Editorial note by Guest Editor

The idea for this special issue arose from series of discussions among the executives of the association during the planning for the 2016 GGA/GGTA conference which place in Tamale in the Northern Region. That motivation was borne out of the financial constraints that the association faced at the time, and the need to strategize to circumvent that challenge. In the process, the executives decided to seek assistance from potential corporate entities who would be interested in the outcomes of our presentations either in the form of journal articles or edited book chapters. With the kind assistance and initiative of Prof Mariamah Awumbilla, a renowned population geographer and a faculty member of the Department of Geography and Resource Development at the University of Ghana, Legon, we were able to identify and negotiate with Savanna Accelerated Development Authority (SADA) who willingly and gracefully accepted our proposal, and this gave birth to this edition of our esteemed journal, Ghana Journal of Geography, we are witnessing today. This SADA special issue falls under the theme “Actualization of the sustainable development goals: the role of the Geographer”. Our intention here is to showcase some of the current studies authored by our members which interrogate some of the causal factors explaining why Northern Ghana lags behind the rest of the country in terms of development and how the situation can be rectify, the very focus of SADA’s tremendous activities. We opted for a short review format. This rules out the possibility of an exhaustive review of subthemes but nevertheless allows for a quick introduction to key themes. We pursued an inductive process. Rather than selecting people with specific thematic interests, we made an open call to propose ideas for review articles. We were flexible in following the interests of those who responded rather than trying to cover a prescribed set of subthemes. While some articles bear titles which align squarely with the mission of SADA, others covered remotely related subfields and thus, we are able to generate a sense of the variety of interests that are engaging geographers today.