Every rainy season, the same drains fill with the same waste. Designing that waste out of the system and turning what remains into a resource is the prevention Ghana keeps skipping.

On the morning of 29 June 2026, roughly 140 millimetres of rain fell on Accra in a single day, more than double the heaviest downpour of the year before. By the time the water pulled back, at least 12 people were dead, according to news reports citing Ghana’s National Fire Service, among them a mother and her child swept away in the Achimota-Agbogbloshie area. Rescue teams pulled more than 400 people from submerged homes, the same reports said. The neighbourhoods that go under every year, Kaneshie, Alajo, Odawna, Weija and Kwame Nkrumah Circle, went under again.

None of this was a surprise. Accra has recorded flooding almost every year since 1935, and the city still carries the memory of June 2015, when floodwaters and a fuel-station fire at Circle killed at least 150 people in a single night. The scenes that precede each disaster have become a ritual. Dark clouds gather, traders lift their goods off the ground, drivers hunt for higher routes, and families in low-lying areas watch the water climb toward their doorsteps, knowing that a few hours of rain can undo years of work.

Rain is the trigger, but it is not the whole story. The scale of the damage is set by a harder combination of forces: rapid urban growth, undersized and unmaintained drainage, building in flood-prone land, the paving-over of natural water-retention spaces, and weak management of solid waste.

That last factor is the one you can see with your own eyes every time the water recedes: plastics, food waste, discarded clothing and construction debris packed into drains, culverts and streams. It is also the factor Ghana talks about least when it talks about floods. And it is where the country’s slow shift toward a circular economy stops being an environmental abstraction and starts being a flood-control measure. Designing that waste out of daily life, and turning what is left into something of value rather than refuse, is a form of flood prevention the country has barely begun to use.

Floodwater carries the receipts of a linear economy

For decades, economic life has followed a straight line: extract, manufacture, consume, discard. In that model, a water sachet, the ubiquitous plastic pouch Ghanaians tear open and drop by the millions each day, is worth something only until the last sip. Food scraps, fabric offcuts, packaging and broken household goods are treated as dead weight, to be hauled away or, more often, tossed into the nearest open space.

When collection fails or disposal is out of reach, those materials do not disappear. They migrate into gutters, drains and rivers.

The numbers are stark. Ghana generates about 840,000 tonnes of plastic waste a year, and only around 9.5 per cent is collected for recycling, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Plastic Action Partnership. The rest is buried, burned, dumped or left to leak into the environment, where it sheathes drains and chokes waterways. By the government’s own reckoning, mishandled plastic costs the country on the order of $100 million a year, and analysts project that plastic leakage into Ghana’s water bodies could nearly triple between 2020 and 2040 if nothing changes.

None of this is lost on the institutions studying the floods. The World Bank’s Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development Project, known as GARID, is a $150 million effort reaching more than 2.5 million residents of the Odaw River Basin. It was deliberately built to do two jobs at once: improve drainage and fix solid-waste management. Its designers treated silted channels and clogged gutters not as separate problems but as the same one.

The conclusion writes itself. Ghana cannot engineer its way out of flooding with bigger drains and annual desilting while ever-larger volumes of material keep pouring into those same drains.

Keeping materials out of the water

A circular economy starts from the opposite premise. In the definition popularised by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and now widely used, it rests on three ideas: designing out waste and pollution, keeping products and materials in use for as long as possible, and regenerating natural systems rather than exhausting them. Put simply, it treats what the linear model throws away as something still worth holding on to, and works to keep that value from ever reaching the gutter.

Applied to Ghana’s floods, the work begins long before the first cloud. It means cutting avoidable single-use packaging and backing reusable alternatives. It means requiring manufacturers to design products that can be collected, repaired or recycled instead of thrown away after one use. And it means making producers share responsibility for what becomes of their packaging once it leaves the shelf.

The logic is simple. When a material holds value, someone has a reason to retrieve it rather than dump it. A used bottle becomes feedstock for a new one. Fabric offcuts become bags and household goods. Organic waste becomes compost, animal feed or biogas. Construction rubble gets recovered instead of tipped beside a stream. Each of these does more than boost recycling rates. It shrinks the volume of material reaching the drain in the first place.

Collection systems that actually work

Circularity cannot rest on telling people not to litter. It rests on systems people can rely on.

Households and businesses need practical ways to separate plastics, organics and residual waste. Communities need collection points they can reach. Municipal authorities need the trucks, financing and partnerships to collect consistently. And recyclers need a predictable supply of properly sorted material to stay in business. A single break in that chain sends waste back to the gutter.

Ghana’s informal waste workers are central here, not incidental. More than 2,000 waste pickers already comb beaches, drains and dumpsites, recovering valuable material that would otherwise clog waterways, usually in dangerous conditions and without contracts, equipment or fair pay. Bringing them into formal municipal and private collection systems, with training, protective gear, social protection and decent wages, would strengthen recovery and create safer, more dignified livelihoods at the same time. Ghana already has models to build on: the social enterprise ASASE, for one, organises women waste pickers into a structured plastic-recovery chain, pairing steadier income with safer working conditions. In communities where public collection barely reaches, these workers are not a supplement to the system. They are the system.

A drain-cleaning exercise removes waste for a season. A functioning circular economy keeps much of it from reaching the drain at all.

Prevention is also a conversation

None of this happens by decree, and it will not happen through slogans. Ghana has tried the poster-and-jingle approach to waste for years, through keep-the-city-clean drives, periodic clean-up exercises and warnings not to dump in the gutters. They tend to fade with the news cycle, because one-way messaging assumes the problem is ignorance. Most people already know that a choked drain floods. What they lack is a workable alternative at the moment of disposal, and any confidence that their own effort will be matched by everyone else’s.

This is where communication does the harder work, and not the kind that ends at a billboard. Lasting change in how a neighbourhood handles its waste tends to come from dialogue rather than instruction: residents, market associations, landlords, assembly members and collectors working out together what separation and pickup will actually look like on their own street, and then holding one another to it. Habits move when the new practice becomes the visible norm, the thing neighbours are seen to do, rather than the thing a poster recommends. That shared expectation is what makes a collection system worth joining in the first place.

The same logic runs upward. Producers, municipal assemblies and financiers are not only levers to be pulled; they are parties to an unsettled negotiation over who is responsible for a sachet once it has been sold. And the people closest to the waste, the pickers and the households that flood, are not an audience to be lectured but participants whose knowledge and buy-in the system depends on. A circular economy designed with them, rather than announced to them, is the one more likely to hold when the rains come.

Turning flood prevention into an economy

Circularity also changes the arithmetic of flood control. Under the current model, public agencies spend scarce money collecting, hauling, dumping and then repeatedly re-clearing the same waste, and communities pay again when floods destroy homes, goods, roads and infrastructure. It is a bill the country pays twice.

A circular approach redirects part of that spending toward the businesses and systems that stop material from escaping in the first place. Municipalities can contract waste-recovery firms. Banks can build lending products for recyclers, repairers, composters and resource-efficient manufacturers. Government and large companies can create demand by buying goods made with recovered material. Producers can fund collection through extended-producer-responsibility schemes.

Together, these measures build markets for materials now treated as worthless. A sachet recovered before it reaches a gutter is not just one less piece of litter. Plugged into a working value chain, it becomes a manufacturing input, a source of income, and one less obstruction when the rain comes.

Circular cities have to work with nature too

Flood resilience is not only about managing what factories make. It is also about protecting what the landscape already does for free.

Wetlands, vegetation, urban trees and permeable ground slow water down and let it sink into the soil. Cover those surfaces with concrete, pack them with debris, or build over them without planning, and rainfall races straight into drains that are already overwhelmed. The regenerative side of circularity argues for the opposite: guarding natural drainage corridors, restoring degraded wetlands, and laying out neighbourhoods so water has somewhere to go.

Kigali offers a working example. The Rwandan capital sits in a bowl of hills, and as its wetlands were paved over and dumped in, the stormwater those marshes once soaked up began flooding roads and homes instead, a pattern Accra will recognise. Beginning in 2016, Rwanda’s environmental authority rebuilt one of them, turning roughly 160 hectares of degraded swamp at Nyandungu into a restored eco-park of ponds, reed beds and native forest for about $5 million. The wetland’s sponge function came back with it. Its manager reports that the chronic flooding of the adjacent road simply stopped, and the project created several thousand green jobs along the way. The results were convincing enough that Kigali is now restoring wetlands across the city.

Recovered construction material can help here as well, cutting indiscriminate dumping while feeding the production of paving and building products. Where it makes technical sense, permeable surfaces can be worked into public spaces, compounds and walkways so that water soaks in rather than sheets off. Circular urban development, done properly, treats materials, land and water as one connected system rather than three separate headaches.

Not a substitute, but a missing layer

Circular economy measures will not end Ghana’s floods on their own. The country still needs climate-resilient drainage, honest spatial planning, enforcement against building on waterways, reliable forecasting, early-warning systems, emergency preparedness and sustained maintenance.

But those investments will keep underperforming as long as drainage channels double as disposal routes. Circularity is the preventive layer the wider strategy has been missing. It works on the problem before the rain turns it into an emergency.

From clean-ups to systems change

Ghana has already begun laying the groundwork, through its plastics initiatives, its waste-recovery programmes and a growing community of circular enterprises. The Ghana Circular Economy Centre is one example. A five-year, roughly CAD $7.5 million project launched in 2022, it is implemented by UNIDO with the Ministry of Environment, Science and Technology and funded by Global Affairs Canada. Hosted at Ho Technical University, with partners including the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, the University of Cape Coast and the Or Foundation, it works across textiles, plastics and agriculture to build circular business models, transfer technology and open opportunities for women, young people and informal-sector workers.

The project’s premise is that circularity is not a matter of a few recycling schemes. It requires policy, institutional coordination, finance, appropriate technology, practical know-how, sustained public engagement, and cooperation up and down entire value chains. That same systemic view is exactly what Ghana’s flood response needs.

The country must keep clearing its drains and rebuilding its infrastructure. But it also has to sit with a harder question. Why do so many valuable materials keep ending up in the drains in the first place?

Answering it moves the national conversation past clean-up campaigns and toward a redesign of how things are made, used, collected and recovered. When materials stay in productive use, fewer of them become pollution. When fewer of them reach the water, the drains do their job. And when businesses grow up around recovery and reuse, protecting the environment starts generating jobs and income instead of just costs.

Ghana’s floods have many causes and will need many answers. Circularity is not the whole answer. But keeping even a single sachet in productive use, rather than letting it wash into a gutter, is a small bet against the next flood, and it is one the country can no longer afford to keep losing.

The author, Clement Boateng, is pursuing a PhD in Social Change Communication at the University for Development Studies, Nyankpala Campus. He can be reached at bigboat27@gmail.com.