Nana Akua Anyidoho

• PhD (Human Development and Social Policy, Northwestern University), B.A. (Psychology, Univ of Ghana),
• Associate Professor & Director at University of Ghana

Andrea Cornwall and Nana Akua Anyidoho critically examine empowerment in an introduction to how to go beyond mainstream interpretations of empowerment to discover what is happening in women's lives that is bringing about positive change.

The massification of higher education, fuelled in part by demand from young people and their families, has coincided with more competition in the graduate labour market. This article seeks insight into the interpretative framework through which graduates view the relationship between higher education and the labour market. Specifically, given evide...

Much has been made of the potential of the digital economy to provide women with new or increased work opportunities. Our study brings nuance to this narrative by investigating the extent to which, within the socioeconomic context of Ghana, different categories of women are able to leverage opportunities in the growing digital economy. Based on int...

The common assumption that informal economies are untaxed has underpinned arguments that they represent an ‘untapped goldmine’ for government coffers. However, there has been limited empirical engagement with this assumption. While some studies have highlighted that many informal businesses pay both formal and informal taxes, there has been little...

International and domestic policymakers have long assumed that informal economies represent an ‘untapped goldmine’ for government coffers. While recent research has highlighted that many informal businesses do pay a range of formal and informal taxes, there has, to date, been little systematic account of their tax burdens. Using a novel dataset of...

In recent years, governments in low‐income countries have increasingly introduced taxes on mobile money transfers. These are often explicitly promoted as a way of taxing informal economic activity, but critics have noted their potential negative impact on lower income groups and specifically those in the informal sector. Yet there is virtually no e...

This paper presents a typology to highlight and describe the variation in attitudes among young farmers in rural Ghana, a group that has been treated in policy discourses and in development practice as largely homogenous. It further identifies motivations and aspirations associated with each type. A cluster analysis of survey data from 120 responde...

Motivation: Youth employment has become an urgent policy issue in Africa. Half of the population is under 25 years old on a continent in which job creation lags behind economic growth. Consequently, policy-makers have increasingly proposed self-employment as a solu- tion to the challenge of youth unemployment. Purpose: This study examines self-emp...

An emerging orthodoxy supports the proposition that the rural economy – built around agriculture but encompassing much more – will serve as sweet spot of employment opportunities for many millions of young people into the foreseeable future. However, our understanding of how rural young people in Africa take advantage of processes of rural transfor...

Gender denotes the social prescriptions associated with biological sex in regard to roles, behavior, appearance, cognition, emotions, and so on. Social relations of gender or gender relations encompass all relationships in which gender sub- jectivities play a role, including those among people, and between people and the institutions, systems, and...

The question of whether social movements can catalyze change has preoccupied researchers but an understanding of how such change can be created is equally important. Specifically, there has been little investigation of how women's movements engage in the process of implementation of women's rights laws. We use a case study of Ghana's Domestic Viole...

The youth in Africa have been an important political force and performed a wide range of roles in the political field as voters, activists, party members, members of parliament, ministers, party "foot soldiers," and apparatchiks. Although political parties, govern­ ments, and other political leaders often exploit young people's political activity,...

The post-secular turn in feminist theorizing has been hailed as a relatively new development, but some have pointed to the ‘the long history of coexistence and contestations between religious and secular feminists approaches’ (Smiet 2015, p.7). The lower visibility or silencing of this tradition can be seen as part of a broader history of marginali...

While older farmers are less likely to well adopt good agricultural practices and are more risk averse in farm investments, young cocoa farmers are more likely to well adopt good agricultural practices to enhance yields. This rationale is partly behind the drive to bring more young people into cocoa farming with the government, donor agencies and c...

The informal sector in Ghana is characterised by precarious conditions of work and high rates of poverty and, for these reasons, Ghanaian women’s participation in the sector has received sympathetic attention in the literature. By contrast, their work in the presumably more secure and rewarding formal sector—including the banking industry—has been...

[Paper available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12571-016-0646-y] An emerging orthodoxy suggests that agriculture is the key to addressing the youth employment challenge in Africa. The analysis that informs this orthodoxy identifies a number of persistent barriers to increased pro- ductivity; and the programmes that work to get young...

The concept of participation puts people – their priorities, knowledge, assets and well-being – at the centre of development. Participation encourages the recognition of ordinary persons as social actors who exercise agency in cognition and behaviour. As currently conceived, however, participation does not fully account for the complexity of indivi...

This paper investigates the ways in which linkages between the informal and formal segments of an economy may yield benefits to or impose costs upon informal workers, based on views of informal traders in Accra regarding their relationships with the formal economy and its institutions. The data are drawn from the Informal Economy Monitoring Study (...

As one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s most politically stable countries, Ghana is an important case study for the ways in which activism is a measure of and a catalyst for social change. The overview we provide here is necessarily brief, and covers only the period of activism since Ghana’s return to democratic rule in 1992 after three decades of alternati...

The perspectives of young people and parents are important to policy that seeks to address youth unemployment in Africa. A systematic understanding of these should help to avoid implementation failure caused by incompatible assumptions or world views, and increase the likelihood that policies promoted by officials will be effective. We present resu...

This paper assesses market development as a sustainable approach to increasing the use of renewable energy, specifically solar, using the case of Ghana's Solar Project. This strategy is intended to overcome some weaknesses of donor-driven and fee-for-service models in sustaining gains beyond the end of projects. The literature shows that developing...

Patriarchy – a social system within which male authority is central to social, political and economic organisation – is a feature of most human societies. Consequently, women’s lives everywhere are marked by distinct patterns of disadvantage on many fronts: at home, in the labour market, and in the larger society. However, women’s experiences are n...

The aim of the study was to examine the factors that make up sustainable production for cocoa farmers in Ghana, focusing on the socio-economic dimensions of sustainability. The research combined two analytical approaches: (a) value chain mapping, which traces linkages from production through to final consumption of a good, including initial inputs,...

The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing was a pivotal moment for legitimating women's rights work in Ghana and served as a powerful framing for women's empowerment. This article explores the Beijing conference and examines its influence on popular notions of and efforts to promote women's empowerment. We argue that the discursive conte...

Changes in the conditions of formal work in Ghana speaks to larger themes of globalization and economic liberalization. While the liberalization of the banking industry in Ghana (a site of formal work) has improved the material rewards of bank work, these benefits are gendered and unequal. Moreover, other conditions of work have become more challen...

This chapter paper examines the current interest in addressing the problem of young people’s unemployment in Africa through agriculture. Using notions of transitions and mobilities we set out a Transformative Work and Opportunity Space framework that privileges difference and diversity among work opportunities, rural areas and young people. We argu...

This article explores local-global interconnections in the context of local rights-based struggles against the adverse impact of gold mining by transnational corporations in Ghana. It examines how a small community-based organisation, WACAM, approached a situation of huge power asymmetry by both mobilising local resistance and developing national a...

Despite the conventional policy wisdom that formal work more closely approximates “decent” work, the process of informalization of the Ghanaian economy increasingly makes difficult a straightforward dichotomy between ‘good’ formal work and ‘bad’ informal work. The paper discusses the nature and impact of the use of employment agencies in the bankin...

Recent statistics show the majority of workers in developing countries earn their livelihoods in the informal economy. The Informal Economy Monitoring Study (IEMS) is a qualitative and quantitative study designed to evaluate the reality for these workers’ lives. With research conducted over three years in 10 cities, the IEMS aims to provide credibl...

This article assesses the potential of rights-based approaches as a progressive development strategy by exploring the extent to which rights can be made real for people living in conditions of material deprivation and social oppression. It does so through a case study of Belim Wusa Development Agency (BEWDA), a small rights-promoting non-government...

Following the round of UN Conferences on Women from the 1970s to 1990s, many states in the developing world established national machineries to first ‘integrate women into development,’ and later to spearhead the task of gender mainstreaming adopted in the Beijing Platform of Action. Analyses of these national machineries in different African count...

This chapter investigates the prospects and challenges for securing human rights through civic action in Ghana. On the spectrum of political contexts that are covered in this book, currently Ghana represents a relatively stable democratic setting, given the progress made in consolidating democracy since the return to multiparty democracy in 1992. T...

In introducing this collection of articles we argue that policy framing and policy responses to the ‘problem’ of young people and agriculture in Africa are hampered by a lack of research and evidence that is theoretically and historically informed, conceptually sound and context sensitive. The result is policy that is well intentioned, but unlikely...

This article considers the question of young people's aspirations in agriculture in light of the renewed interest in the agricultural sector as a viable basis for development in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), and the perception that young people's involvement is important for the success of this project. Life choices and outcomes are affected in part by...

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; ""; }.MsoChpDefault { ; }.MsoPapDefault { margin-bottom: 10pt; }div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1; } Micro-credit has become a common tool in the development kit and is commonly offered up as an anti-poverty and empowerment strategy for women. The assumption...

The Enhancing Child Nutrition through Animal Source Food Management (ENAM) project, part of the Global Livestock Collaborative Research Support Program (GLCRSP), integrated a microcredit and savings program with entrepreneurial and nutrition education to strengthen women’s income-generation activities with the intent of increasing women’s (caregive...

The Afram Plains are a fascinating reference point for thinking about development in Ghana. They are a recurrent site of experimentation in development programming, and yet remain persistently ‘undeveloped’ by all accounts. This paradox is the reason I chose to conduct research in the Afram Plains District. I took the case of one income-generating...

The continued interest in political economy-inspired perspectives on economic and social policies is an attempt to understand policymakers as human beings who are influenced by values, votes and other factors that were once thought to be exogenous to policy choices. However, there is still little theorising about those on the other side of the poli...

The Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research consortium provided an opportunity for hub researchers to plan and conduct research on some common themes (policy processes and discourses on empowerment; work and changes and continuities in women’s everyday lives; popular culture; women in local governance structures), and to be in continuous dialogue...

This paper examines the linked themes of identity and knowledge production embedded within the concept of insider scholarship. Insider scholarship may be described as the production of knowledge by a scholar about a group with which s/he identifies as a member. We are immediately compelled to complicate this definition by asking how any such group...

Successive post-independence governments have embraced women's empowerment in one form or another, either because of their own ideological positioning, or because of demands by their ‘donor friends/partners’ and/or organized domestic groups and NGOs. What has emerged is a varied landscape on women's rights and empowerment work comprising the state...

'The myth of community' permeates both the understanding and the practice of participatory development. Yet the idea that communities exist as coherent units of people who inhabit bounded geographic spaces and are ready to be mobilised for development restricts the very agency that participation promises. This article offers an alternative model of...

Recent debates in Ghana over the English-only educational policy have brought into sharp focus ideological and political concerns, making necessary a reexamination of this all too familiar but still contested terrain. In this paper we theorize about the factors that shaped the policy, but which remained as subtexts in the Minister’s announcement. W...

This paper analyzes archived newspaper articles for public perspectives and experiences of social exclusion in the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of Ghana’s independence, dubbed Ghana@50. We make connections between exclusion in the context of this specific event and historical and systematic marginalization in the larger projects of nati...

When we speak of our dreams as a nation, we tend to use the prosaic language of ‘development’. Development features strongly in our conversations and policy discourse - even though its processes are arduous and its goals frustratingly elusive - it is because it taps into something fundamental to us as human beings. Development is simply the natural...

Customary institutions with proprietary interest in land are compelled to adapt to variable economic and political environments or face the threat of redundancy. Among the confluences of dynamic forces that exert pressure on customary land systems are the increasing commercialization of land; the burgeoning demand that exceeds supply in many parts...

If a person's internalized and evolving life story (narrative identity) is to be considered an integral feature of personality itself, then aspects of that story should manifest some continuity over time while also providing evidence regarding important personality change. Accordingly, college freshmen and seniors provided detailed written accounts...

This paper examines the linked themes of identity and knowledge production embedded within the notion of insider scholarship. Insider scholarship can be simplistically defined as producing knowledge about and within a group with which one identifies as a member. However, how groups are delineated and what constitutes membership are not so simply de...

This paper investigates the ways in which linkages between the informal and formal segments of an economy yield benefits to, or impose costs upon, informal workers. The investigation is based on the self- report of market and street vendors in Accra regarding their relationships with the formal economy and its institutions. The data are drawn from...

Dispositional traits and life narratives represent two different levels of personality that have not previously been empirically linked. The current study tested five hypotheses connecting Big-Five traits to life-narrative indices of emotional tone, theme, and structure. Students (Study 1) and adults (Study 2) completed a self-report measure of the...

The literature on development abounds with instances of "failed" interventions when target populations have ignored, resisted or have been, in other ways, non-compliant with policymakers' expectations. This dissertation examines how people make sense of policy, which is a necessary first step to understanding why they respond to it in the ways they...