Evaluation of Public Weather Services by Users in the Formal Services Sector in Accra, Ghana

Environmental and natural hazards are known to affect the outputs and productivity of agriculture and related industries; construction industry and water and utilities industries. They impact the services sector through cutting and destruction of service lines. These hazards are also known to have severe macroeconomic impacts including reduction in economic growth, increase in inflation and depreciation of the local currency due to reduced levels of agricultural commodity exports. And in order to reduce the losses, some technologies and services can be used.

In this paper, the authors undertook a study that evaluated the public weather services used by people working in the formal services sector in Accra and established the economic value that these users attached to the services using the contingent valuation method. The study employed randomly-sampling survey technique to request information from 102 respondents on their use of services and information produced by the Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMet), the country’s official producer and archival of meteorological data, information, products and services.

The results of the analysis of survey data indicated that virtually all the respondents used public weather services produced by GMet. The users generally considered the quality of the public weather services to be of moderate quality. Using the contingent valuation method to ascertain the economic value of public weather services, 87.7% of the respondents were prepared to pay for the public weather services rather than be without them. The average WTP per person per month was 16.67 Ghana cedis per month or 200.04 Ghana cedis per year or 51.96 United States dollars per year. The aggregate economic value, based on only the users of public weather services in the formal services sector of Accra, who constituted just about 2.1% of the total work force of Ghana, was over four times the value of the annual budget provided by the Government of Ghana to GMet in 2016. Users in the formal services sector wanted GMet to produce more locality-specific weather forecasts and services with advance warning times.

Further the information from the Agency needs to be distributed and publicized by the mass media through radio and television including the emerging and fast growing local language-based mass media on hourly basis rather than the current system where they are supplied to the general public once a day via the evening television news through the English-language radio and TV channels.

Article by Kwabena Asomanin Anaman, et al, from University of Ghana, Accra, Ghana.

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