Gender,households and reintegration: everyday lives of returned migrant women in rural northern Ghana

Since the late 1990s, migration of single women from the rural north to the urban south in Ghana has been making up a growing share of migrant streams. While the livelihood strategies of these migrant women in their southern destinations have been recently examined, the experience of reintegration for those who return to their place of origin has rarely been studied. Drawing on qualitative research with migrant women, returned migrant women (RMW) and their family members, this study examines everyday reintegration experiences of RMW within their households in a rural Dagomba community in Northern Region, Ghana. We conceptualise the household as an arena of everyday life wherein RMW exercise agency to learn to generate livelihoods that support their own as well as household members’ joint well-being. We combine this conceptualisation of household with feminist scholars’ recognition of gender as situated process. Our conceptualisation makes it possible to illuminate gender dynamics around the everyday repetitive decision-making acts that constitute livelihood generation as performed by RMW within specific intra-household dynamics in the context of reintegration in the situated community. Through the examination of the diverse and contradictory ways in which RMW exercise agency in making decisions about livelihood strategies within their households in the studied community, we show how the everyday repetitive acts of RMW contribute to micro-transformations of a situated gender ideology.     

Global and local methodological and ethical questions in researching football academies in Ghana

Do Western researchers in non-Western countries face special situations that require adopting a unique research methodology and ethics when conducting research with children? Are methodological and ethical rules, common in the West, also valid for research with children in non-Western countries? The present article addresses methodological and ethical questions that arise when conducting research with children in football academies in Ghana. The article focuses on five main issues that raise methodological and ethical questions: access to children, informed consent, power relations, reciprocity and the use of interviews as a research tool with children. Examples derived from my fieldwork in Ghana illustrate that universal ethical guidelines may restrict Western researchers to a far too rigid framework that does not take into consideration the local context. Thus, there is a need for culture-related methodology and ethics when we conduct studies with children in non-Western countries.     

Democracy,decentralization, and district proliferation: The case of Ghana

In many developing countries, a rhetorical commitment to decentralization often superficially manifests through the creation of new or smaller administrative units at the sub-national level. In democracies in particular, this raises the question of whether sub-national unit proliferation is intended for winning popular support in elections or addressing the concerns of local citizens. This paper analyzes the motivations for district creation by focusing on Ghana, which is oft-considered one of Africa's more committed countries to decentralization. At the same time, successive governments repeatedly have divided the country into more districts in an espoused effort to more effectively bring services closer to citizens. With an in-depth focus on the most recent increase from 170 to 216 districts between 2008 and 2012, this paper employs national and district census, socioeconomic, and electoral data to examine which districts were split and why. Instead of representing a source of patronage to swing voters or a divide-and-rule strategy in opposition strongholds, the study finds that the incumbent party at the time, the National Democratic Congress (NDC), used re-districting as a tactic of malapportionment and predominantly targeted non-competitive districts where gaining an additional legislative seat in subsequent elections was more likely. Evidence suggests that this pattern is not specific to the NDC and that previous district splitting under the New Patriotic Party (NPP) also focused disproportionately on that party's safe seats. Overall, the paper emphasizes the need for according greater consideration to underlying institutional aspects, particularly electoral rules and executive-legislative relations, when analyzing the motivations for territorial reforms.     

VARYING EFFECT OF FERTILITY DETERMINANTS AMONG MIGRANT AND INDIGENOUS FEMALES IN THE TRANSITIONAL AGRO-ECOLOGICAL ZONE OF GHANA

The transitional agro‐ecological zone of Ghana, located between the richly endowed south and the impoverished north, has attracted seasonal and permanent farm migrants, mainly from northern Ghana, who now live side by side with the indigenous people. While migrants have higher numbers of Muslims, indigenous people are mainly Christians. Although the majority of the migrants live in migrant quarters with less favourable socio‐economic conditions, they are more successful farmers and therefore wealthier. The objectives are to examine the varying effect of fertility determinants among migrants and indigenous females. This paper uses data collected in 2002 among 194 females aged 15 to 49 years. Multiple regression models are used to assess fertility determinants. Results show that although migrant households were wealthier, migrant females were more traditional. They had more children living in foster care, and a lower proportion of them approved of men participating in household activities. In addition, they were less well educated, recorded higher infant mortality, gave birth earlier and used less contraception. Furthermore, while a female's migration status is statistically significant so far as non‐proximate determinants of fertility are concerned, the same variable is not significant with respect to proximate determinants. In addition, a married female migrant would on average have almost one more child compared to her indigenous counterpart, and migrant females who had experienced the loss of a child would on average have 2.5 more children compared to their indigenous counterparts. Finally, more affluent migrant females have 0.08 fewer children compared to their indigenous counterpart.     

Digging Deep for Justice: A Radical Re-imagination of the Artisanal Gold Mining Sector in Ghana

Abstract:  This article explores the concept of "contact zones" to counteract misrecognition and exclusion in the artisanal gold mining sector of Ghana. The large majority of the 300,000–500,000 Ghanaian artisanal miners work without an official license, illegally. Due to their encroachment on corporate concession lands, the use of toxic mercury in the gold extraction process, and the social disruption caused by their migratory activities, these miners are often marginalized and criminalized. Yet, devaluation and misrecognition hamper environmental stewardship and participation in political decision-making. Through parity-fostering participatory research, I propose a radical re-imagination of the sector that encourages agency and flourishing among these ostracized men and women diggers.     

“Now let me share this with you”: Exploring Poetry as a Method for Postcolonial Geography Research

Abstract: In this article we attempt to “seize back the creative initiative” to uncover whether poetry might be a useful postcolonial research method. In exploring the possibilities and limitations of poetry as a means of re‐representing and interpreting data collected through in‐depth qualitative interviews, our conclusions are ambivalent: we are attracted to poetry but troubled by it too. For instance, poetry does hold promise through its ability to imaginatively project thoughts and ideas, opening up space so new perspectives can emerge. However, as academics we are always complicit in the knowledge creation process (albeit to varying degrees), and so the representative qualities of poetry are never unproblematic or straightforward. Thus although poetry does have potential as a method for postcolonial geography research, we are making a cautious and careful appeal for its use. We use the case of ecotourism research conducted in Boabeng‐Fiema Monkey Sanctuary in Ghana to explore these ideas.     

Surviving through movement: the mobility of urban youth in Ghana

In Africa, young people are engaging with a globalised world of flows and movements but are coming of age in environments characterised by uncertainty, economic hardship and unemployment. Drawing upon research conducted in Madina, a suburb of Accra, a social navigation perspective is adopted to explore young people's everyday mobility and their aspirations for future mobility. By drawing attention to the meanings young people ascribe to movement, and by analysing their movements as tactics of social navigation, the importance of spatial mobility to young people's everyday well-being and their processes of social becoming are illustrated. Young people find that their mobility is bounded by a range of factors including labour market characteristics, gender and generational relations, and their spatial location on the outskirts of the city and the margins of the world. However, neither their daily mobility nor their spatial imagination is restricted to Madina; real or imagined travel takes them to other parts of the city, into rural areas and across the nation's borders. Through illustrating how significant mobility can be for everyday survival, this paper contributes to ‘the mobility turn’ in the social sciences which has overlooked the importance of mobility for livelihoods in the global South.     

The social and built infrastructure of cultural policy: between selective popular memory and future plans

The rise of digital music distribution has caused decreasing returns from CD and cassette sales in Burkina Faso and Ghana. In response to this decline in revenues, artists and their management have been trying to find ways to find other sources of income. One major way of doing this has been through focusing on (live) music performance. Yet this requires built and social infrastructures that are not always present, functional, or put to full use. This paper explores how musicians and music workers make sense of the cultural policies that have shaped and will shape the built infrastructure (concert venues, clubs, etc.) they need. Because the complex links between the built and social infrastructures mean that history weighs significantly on future plans, this paper argues that calls for new venues cannot be the solution to the range of existing issues without engaging more thoroughly with the past.     

GEOGRAPHY OF GENDER ECONOMIC STATUS IN URBAN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA: GHANA, 1960–1984

The economic status of men and women in urban Sub-Saharan Africa has been a central research theme by anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists over the last two decades. Most of this research, although of high quality, has not paid attention to direct comparisons of the economic status of the two genders in urban places in the region. Added to this, only the active or market-oriented population in towns of the region have been studied. Most research on urban gender economic status has been on limited areal scales, and has been couched within the formal-informal-sector framework, resulting in a piecemeal understanding of the total urban economy in the region. This paper provides a geographical and historical framework for interpreting and assessing research on gender economic status in Sub-Saharan Africa, using the Ghanaian urban system as a case study. Au cours des deux dernières décennies, dans les domaines de l'anthropologie, de la sociologie et des sciences politiques, un grand nombre de recherches ont porté sur le statut économique des hommes et des femmes dans l'Afrique urbaine subsaharienne. Bien que ces recherches soient d'une très haute qualité, la majorité d'entre elles ne font aucune comparaison directe entre les différences entre le statut économique des hommes et celui des femmes dans les milieux urbains. De plus, ces études ne portent que sur les populations actives ou sur les personnes qui participent à l'économie de marché dans les villes de la région qu'on étudie. La plupart des recherches sur le statut économique des deux sexes dans les milieux urbains se rapportent à des espaces délimités et à des moments particuliers (sans considérer les changements qui surviennent pendant une période de temps plus étendue). De plus, ces études sont formulées dans un cadre sectoriel formel-informel, ce qui a abouti à une compréhension fragmentée de l'ensemble de l'économie urbaine de la région. Cet article se base sur l'étude de cas d'un système urbain ghanéen pour fournir un cadre géographique et historique qui servira de base d'interprétation et d'évaluation des recherches portant sur le statut économique des deux sexes en Afrique subsaharienne.