U. S. Pres­i­dent Barack Obama is about to visit the African coun­try of Ghana. This will be the third con­sec­u­tive U. S. Pres­i­dent to visit the coun­try. The U. S. con­tin­ues to pay the vis­its because of the great strides the coun­try has made in improv­ing it’s econ­omy and shrink­ing poverty.

As a pre­view to the visit, this story in the Canada’s Globe and Mail explains some of the improve­ments in the coun­try. Writer Geof­frey York also includes some things that Ghana still needs to work on.

Ghana has become the dar­ling of the West­ern donor com­mu­nity. With its bold pro­grams in health and edu­ca­tion, its vibrant democ­racy, its boom­ing econ­omy and its polit­i­cal sta­bil­ity, Ghana is widely touted as a model for other African coun­tries.

Since 2003, when the new edu­ca­tion pol­icy was intro­duced, the num­ber of school chil­dren in Ghana has expanded by a remark­able 1.2 mil­lion. Ghana now has one of the high­est school-enrolment rates in West Africa, with 83 per cent of its chil­dren in school.

Child mor­tal­ity, for chil­dren under the age of 5, has dropped by 30 per cent in the past decade. Mal­nu­tri­tion has declined, the health bud­get is grow­ing, and only 28 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion is below the offi­cial poverty line, com­pared with 52 per cent in the early 1990s. Ghana is one of the few African coun­tries on track to meet its goal of cut­ting poverty in half by 2015. With oil resources now being devel­oped, the coun­try even has an ambi­tious tar­get of becom­ing a middle-income coun­try by 2020.
…

Ghana’s suc­cesses, how­ever, are far from com­plete. There is grow­ing inequal­ity between the rich and the poor. Schools in north­ern Ghana have much lower enrol­ment rates than south­ern schools, and poverty is much higher in the north.

“Stark and ris­ing inequal­i­ties have been gen­er­ated by the growth model that Ghana has pur­sued in the last decade,” says a recent report by Oxfam.

“Mil­lions of men and women liv­ing in north­ern Ghana have been mar­gin­al­ized from the devel­op­ment process. Poverty lev­els in two of the three regions are higher than they were in 1991–92.”

Despite its progress, Ghana is still ranked only 142 of the 179 coun­tries in the UN human-development index, which mea­sures qual­ity of life. Some Ghana­ians are so poor that they turn to des­per­ate mea­sures. Just last week, when a Ghana Inter­na­tional Air­lines plane landed at Gatwick Air­port near Lon­don, the under­car­riage con­tained the dead body of a man who had appar­ently risked his life to flee the coun­try. He per­ished at high altitude.

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