Paper long abstract:

Author: Justine Dugbazah

Rural women in Ghana confront significant socio-cultural and economic constraints such as lack of access to resources, and relatively lower socio-economic status. This situation is worsened when male members of the household migrate. This results in an increase in women’s productive and unproductive responsibilities. Yet in spite of the increased responsibilities of women, their position in the households and community remains the same. Women mediate this complex situation by aspirations for and participation in new patterns of socio-economic structures. In this article, I examine the negotiations that occur regarding women’s identities, their position and roles within rural migrant households in Ghana. The paper argues that these negotiations serve as important sites of cultural struggle in which women seek to construct new identities and contest their marginalization within the wider society, albeit with conflicting and often ambivalent results. This paper will focus on the experiences of rural women in the Ho District of Ghana.