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The emergence of COVID-19 in December 2019 produced new geographic spaces characterized by physical and social distancing with concomitant surprises. In Ghana, management of the first and second waves of the pandemic garnered mixed reactions from the populace. Against these perspectives, this commentary explored the critical role of health promotion and wise reasoning tenets in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic in Ghana, specifically through the following eight principles: intellectual humility; acknowledging uncertainty and change; perspective-taking of different viewpoints; integration of diverse perspectives; intersectorality; sustainability; empowerment and public health engagement; and equity. Our analyses demonstrate that wise reasoning and health promotion from Ghana’s political authorities are critical to ensure citizens’ compliance with the several measures that require a change of behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urbanisation is increasingly recognised as one of the pressing global issues. As a result, managing contemporary and future urban processes to produce sustainable outcomes has become a preoccupation of policy analysts, academics, and urban planners. Urbanisation can either produce positive or negative outcomes depending on how authorities and stakeholders at all levels manage it. In African context, several national governments have formulated and implemented National Urban Policies (NUPs) as a way of curbing urban challenges associated with urbanisation. This paper provides a content analysis of Ghana's NUP. The objective of this paper is two-fold: to evaluate the (a) dominant themes that are covered in Ghana's NUP and why the emphasis on those themes; and (b) the extent to which rural–urban migration is factored into the policy document. The latter is more critical because in Africa's context, besides natural population increase and reclassification of rural settlements as urban areas, rural–urban migration is one of the fundamental drivers of urbanisation. Our analyses revealed that the dimension of rural–urban migration is ignored in the policy document. This neglect, we argue, is problematic because rural–urban migration is one of the drivers of urbanisation in Ghana. Policy recommendations, including the need to minimise the push and pull causes of rural–urban migration, the need to give proper meaning to the decentralisation concept, and the need for the government to focus on rural development interventions are proffered to strengthen the overall goal of Ghana's NUP in the context of urbanisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]