Farmer resistance to agriculture commercialisation in northern Ghana

Drawing on postcolonial literature and theories of farmer resistance, this article provides an empirically based alternative explanation of African farmer behaviours to narratives that blame them for their lack of technology adoption. Based on six months of ethnographic immersion in one district in the Northern Region of Ghana^a, we identify the ways that farmers defy commercial agriculture investment, government services and non-governmental organisation (NGO) project interventions aimed at intensification, and describe their reasons for doing so. This study interprets farmers’ acts of defiance, such as side-selling or falsely weighting their products, as insights into everyday acts of resistance. We find that throughout Ghana’s postcolonial period, agriculture intensification policy and practice have produced an environment where various development actors and farmers have both a sense of entitlement and mistrust of each other. Farmers’ acts of sabotage may be spaces where they make rational choices based on experiences of historical antecedence, including decades of failed development projects, elite corruption and mismanagement, degrading ecologies and donor hegemony.     

Child Development and Migrant Transnationalism: The Health of Children Who Stay Behind in Ghana and Nigeria

This paper examines the relation between parental migration and children’s health in Ghana (N = 2760) and Nigeria (N = 2168) and considers four dimensions of parental migration: the type of separation, parental migration and the caregiver, stability of care arrangements, and the availability of remittances. By employing an ordered scale of children’s self-rated health, we found that children with international migrant parents who are divorced/separated are less likely than children in non-migrant families to have good health. The magnitude of the effects are higher in Nigeria, attesting for a greater vulnerability of Nigerian children in divorced migrant families. Among children with parents living abroad who are stably married, specific dimensions of children’s transnational life are associated with negative health, while others are not. This study highlights the sensitivity of results to the context of parent-child separation and to the transnational dimension being measured.     

The State Elite,PRSPs and Policy Implementation in Aid-dependent Ghana

This article describes and explains the impact of the donor-driven Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) and the aid modalities surrounding it in Ghana. It focuses on the period in which the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government was in power from 2001 until 2008, but places this within the broader context of aid dependence in Ghana since the 1980s. It is argued that the PRSP documents produced by the government had little impact on implementing policy actions, but rather their function was to secure debt relief and the continuation of foreign aid from official donors. The article examines what was actually implemented during the NPP government and the factors that influenced those actions. More generally it highlights the constraints Ghanaian governments have faced in pursuing economic transformation within contemporary domestic and international contexts.     

Persistent poverty in North East Ghana

This paper explores local poverty and wealth inequality in the Upper East Region of northern Ghana in the period from 1975–89. Land was not scarce and the social management of household membership and household labour were critical to household security, but this social management was not independent of wealth status. There was a virtuous circle between wealth and household labour supply and a vicious circle between poverty and small household size. Poverty traps existed so that those with too little labour and too little wealth engaged in strategies which entrenched them in poverty.     

The Philosophy of the Revolution: Thoughts on Modernizing Islamic Schools in Ghana

This article examines the historical distaste for secular education within the Muslim communities of Ghana and the growing enthusiasm of Ghana’s Ministry of Education in transforming Qur’anic schools to integrate secular subjects. The popularity of the Qur’anic schools has remained as places—either under trees, at courtyards, or at street corners—where pupils simply recited the Qur’an, relevant only because it is fundamentally religious. The article argues that the contemporary philosophical foundations of Islamic education ought to be based upon the provision of Islamic learning that ensures not only taqwa or the fear of Allah but also renders students’ faith unshakeable for the modernization efforts of incorporating technical and scientific learning at the Qur’anic schools to become acceptable. The article concludes that the recent structural and pedagogical changes taking place at the Makaranta or recitation schools go beyond philosophical reconciliations to harnessing the combined benefits of Islamic and secular education for the good of the nation.     

Public Administrators Under Democratic Governance in Ghana

The politicization of the public service has been the subject of scholarly interest and debate. This article based on a desk study makes a contribution to this debate by examining the constitutional, legal, and political framework and environment within which public administrators operate in Ghana since the return to constitutional rule in 1993. It discusses the participation of public administrators in partisan politics and the challenges faced as well as benchmarking the Ghanaian experience against some countries. The article found that there has been growing politicization of the public service and an increase in the number of public administrators in partisan politics. The Ghanaian case reinforces the highly intense political environment within which public administrators operate and the myth of the politics-administration dichotomy.     

Domestic credit and the balance of payments in Ghana

This model strives to assess the relationship between domestic credit and the balance of payments in Ghana during the 1961—75 period in an effort to guide policymakers in generating credit policies aimed at reaching a particular balance of payments objective. An equation is derived and estimated which specifies the relationship between domestic credit, exports, capital flows, and net foreign assets within a constraint imposing balance of payments equilibrium. The general conclusions of the analysis are that excessive increases in domestic credit were the principal cause for the balance of payments deficits incurred by Ghana during the period considered.