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Paper short abstract

Female tomato traders in Ghana offer a possible vantage point to explore agrifood resilience, showing how women’s intersecting social and economic networks shape responses to digital transformation and underpin sustainable, equitable food‑security futures through female agency.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how gender, technology, and inequality intersect within Ghana’s fresh tomato value chain by foregrounding the experiences and positionality of female wholesale traders. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork (2024–2025), I analyse how these women navigate a food system shaped by climate volatility, market uncertainty, and a strong female monopoly on the marketing of fresh tomatoes based on relational economic and social network activities. While policy narratives increasingly promote digital agriculture and climate‑smart solutions as pathways to resilience, such interventions often overlook the informal infrastructures through which most fresh food circulates in Ghana. Female traders—despite being central to the functioning of the agrifood system— often remain excluded from technological innovation programs, credit schemes, and market information platforms tailored primarily to farmers or formalised actors. Simultaneously, they are disproportionately blamed for price increases.

Through a feminist political economy lens, the paper shows how traders rely on long‑standing social relations, collective practices, and kinship‑based networks to manage risk, stabilise supply, and reorganise labour in response to environmental and market shocks. Their everyday strategies reveal forms of resilience and economic governance that operate outside techno‑centric logics, while simultaneously exposing deeply gendered inequalities in access to land, capital, and decision‑making power.

By situating traders’ experiences within broader political‑economic discourse, the paper raises the question of how traders may act as a vantage point for (digital) transformation. It argues that equitable agrarian futures require recognising and engaging with the informal, gendered institutions that sustain food systems across the Global South.