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Paper short abstract:

In times of recent multiple crises, urban precarity in southern Ghana is growing among migrant women from the north of the country. Hereby, long fought over translocal achievements of facilitating women’s social mobility in northern Ghana are at risk. How do women experience and navigate this?

Paper long abstract:

Initially a means to secure food security in times of heavy droughts in the early 1980s, women from northern Ghana have established independent practices of translocal labour migration. Ever since, young women continue to move in numbers, predominantly circularly, to Accra and Kumasi, Ghana’s biggest cities, to earn individual and family income. For most women today, this is an ambivalent experience. Due to a widespread lack of formal education and language skills, the majority is tied to job opportunities in the informal load carrying business. 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. Despite these gendered precarities their migration is linked to the hope of social mobility upon return. In fact, returnees enjoy a higher social status and generally widen women’s social and economic room to manoeuvre. However, the recent emergence and intensification of multiple crises in Ghana, ranging from impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to high rates of inflation, have imperilled these achievements. While urban work opportunities have become scarce, migrant women’s income (and its value) has decreased drastically. Based on ethnographic and geographical fieldwork in Ghana between 2007 and 2023 we analyse the recent processes of gendered urban precarity and their translocal impact on women’s social mobility in the region of origin. Hereby, we seek to contribute to the debate on gender, labour and inequality in Africa by highlighting the temporalities and spatialities of gendered precarity in women’s labour migration.