Introduction The most basic needs of human beings are air, water, food, clothing and shelter. Shelter in the form of housing can be considered to be both a social good, providing core security for households, neighbourhoods, societies and communities and as an economic good that stimulates growth and development. The 2010 PHC solicited information on housing stock, type of dwelling, holding and tenancy arrangements, ownership of dwelling units, construction materials, room occupancy, access to utilities and household facilities, main sources of water, bathing and toilet facilities and method of waste disposal in the Sene West District and these are discussed in this chapter.

 Information on housing stock and households in the Sene West District. The 2010 PHC reveals that the total population in Brong-Ahafo Region is 2,310,983. Sene West District is one of the least populated Districts with a population of 2.5 percent of the region’s population. The total household population of the District stands at 57,049. The housing stock available in the region is 331,967 or about ten percent (9.8%) of the national figure of 3,392,745 (GSS, 2013a). The Sene West District has a total of 9,369 houses representing 2.8 percent of the regional stock and 10,936 households or 2.2 percent of the region’s 490,515 households.  

The majority of the houses (77.3%) and households (71.9%) are in the rural areas. The average number of persons per house in the District is 6.2. This is lower than both the regional average of 7.0 and the national average of 7.2. Again, the average household size in the District is 5.2. This is about half a person higher than the regional household size of 4.6. Although the rural areas contain over seventy percent of the District’s housing stock and households, the population per house (7.0) and the average households per house (1.4) are slightly higher in the urban areas. There is also no significant difference between the urban (4.8) and the rural (5.3) average household sizes.  

Type of Dwelling and Ownership Status The type of dwelling units in Sene west District varies from one to another, so is the holding and tenancy arrangement. This analysis looks at the disparities in dwelling types as well as the ownership and holding/tenancy agreements that are currently prevailing in the District.

 Type of Dwelling Unit shows the type of dwelling by type of locality. The total number of occupied dwelling units in the District is 10,936. Separate house is the commonest type of occupied dwelling unit accounting for 55.8 percent of all dwellings in the District. This is followed by compound house (rooms) (32.4%) and Huts/buildings (same compound) (5.6%). Semidetached houses rank fourth (3.8%). Flat/Apartment is occupied by 1.6 percent of households.  

The phenomenon of living in non-permanent or temporary structures which is common in large towns such as Accra, Kumasi and Sunyani is minimal in the District since improvised homes such as kiosk/container, tents, and living quarters attached to offices/shops and uncompleted buildings account for less than one percent (0.8%) of occupied dwelling units.

The proportion of separate houses is higher in rural than urban localities, 50.9 percent for urban and 57.7 percent for rural localities. However, regarding compound houses, the situation is different. Rather, the percentage of compound houses is higher in urban areas (39.5%) compared to the proportion of 29.6 percent for rural areas. In addition to that, the percentage of Huts/buildings (either in same or different compounds) is higher in rural localities (8.2%) than urban localities (0.2%).

Ownership of Dwelling shows the ownership status of dwellings by sex of household head and type of locality reveals that, out of a total 10936 dwellings in the District, 74.2 percent are owned by members of the household whereas 12.64 percent are owned by other relatives who are not residents in those dwellings. Thus, 86.8 percent of dwelling units are “family houses”. In the District, one out of ten (10.0%) of all households live in houses owned by other private individuals, some of which are probably rented out.  

About one percent of households live in dwelling units is currently being purchased e.g. mortgage (1.1%) and another 0.5 percent in dwelling units provided by private employer. Public/ government ownership is less than two percent (1.4%) of the total dwelling units in the District.  

 Both male and female headed households, the rank order of proportions for dwelling unit ownership follows the District pattern with slight differences in the size of the proportions. For example, 8.0 percent of households headed by males live in houses owned by other private individuals. The proportion for female-headed households is 15.3 percent.  

Again, 62.6 percent of female-headed households compared with 78.5 percent male-headed households live in houses owned by a household member. Also, 18.7 percent of femaleheaded households live in houses own by a relative who is not a household member compared with about 10.4 percent of male-headed households. The proportion of maleheaded households living in dwelling units which are being purchased is 1.0 percent compared with 1.4 percent for female- headed households. About the same proportion of male-headed households (1.5%) compared with female-headed households (1.2%) occupy Public/Government dwelling units.

 The distribution of house ownership statuses by locality type is about the same in both urban and rural areas. However, there are differences in the size of the proportions for each ownership type between urban and rural areas. For example, the difference in the proportion for urban (65.5%) and rural communities (77.6%) for dwelling units owned by a member of the household is high. In relation to dwelling units owned by other private individuals, an opposite trend emerges. A much higher proportion of urban households (13.1%) live in such houses compared to rural households (8.7%). There is only a slight difference between the proportion of urban households (13.5 %) and rural households (12.3%) who live in dwelling units owned by a relative who is not a member of the household. In the District, a significantly higher proportion of urban households (1.3%) than rural households (0.2%) occupy dwelling units owned by a private employer.

Construction Materials The type of materials used for constructing various parts of a dwelling unit contributes to the durability and life span of the dwelling unit. Questions on the construction materials for the outer wall (excluding any fence), floor and roof of dwellings are asked for each dwelling unit. For dwelling units that are vacant, at the time of the census, the question on material of floor is skipped.  

  Materials for Outer Wall The two main materials for the construction of outer walls in are mud brick/earth in the District, which constitute 75.8 percent of dwelling units having their outer walls constructed with mud brick/earth and cement block/concrete. All other materials such as wood, land create, burnt bricks, metal sheets/slates/asbestos and bamboo account for 2.6 percent of all materials for the construction of outer walls.

The two main materials used in the District (mud brick/earth, cement block/concrete) apply to urban and rural areas with some significant differences. The use of mud brick / earth for outer wall is higher in rural areas (85.2%) than urban areas (50.6%). Conversely, the percent of cement blocks/ concrete houses is far higher in urban (46.1%) than rural localities (12.5%).

Materials for Roof

 62.3 percent of dwellings in the District are roofed with metal sheets. The next main material used for roofing is Thatch/Palm leaf or Raffia (32.7%). Only one percent (1.0%) of roofs is made of tiles, wood, and concrete. Dwelling units were hardly roofed with either bamboo or slate (0.8%). All other materials are rarely used in the District as main roofing materials for dwelling units because of lack of availability, high prices among others.

Metal sheets are the main materials for roofing in both urban and rural centres accounting for 92.6 and 51.0 percent respectively. However the use of thatch/palm leaf or raffia for roofing is higher in rural areas accounting for 43 percent whereas in the urban areas it is only 5.1 percent.

Material for Floor

The type of materials used for the floor of a house affects the appearance, quality and the structural quality of a house. The floors are largely made of cement /concrete (71.0%) and earth or mud (26.9%). Other materials account for less than one percent in the District. In terms of locality, cement was the common material for floors accounting for 93.1 percent and 62.4 percent for urban and rural localities respectively.  

Earth/mud is the next common material for floor with 5.3 percent for urban and 35.4 percent for rural areas. Only 0.2 and 1.4 percent of floors in rural and urban areas respectively are made of stone. District wide, less than one percent of floors are either made of burnt brick, wood, vinyl tiles, ceramic /porcelain and terrazzo/terrazzo tiles.

Room Occupancy

 Room occupancy may refer to how a room is used in terms of the number of persons presently accessing the room as their abode; the ratio of household population to the number of sleeping rooms available indicates the room occupancy rate. The number of sleeping rooms suggests the degree of crowding in households. Crowded living conditions are likely to increase the spread of infectious diseases such tuberculosis and respiratory infections.  

A standard operational measure of overcrowding should take into account not only the size of households, but also household composition, household structure, number of sleeping rooms and size of the sleeping rooms. Although there is no standardized operational definition for overcrowding in use in Ghana, an attempt has been made in this section to convey some idea of possible overcrowding based on household size and number of sleeping rooms.  

 About one-half (43.0%) of the households have one sleeping room; 30.7 percent of households live in two sleeping rooms. The proportions of households with three sleeping rooms and four sleeping rooms are 14.5 percent and 11.8 percent respectively. The distribution of households by size in the District is as follows: out of the total 10,936 households, 1,143 or 10.5 percent are single-person households, 1,051 or 9.6 percent are twoperson households, 1,349 or 12.3 percent are households with three members and 1,476 or 13.5 percent are four-member households. There are 1,382 households with five persons representing 12.6 percent and 1,287 households with six members (11.8%). The 1,050 seven member households make up 9.6 percent, 705 households (6.4%) have eight members and 470 households (4.3%) have nine members. There are 1,023 households with ten or more members (9.4%) Analysis of the number of sleeping rooms by household size reveals that almost four in ten  (38.9%) of five-person households share only one sleeping room and also about one-third (31.2%) of six-person households have only one sleeping room. Sixty percent of sevenperson households have only one or two sleeping rooms and fifty-three percent of eight person-households occupy only one or two sleeping rooms. Forty-one percent of nine person households have one or two sleeping rooms and about one-quarter (23.7%) of households with ten or more persons sleep in one or two rooms while close to one-half of such households (47.1%) sleep in three or four rooms.  

If it is assumed that a household with five or more persons is large, then sleeping rooms in the District are woefully inadequate as indicated by the above statistics. Generally, irrespective of the household size, single and two rooms are the most available. This phenomenon might be due to scarcity of sleeping rooms as a result of an overall housing deficit and high cost of securing accommodation.

Access to Utilities and Household  

Facilities Access to utilities such as water and lighting is important for a decent way of living. This section analyses household amenities, source of lighting, main source of energy for cooking and cooking space, main source of water for drinking and other domestic activities and sanitation facilities available for dwelling units.

The major source of lighting of dwelling units in the District is electricity (39%), the flashlight/torch (27%) and 33% use kerosene lamp. All other sources including gas lamp, solar energy, electricity from private generator, candle, firewood and others account for only two percent of source of lighting.

The percentage of households using electricity (mains) is 64.9 percent in urban areas, which is far higher than the 28.2 percent in the rural areas. On the other hand, kerosene lamp is the major source of lighting for households in rural areas (36.4%) compared to urban areas (23.1%). Similarly, flashlight/torch is used more in the rural.  

The main source of cooking fuel used by households. The main source of fuel for cooking is wood accounting for 80 percent of the fuel types in the District compared to the national figure of 40.2 percent and the region’s 60 percent. Charcoal is the second most widely-used cooking fuel accounting for 14.9 percent. These two sources account for 94.9 percent of the energy sources for cooking in the District.  

Modern types of energy for cooking namely gas (1.1%), electricity (0.1%) and kerosene (0.3%) together account for only about 1.5 percent of all cooking energy sources. With the deforestation associated with the use of firewood and charcoal, every effort should be made by the District Assembly to encourage more households to shift to alternative sources of cooking fuel. Gas, an environmentally friendly source of fuel is used by a mere 1.1 percent of household.  

 In terms of rural-urban usage of cooking fuel, wood and charcoal are the most preferred sources even though wood is more pronounced in the rural (88.8%) areas than urban (57.3) areas. On the other hand, charcoal fuel is more widely used in urban (34.2%) areas than in the rural (7.4%) areas.

 further provides data on cooking space by type of locality. 55.1 percent of urban dwelling units and 54.8 percent of rural dwelling units use open space for cooking whereas 8.4 percent of urban households and 12.5 percent of rural households have a separate room exclusive to the household for cooking. In the urban localities, 19.2 percent of dwelling units use their verandas for cooking while just 7.1 percent of rural dwelling units use their verandas as cooking space.

INFORMATION COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY   

 Introduction Information Communication Technology (ICT) development in Ghana has seen significant growth over the past decade. The growth of ICT in Ghana is linked to the development and deployment of a national ICT infrastructure, institutional and regulatory framework for managing the sector, implementing e-governance in all government institutions and the construction of a National Data Centre as well as Regional Innovation Centres. The objective of this chapter is to report the extent of individual ownership of mobile phones, use of internet among the population aged 12 years and older, ownership of fixed telephone lines and desktops/laptop computers by a member of the household.  

 Ownership of Mobile Phones data on the population 12 years and older who own mobile phones and the number of people who use the internet. Out of the total population of 36,758 persons who are 12 years and older in the District, only 6, 911 representing less than one-fifth (18.8%) own mobile phones. When males and females are compared, about a quarter (24.1%) of the total male population of 18,526 own mobile phones whereas a relatively lower figure of 13.4 percent of the total female population of 18,232 own mobile phones.

Use of Internet shows, the proportion using the internet is far smaller than the proportion using mobile phones. Out of the total population of 36,758 persons aged 12 years and older in the District, only 394 persons representing 1.1 percent of the population use internet facility. Twice as more males (1.6%) than females (0.6) use internet facilities

Household Ownership of Desktop or Laptop Computer, household ownership of desktop or laptop computers. Out of the 10,936 households in the District, only about one percent (1.2%) own desktop or laptop computers. There is not much variation for the sexes. Out of the 7,991 male-headed households only 107 representing 1.3 percent have desktop/laptop computers. Among the 2,945 female-headed households only 29 or 1.0% have desktop/laptop computers