Traditional Provisioning Responsibilities of Women in Northern Ghana

This chapter uses a feminist political ecology perspective to demonstrate how gender interacts with access to land as a re/productive resource in Tamale, a rapidly urbanizing city in West Africa. The study gives insight into the strategies that vulnerable groups employ to gain access to resources.

An ethnographic field study was carried out over 16 months, taking a case study approach involving interviews, participant observation and focus groups.

Women’s access to land is restricted in order to guarantee their labor for household reproductive tasks and inheritance. Yet they are using various traditional and contemporary strategies to reconcile their landless status with their food provisioning responsibilities. These involve forging networks with individuals and development institutions as well as harvesting and marketing. As land markets accelerate, these strategies become more important, even though they offer no guarantee that a woman can provide what she needs to her household. Formalized institutions aiming to give women access to land do not necessarily fulfill those functions if they are naive of the historical and cultural context.

Marginalization of groups of people, such as women, with regards to resource access is a result of complex interlocking historical processes that are often a result of dominant groups’ efforts to retain power.

We confirm that gender is a primary element organizing access to land. The way this is performed in Northern Ghana results from the construction of tradition through post/colonial, religious and neoliberal contexts.

The originality of this work lies in its use of in-depth ethnographic data.