Volta Lake and Akosombo Dam

At 8502 square kilometers, the Volta Reservoir is the largest man-made lake in the world. It was created by the construction of the Akosombo Dam, which is the largest and most expensive dam project in Ghana's history. Due to its year-round navigability, it has an important function as a transport and trade route. With a length of 660 meters, the dam is and 6 turbines, the dam generates a large part of the electricity for Ghana. While the dam helps to regulate the floods, it also holds back millions of tons of sediments. The Volta River once brought millions of tons of silt and sand from the upper catchment areas and constantly added sediment to the Volta delta and the coastline. As a cause of the sediments trapped in the Volta Lake, the sediment load is reduced to about 10% from about 70 Mio m3 to about 7 Mio m3 per year. As a consequence, the coastlines in the vicinity of the estuary are exposed to extreme erosion (Addo 2015). Large scale infrastructure projects like the dam projects induces human mobility: when the reservoir was flooded, more than 80.000 people were resettled. Also, the Volta River Authoritity (VRA) created thousands of jobs for the operation and the maintenance of the dam. Akosombo city was planned as a model community. Thousands of people migrated to this now affluent community to work at the VRA and a growing service and infrastructure sector (Jackson I. et al (2019).

Addo, K. A. (2015): Assessment of the Volta Delta Shoreline Change. In: Journal of Coastal Zone Management. Vol 18, Issue 3.

Jackson I., Uduku O. , Addo I. A.; Opong R. A. (2019): The Volta River Project: planning, housing and resettlement in Ghana, 1950–1965. In: The Journal of Architecture, Volume 24, Issue 4.