exist, they must play important roles in the design and implementation of strategies that seek to reduce or eliminate religious begging in society. This implies that formal government agencies and their associated laws alone will not be enough to eradicate or reduce begging under such contexts.

Measures to eradicate begging have often ignored the role of community leaders. This paper contributes to our understanding on this by specifically examining the phenomenon of begging at the micro level and exploring the different ways community leaders can contribute to the eradication of begging in society.