Town hall: Akuapem South water extension
Join the project team at the Assembly Hall on Saturday 18 July, 9:00, to review the pipeline route and connection fees. Twi interpretation and step-free access provided.
Akwaaba — you are welcome · Yɛn ara asaase ni
Services for the people of Aburi and the Akuapem ridge
Pay your rates, apply for permits, and follow Assembly business — in plain language, from any device, for every resident.
Try “rates”, “permit”, “waste”, or “birth”.
Do it online or in person
Popular services
Every service is written in plain language, with fees and timelines stated up front. If a service is not listed, the contact desk will point you to the right officer.
Showing all 8 services.
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Pay property rates
Check your 2026 bill and pay by mobile money, bank card, or at the revenue office.
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Business operating permit
Apply for or renew the permit every shop, kiosk, and enterprise in the municipality needs.
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Building & development permit
Get approval before you build, extend, or change the use of a structure.
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Register a birth or death
Start at the registry desk within 12 months of the event. Bring one valid ID.
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Market stalls & lorry park
Apply for a stall at Aburi market or a bay at the lorry park, and see the daily toll rates.
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Waste & sanitation schedule
Find your zone’s collection days and report a missed pickup within 48 hours.
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Assembly sittings & minutes
See when the Assembly and its committees sit, and read what was decided.
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Report an issue
A broken streetlight, a blocked drain, a pothole — tell us and track the fix.
Three steps, five minutes
Pay your property rates
Property rates fund waste collection, streetlights, drains, and the clinics grant. The portal walks you through it in three short steps — no queue, no carbon copies.
Concept UI — demonstration only
Parcel number
Printed at the top-right of your rate bill, e.g. AB-0412-2207.
AB-0412-2207
No bill to hand? Search by owner name and suburb instead.
Concept UI — demonstration only
14 Ridge View Lane, Aburi Atweasin
- Rateable value
- GH₵ 18,400.00
- Rate impost (1.25%)
- GH₵ 230.00
- Sanitation levy
- GH₵ 15.00
- Total due
- GH₵ 245.00
Pay by MTN MoMo, Telecel Cash, AT Money, or bank card.
Concept UI — demonstration only
Payment received — medaase.
- Receipt number
- AMA-26-081432
- Date
- 8 July 2026
- Amount paid
- GH₵ 245.00
A copy is sent to your phone by SMS. Your property record updates the same day.
Fees stated up front
Permits & licences
You should never need a “protocol” to get a permit. Fees, documents, and timelines are published here, and every application gets a tracking number.
How applying works
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Gather your documents
Site plan and land title for building permits; Ghana Card and business registration for operating permits. The checklist on the back of each form lists everything.
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Submit and pay the assessed fee
Submit at the client service desk or through this portal. You receive a tracking number and an SMS confirming the fee — never pay more than the published rate.
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Track your application
Quote your tracking number at the desk or in the portal. Building permits are decided within 60 working days; operating permits within 10.
| Permit or licence | Decided within | Fee (GH₵) |
|---|---|---|
| Business operating permit — kiosk or table-top | 10 working days | 120.00 |
| Business operating permit — shop or office | 10 working days | 350.00 |
| Building permit — single residential dwelling | 60 working days | 1,150.00 |
| Building permit — commercial development | 60 working days | 2,800.00 |
| Temporary signage & banners (per month) | 5 working days | 60.00 |
Your Assembly, on the record
Open government
Every sitting of the Assembly and its committees is public. Dates are published a month ahead, and minutes are adopted at the following sitting — then anyone may read them at the Assembly Hall or request a copy from the clerk.
| Date | Sitting | Presiding | Minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1st ordinary sitting — annual budget review | Presiding Member | Adopted | |
| Works sub-committee — drainage & feeder roads | Chair, Works | Adopted | |
| 2nd ordinary sitting — sanitation contracts | Presiding Member | Adopted | |
| Finance & administration — Q1 revenue report | Chair, F&A | Adopted | |
| 3rd ordinary sitting — Akuapem South water extension | Presiding Member | Adopted | |
| Social services sub-committee — schools & clinics grant | Chair, Social Services | Draft — adoption 16 Jul | |
| 4th ordinary sitting — mid-year budget statement | Presiding Member | Scheduled | |
| Works sub-committee — streetlight maintenance tender | Chair, Works | Scheduled |
Want to speak at a sitting? Residents may address the Assembly during the public forum that opens each ordinary sitting. Register with the clerk by noon the day before — in person or through the contact desk.
What’s happening
Notices
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Night works on the Aburi–Peduase road
Resurfacing runs 20:00–5:00 until 24 July. One lane stays open with flag control; expect short delays near the Botanical Gardens gate. Waste collection in Zone 3 moves one day later.
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2026 property rate bills posted
Bills have been delivered to all rated properties. Pay by 30 September to receive the 5% early-payment discount. Query a bill within 28 days at the revenue office.
We answer within two working days
Contact the Assembly
Message received — medaase.
The client service desk will reply within two working days. Urgent sanitation issues are handled the same day.
Visit or call
The client service desk sits just inside the main entrance — no appointment needed. An officer fluent in Twi, Ga, and English is always on duty, and the building is step-free with an accessible washroom.
- Assembly Hall
- Aburi–Akropong Road, opposite the district court, Aburi
- Opening hours
- Monday to Friday, 8:00–16:30
Revenue office also open Saturday, 9:00–13:00 - Accessibility
- Step-free entrance, reserved parking, seated queuing, documents available in large print on request
Design case study
Process — how this concept was designed
Concept project — adapted from a public RFQ. Frontend only; the rates portal and ledger shown are static UI demonstrations. This site is a fictional presentation and is not affiliated with the Aburi authorities or any real organization. Names, fees, dates, and officers are plausible inventions.
The brief
Public RFQs for municipal websites in Ghana keep asking for the same three things: let residents pay rates without queuing, make permits legible enough that nobody needs a middleman, and put Assembly business on the record. This concept answers that brief for Aburi — a ridge town of about 20,000 people, home of the Botanical Gardens, an hour above Accra.
The problem
Municipal sites usually fail their least-connected users first: low-end phones, patchy data, older eyes, first-time readers of official English. The audit trail of most council sites is a PDF scan of a typed notice. So the real problem was never visual — it was trust and legibility. Residents need to know the fee before the desk does, the sitting date before it passes, and the bill before the deadline.
Direction chosen — and what was rejected
The chosen direction is GOV.UK-grade clarity with Ghanaian warmth: one column of plain language, services first, every fee published, AAA contrast throughout — warmed by sand tones, a gold civic seal, the Akuapem ridge drawn as quiet hero art, and Twi where a greeting belongs.
Two directions were rejected. A glossy brochure site — mayor’s portrait, carousel, mission statements — was rejected because it serves the institution, not the resident. A “smart city” dashboard aesthetic — dark UI, live counters, map widgets — was rejected because it performs modernity at the direct cost of legibility on cheap hardware and older browsers.
Key decisions & trade-offs
- Accessibility as the design story, not a compliance pass. Every colour pair was chosen by computing its contrast ratio first and picking the aesthetic within that constraint — including darkening the brief’s link blue and demoting its gold to decorative use. The full audit is in the build guide.
- Honest mocks. The rates portal is clearly tagged “Concept UI — demonstration only” on every screen. Fake controls are rendered as non-focusable text so keyboard and screen-reader users are never lured into a dead interface.
- No JavaScript required. The page reads, navigates, and submits without JS. Script only adds the service search filter and the form success message — both enhancements, both announced to assistive technology.
- Single page over site tree. A real assembly needs deep routes; a concept needs a complete, walkable argument. Anchored sections with a persistent nav give the whole service journey in one scroll.
Intended impact — framed as design goals
- A resident on a 2019 Android phone can find their waste-collection day in under 30 seconds of first load.
- A screen-reader user can complete the contact form without guessing at a single field.
- Nobody pays an “extra fee” because every published fee is one scroll away.
- The sittings ledger makes “what did the Assembly decide?” a lookup, not a rumour.
Teaching artifact
Guide — how this site was built
Part of a 26-site collection designed and built by Hannah Kwakye, engineered with Fable 5. Every visual in the collection is code-drawn — no stock photos, no raster images — which on this site meant SVG hills, an SVG seal, and stroke-icon services. Static hand-authored HTML, CSS, and vanilla JS; three self-hosted font files — two variable families and a six-glyph supplement; deployed on Netlify from a Git push.
The type system
Atkinson Hyperlegible Next (400–700 variable, one 34 KB woff2) sets all reading text. It was designed by the Braille Institute to maximise character distinction for low-vision readers — the right body face is itself an accessibility decision. The QA pass caught the Twi vowels (ɛ, Ɛ, ɔ) and the cedi sign (₵) falling back to whatever system font was installed — Google’s build of Atkinson Next simply lacks them — so a 9 KB six-glyph Noto Sans subset, scoped by unicode-range, now supplies exactly those characters deterministically on every platform. Source Serif 4 (semibold, optical-size axis) gives headings their civic-record voice. Sizes are fluid clamp() steps; the measure is capped at 66ch; body line-height is 1.65.
Signature: contrast engineered, not eyeballed
Every text/background pair on this page was computed with the WCAG relative-luminance formula before it entered the stylesheet, targeting AAA (7:1 body, 4.5:1 large text). Two of the brief’s palette colours failed at AAA and were adjusted: link blue #14507A reached only 6.95:1 on sand, so it was darkened to #124A70; seal gold #8C6D2F reached only 3.94:1 on sand, so it is used exclusively for decorative strokes and rules. The final audit then caught the gold family twice more: bright seal gold #EDCB79 managed only 6.33:1 on forest green — fine for the seal, not for the small-caps labels that borrowed it — so text on dark grounds got its own lighter #F4DCA1 (7.36:1); and the 14 px bold notice dates in #6E551F are small text by WCAG’s definition (large starts at 18.7 px bold), so they only sit on white, where the pair reaches 7.04:1.
| Pair | Used for | Ratio | Target |
|---|---|---|---|
| ink on paper | Body text | 14.36 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| ink on sand | Body text on panels | 12.10 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| muted on sand | Secondary text | 7.89 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| muted on paper | Secondary text | 9.36 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| forest on sand | Headings, eyebrows | 8.07 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| forest on paper | Headings | 9.57 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| link on sand | Links (darkened from brief) | 7.63 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| link on paper | Links | 9.06 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| link on white | Links in cards | 9.38 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| white on forest | Header, buttons, contact | 9.91 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| white on deep | Footer, phase banner | 13.55 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| sand on forest | Contact secondary text | 8.07 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| gold-deep on white | Notice dates, iteration-log headings | 7.04 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| gold-text on forest | Small-caps labels on dark grounds | 7.36 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| focus ink on focus gold | Focus highlight | 11.87 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| ink on gold-bright | “Concept” badge, portal step numbers | 10.45 | AAA ≥ 7.0 — pass |
| gold-bright on forest | Seal strokes, badge grounds — never text | 6.33 | Non-text ≥ 3.0 — pass |
| gold-deep on sand | List bullets only — never text on sand | 5.73 | Non-text ≥ 3.0 — pass |
| gold vs paper | Decorative rules only — never text | 4.67 | Non-text ≥ 3.0 — pass |
The focus system
Links get the GOV.UK treatment on focus: a gold wash (#FCD879) with near-black text and a 4 px ink underline — an 11.87:1 pair that is unmissable on any background, light or dark. Form controls and buttons get a two-colour ring instead: a 3 px deep-blue outline offset over a 2 px white halo, so at least one ring always exceeds 3:1 whether it sits on paper or on forest green. Focus order follows the document; there are no tabindex hacks, no focus traps, and the portal mock’s fake controls are deliberately non-focusable text.
Code-drawn assets
The hero ridge is three stacked cubic-Bézier paths — mist, mid-slope, foreground forest — with a gold sun disc and two stroke-drawn palms; it reads as the Akuapem ridge in under 1 KB of SVG. The seal is concentric gold circles around the same ridge line, a sun, and a palm. Service icons are a single-family stroke set (1.75 stroke weight, round caps, 24-unit grid), marked aria-hidden because each card’s text already names the service.
Iteration log
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Pass 1 — critique
- Hero search panel initially sat flush against the ridge art; lifted it with a gold top rule and shadow so the primary task reads first at every width.
- Ledger table felt cramped on mobile — added the focusable scroll region with a visible border so keyboard users can pan it.
- Tightened the notices grid from 4 cards to 3 stronger ones; equalised card heights.
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Pass 2 — elevation
- Rebuilt the portal mock from flat cards into framed “screens” with forest title bars and numbered gold step badges — the screenshot moment.
- Gave the ledger typographic status chips (Adopted / Draft / Scheduled) instead of plain text.
- Added the Twi greeting line, the deep-green contact chapter, and the phase banner that states the concept honestly at the very top.
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Pass 3 — ship
- Removed the scroll-reveal system entirely: full-page capture proved cards could sit invisible until observed — on a civic site, content never hides behind motion. Dropped a
content-visibilityoptimisation that corrupted full-page rendering. - Recomputed every pair in the contrast table against the final stylesheet and caught two AAA misses: small gold labels on forest (6.33) lightened to 7.36, and 14 px bold notice dates reclassified as small text — they pass only on white (7.04), so that is the only ground they sit on.
- Screenshot review caught the worst kind of bug a checklist misses: the contact form’s labels were rendering white-on-white — the white card inherited the forest section’s white text. The card now resets its own colour. Ratios in a table mean nothing until you look.
- Full keyboard walk: skip link → nav → search → every card → tables → form → footer, in document order, with visible focus at every stop; Enter in search keeps focus in the field while
role="status"announces the result count. - Reduced-motion verified with forced
prefers-reduced-motion; smooth scrolling and hover transitions collapse to instant. Zero console errors at 390 / 834 / 1440 px.
- Removed the scroll-reveal system entirely: full-page capture proved cards could sit invisible until observed — on a civic site, content never hides behind motion. Dropped a
Deploy
Netlify, straight from the repository: publish = ".", immutable cache headers on /assets/*, and Netlify Forms handling the contact form with a honeypot field. The /guide and /process routes exist as tiny redirect stubs pointing at these anchored sections, so the collection’s route contract holds.