Paper short abstract:

Exploring a co-development project that involved Ghanaian migrants to Italy, the paper aims to investigate how development discourses and practices are envisioned by migrants’ association and diasporic collectivities that are becoming the new development brokers.

Paper long abstract:

By seeking to attract migrants resources, recently Ghanaian governments encouraged hometown associations in the receiving countries to fund development through various local partnership. The activities of sending states, of international organisations and community-based associations apparently converge in normalising "a particular reading of development, which is funded, as Mohan argues, on entrepreneurialism and a self-help, charitable ethos".

This paper scketches out an empirical analysis of a co-development project which involved a Ghananian migrants' association in Italy, the International Organisation for Migration and some relevant Italian economic actors. Ghanacoop, which is the name of the co-development initiative, was a cooperative company trading in fruits and so-called 'ethnic products' between Ghana and Italy and was managed by Ghanaian migrants. The company promoted initiatives and projects that dealt with health, education and sustainable development in Ghana, becoming an important development broker. Due to its entrepreneurial features, Ghanacoop succeeded in opening a new space of political negotiation with Italian and Ghanaian State institutions.

The analysis shows the complexity as well as the peculiarity of a migrants' organisation in which entrepreneurial idiom, development language and transnational identities are combined. Emphasis is given to the Italian representation of the cooperative as a tool for socio-economic development as well as to the historical path of the Ghanaian conceptualisation of the Nation and the role of people's self-help in development.

Based on an ethnographic research, the paper explores how development discourses, practices and projects are envisioned and enacted by Ghanaian migrants to Italy.