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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the roles of landlords in tenant management during COVID-19 pandemic season among informal settlement neighbourhoods in urban Ghana.

This study used a mixed methods research approach and foregrounds the discussions of the results with the social roles theory. Using the quota sampling procedure, this study used 467 semi-structured interviews of tenants from five old informal settlement neighbourhoods in urban Ghana. This study adopted the thematic analytical technique in the results section.

This study uncovered that landlords perform a gate-keeping social relationship role in ensuring tenant safety during the COVID-19 pandemic season through the provision of security, care and support, discipline, hard work, morale building to accountability. However, this study found that most landlords do not provide tenancy agreements to tenants which strained some social relationships in tenant management.

The application of social roles theory in this study provides a cutting-edge approach to the study of welfare of tenants living in informal settlement housing units during periods of pandemic. This study practically provides a participatory approach to analysing and discussing the roles of landlords in tenant management and proffering solutions for formalisation of these roles in housing policies in Ghana.

This paper aims to examine landlords’ health support systems to tenants to control COVID-19 in selected informal settlement rental housing (ISRH) in Ghana, dwelling on landlords’ views.

The paper used the concurrent imbedded mixed-methods approach and grounded the findings in the socio-ecological theory. The authors collected both qualitative and quantitative data from 242 landlords in 13 informal settlements across Ghana using quotas. The authors undertook semi-structured face-to-face and telephone interviews. The authors conducted content and thematic qualitative data analysis and used simple descriptive statistical data analysis.

The paper discovered that tenants had limited knowledge on the transmission of the pandemic, forcing landlords to regulate their building services usage, ventilation and thermal control, entertainment, common areas and rent advancement for tenants to control the pandemic. Also, tenants found it difficult to comply with the rules on ventilation for fear of criminal attacks, while high social connection and interaction among renters and inadequate enforcement caused the non-adherence by renters to social gathering. Again, landlords had difficulty in contract-tracing visitors suspected to be infected with the virus.

The use of concurrent and imbedded mixed methods to investigate landlords’ viewpoints on their support in health needs of their tenants to regulate COVID-19. The prescriptions from the study provide practical applications to formulate a mix of housing and health policies to formalize the support of landlords to their tenants in ISRH in Ghana.