Contribution short abstract:

Ghana’s recent economic turmoil has exacerbated experiences of urban precarity among informal migrant workers and particularly challenged northern Ghanaian women’s translocal social security measures and long fought achievements of social mobility. How do migrant women experience and navigate this?

Contribution long abstract:

Since the early 1980s, women’s rural-urban migration from northern Ghana to the southern cities of Accra and Kumasi is common practice to sustain individual and household livelihoods. Due to a widespread lack of formal education and language skills, the majority is tied to informal job opportunities. The absence of a safe and secure working environment, of sufficient and stable income, and inadequate access to housing and health care foster precarious livelihoods. However, experiences of precarity are ambivalent. Over generations, it has contributed to women’s modest social mobility upon their return home. This achievement is increasingly at risk. Since 2022, Ghana, long considered a model state in West Africa, faces a severe economic crisis. Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine, higher global interest rates and years of excessive borrowing have led to high rates of inflation, and primarily currency depreciation and higher food prices. While urban work opportunities have become scarce, income and its value has decreased drastically. Joint strategies and practices to ease implications of precarious labour, such as migrant women’s translocal informal social security measures, are increasingly under threat. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana between 2007 and 2024 I analyse the recent processes of urban precarity and their translocal impact on women’s social mobility in the region of origin. By highlighting the temporalities and spatialities of precarious migrant labour, I seek to show how migrant women navigate its ambivalences under increasingly challenging conditions of national and global economic turmoil.