Similar to the global urban-rural population statistics and dynamics, Ghana’s cities host the majority of its population. Although urbanization manifest desirable impacts relative to reducing absolute poverty and facilitating economic growth, such negative impacts as housing deficits, limited access to social services, and transportation challenges among others ought to be addressed. The Government of Ghana in the quest to mitigate these challenges and in the pursuit of the vision of sustainable and inclusive urban cities development has collaborated with Ministries, Departments and Agencies, and development partners to launch several national policies and programmes such as the National Urban Policy Framework and Action Plan and the Urban Grant Support Programme within the framework of Ghana’s decentralization policy reform.

The Ghana Cities League Project aims at contributing to the achievement of local and global urbanization goals as expressed in Ghana’s urbanization policies and SDG 11 and related goals. Together with UNICEF, CDD-Ghana in collaboration with some State Agencies developed performance-assessing instruments, namely the District Performance Assessment Tool (DPAT) and the Ghana District League Table (DLT) to assess the performance of MMDAs. Although DPAT and DLT have chalked some considerable success in exposing developmental challenges, their inability to include the feedbacks of citizens while assessing the quality of service delivery at the local governance level, unfair MMDAs comparison complaints, and failure to generate adequate data urbanization data. Hence, the Ghana Cities League aims at correcting the challenges of DPAT and DLT and subsequently improving urban governance.