Legislation and Accessibility of Recreational Facilities: Comparative Analysis of the Pre- and Post-Act 571 Sports Stadiums in Ghana

Anthony Kwame Danso, De-graft Owusu-Manu, Kofi Agyekum, Alex Acheampong, Victor Acheamfour

Abstract


In addition to the core function of serving as venues for recreational and sporting activities, sports stadiums in Ghana are used as meeting places for political rallies, religious meetings, and other social gatherings due to the lack of large meeting venues. Participants of these gatherings, include people with various degrees of accessibility needs like the PWDs, the elderly, children, pregnant women, and children. Five of the stadiums in Ghana are considered large and of international standards and therefore used for competitions organized by the International Association Football Federation and Confederation of African Football and Association of African Sports Confederations for athletics etc. Four of these stadiums were constructed prior to the introduction of Ghana’s Persons with Disability Act – Act 715 in 2006 which sought to make all public facilities disability friendly. The Cape Coast Sports Stadium was however built 10 years after the introduction of the Act. This paper sought to conduct a comparative accessibility analysis of the five stadiums to determine whether there were any improvements in the design, construction, and usage of Sports Stadiums in Ghana after the introduction of the Act. The results revealed that there has only been a slight and insignificant improvement in the accessibility of the stadiums since the introduction of the Act.


Keywords


Legislation; Building Codes; Guides; Standards; Accessibility; Persons with Disabilities; Stadium

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