A multidimensional assessment of housing quality and socio-spatial inequality: Evidence from Ghana

Abstract

Access to adequate housing is fundamental to wellbeing and sustainable development, yet systematic measurement of multidimensional housing quality and its spatial distribution is limited across many rapidly urbanising countries in the Global South. This paper develops a Multidimensional Housing Quality Index (MHQI) using household-level microdata from Ghana's 2021 Population and Housing Census (N = 836,515) and combines it with the Alkire–Foster framework to assess the prevalence, spatial distribution and correlates of housing quality and deprivation. The MHQI integrates nine binary adequacy indicators across structural quality, sufficient living space, access to essential services, and sanitation and hygiene. The index is constructed by applying principal component analysis to the tetrachoric correlation matrix of the binary indicators to produce empirically derived adequacy weights. The national mean MHQI is 62.2 on a 0–100 scale, but this masks substantial inequalities: urban households score 73.1 compared with 45.3 in rural areas, and the inter-regional gap exceeds 42 points. The Alkire–Foster framework classifies 56.5% of households as housing poor and 37.2% as severely housing poor, with inadequate waste disposal, polluting cooking fuel and unimproved sanitation constituting the most widespread deficits. District-level MHQI scores show strong positive spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I > 0.71, p < 0.001), indicating clustered deprivation. Wealth, education and urban residence are identified as the strongest correlates of housing quality. The study provides a transferable measurement framework for countries where census or nationally representative household surveys contain comparable housing indicators. The findings support a shift from aggregate deficit narratives towards district-level prioritisation of specific housing deficits that drive deprivation in each locality.