Where have all the Workers Gone? Labour and Work in Ghana, 1951-2010
Lead Research Organisation:
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
Department Name: History Faculty
Abstract
This project for the first time systematically combines economic and social history perspectives on the post-colonial era in Africa; a period of labour history so far lacking long-term studies. Taking the example of Ghana, it tries out a distinctive blend of approaches, combining the systematic use of both qualitative and quantitative sources, addressing recent debates both in labour and economic history, and combining a range of local studies with a national overview.
The project addresses two partly conflicting trends in history and historiography. One is the tendency to analyse work "beyond wage labour" and focus increasingly on "informal" and "precarious" labour. This matches a critique of older assumptions that Africa would reproduce European patterns by becoming "proletarianized", with wage labour as the dominant form. Instead, the argument goes, the number of regular wage workers in postcolonial Africa did not grow as expected, while it was the category variously known as customary, informal or precarious labour that grew. The second trend includes the finding that the incidence of wage labour especially in rural areas across the continent has been seriously underestimated.
This combination of observations is the starting point for an in-depth study of labour trends in decolonizing and independent Africa. Ghana makes an apt case study, because there is substantial labour historiography for the colonial era, and potentially excellent primary material for the post-colonial. It was in Ghana that the term "informal sector" was coined, and Ghana epitomises a broader African contrast in economic growth rates and labour relations between the earlier and more recent periods since independence. The project will develop a national overview but focus in detail on three areas - Accra, a cocoa-growing region, and a northern savanna region - selected to represent different aspects of the experience of labour. Research questions include the changing size and composition of the workforce, the changing structure of forms of occupations and employment, the real earnings of labour, labour market integration, the structure of informal work and entrepreneurship, migrant flows and regional inequality, and the relation between poverty, precariousness and work. All these issues are strongly gendered. Sources include interviews, official and unofficial archives, surveys, censuses, newspapers and court records.
The cooperation between the German and British PIs offers combined expertise that forms the indispensable basis for the comprehensive approach envisaged in this project. Special emphasis is put on the participation of Ghanaian scholars. Two experienced scholars employed at Ghanaian universities will be involved as consultants, contributing expert advice as well as individual chapters. Moreover, early-career as well as senior scholars from Ghana will take part in workshops and other project-related activities.
The project addresses two partly conflicting trends in history and historiography. One is the tendency to analyse work "beyond wage labour" and focus increasingly on "informal" and "precarious" labour. This matches a critique of older assumptions that Africa would reproduce European patterns by becoming "proletarianized", with wage labour as the dominant form. Instead, the argument goes, the number of regular wage workers in postcolonial Africa did not grow as expected, while it was the category variously known as customary, informal or precarious labour that grew. The second trend includes the finding that the incidence of wage labour especially in rural areas across the continent has been seriously underestimated.
This combination of observations is the starting point for an in-depth study of labour trends in decolonizing and independent Africa. Ghana makes an apt case study, because there is substantial labour historiography for the colonial era, and potentially excellent primary material for the post-colonial. It was in Ghana that the term "informal sector" was coined, and Ghana epitomises a broader African contrast in economic growth rates and labour relations between the earlier and more recent periods since independence. The project will develop a national overview but focus in detail on three areas - Accra, a cocoa-growing region, and a northern savanna region - selected to represent different aspects of the experience of labour. Research questions include the changing size and composition of the workforce, the changing structure of forms of occupations and employment, the real earnings of labour, labour market integration, the structure of informal work and entrepreneurship, migrant flows and regional inequality, and the relation between poverty, precariousness and work. All these issues are strongly gendered. Sources include interviews, official and unofficial archives, surveys, censuses, newspapers and court records.
The cooperation between the German and British PIs offers combined expertise that forms the indispensable basis for the comprehensive approach envisaged in this project. Special emphasis is put on the participation of Ghanaian scholars. Two experienced scholars employed at Ghanaian universities will be involved as consultants, contributing expert advice as well as individual chapters. Moreover, early-career as well as senior scholars from Ghana will take part in workshops and other project-related activities.
Organisations
Publications
| Description | At the time of Independence it was generally expected that the labour relations of African countries would evolve along the path seen in the then-industrialized countries: industrialization, proletarianization, urbanization. By 2000, and to date, the interdisciplinary literature on African labour concluded that only the third of the three predictions is well on the way to fulfilment. Our case-study of Ghana produces three general findings plus an array of sectoral conclusions. 1) Our evidence broadly confirms that the direction of change in labour relations from the decolonization decade to Ghana's entry into its 'oil age' was that the growth of regular wage employment was outpaced by the growth of precarious jobs, and that unemployment, especially among youth, remained a major issue despite the doubling of real GDP per head from the start of economic liberalization in 1983 to the start of oil exports in 2010. 2) There is a major upside. Manufacturing has not taken off, but there has been a transformation of the range of types of employment and of the nature of work because of urbanization. The urban share of the population tripled, to 50% between 1950 and 2010. Agriculture has shrunk as a share of employment, while services have grown fast, reaching 43% in 2010. Though manufacturing has stagnated, there has been a growth in professional, technical, IT and financial services. So the propositions that the long-term direction of change was towards either factory employment, as expected in the 1950s, or on the other hand towards a stagnating agricultural economy, as in some more recent assessments, proved equally inaccurate. The occupational structure of Ghana is significantly more diversified than at independence, the workforce is much better educated, and productive capacity has been developed in a range of service industries. Ghana has moved from a lower to a lower-middle income country, and the improved training of the workforce, and the more diversified structure of employment, both reflect that and have made it possible. 3) The category of 'informal' employment is less clear in recent years than it was in the last century: firms in activities previously regarded as 'informal' were, by the 2000s, no longer really beyond the scope of state licensing, regulation and taxation - rather weak as these state interventions may remain. 4) An example of the sectoral findings is the work of one of the PhD students, Felix Yaw Amenorhu, on employment in rice farming in northern Ghana. He notes that the labour market in rice growing originated with state investment in rice in the 1970s. Drawing especially on the seven rounds of the Ghana Living Standards survey to date, he finds that the labour force transitioned from overwhelmingly comprising household labour towards a mix of household and, increasingly, hired labour. He also finds that females overtook males in the hired-labour force in the 2000s, ands that the relative decline of household labour is partly attributable to the growth of school enrolment for teenagers. This is one of seven work packages, each with their own findings. |
| Exploitation Route | We anticipate that our final conclusions and data, and the types of inquiry in which we have engaged, will be taken forward by scholars across several disciplines. The relative optimism of the second finding should find considerable engagement from (be perhaps provocative to) other specialists in labour history and economic development. Some findings will also be relevant for trade unionists, agricultural extension officers and government. Accordingly, we invited members/representatives of practitioner communities to the concluding conference at the University of Ghana in March 2025. |
| Sectors | Agriculture Food and Drink Healthcare Manufacturing including Industrial Biotechology Transport |
| URL | https://ghanalabourhistory.org/ |
| Description | "Where Have All the Workers Gone? Labour and Work in Ghana, 1951-2010" (DO 2989/1-2) applied for by the HU part of our team. Funder is DFG (I can't enter that on next line!) |
| Amount | € 54,400 (EUR) |
| Funding ID | DO 2989/1-2 (DFG) |
| Organisation | Humboldt University of Berlin |
| Sector | Academic/University |
| Country | Germany |
| Start | 11/2025 |
| End | 05/2026 |
| Description | Concluding Conference (Accra), March 2025 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | National |
| Primary Audience | Professional Practitioners |
| Results and Impact | Our concluding conference takes place later this month, in the capital city of the study country, Ghana. The aim is to involve, communicate with, and learn from, professional practitioners who have assisted and interacted with us in the course of our research on the contemporary history of labour and work. In addition to inviting practitioners from different sectors to attend and participate in the conference, from the conference the research team will make a 1-day excursion to visit the major cocoa research centre in the country, in order to discuss with agric research and extension staff from the perspective of our focus on labour. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2025 |
| Description | Project Inception Conference (first workshop) in Elmina, Ghana, 19-20 December 2022 |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The 'Inception Conference' (as it was named by Prof Akua Britwum, consultant on the project, who organised and hosted it) was the first of 3 workshops within this project. It had 3 groups of participants, each of them very important: 1) the research team; 2) colleagues at Ghanaian universities working on related issues who could (and did) give us feedback and suggestions; and 3) graduate students, mostly from the host university in Ghana but also a Japanese student doing a PhD in Cambridge (who was in Ghana for her own separate research project). The workshop was extremely useful for all of us, a) because it gave every team member a deadline for finishing an initial paper, b) because of what we learned from the excellent guest lecture by Prof Akosua Darkwah (University of Ghana) and several discussants from the University of Cape Coast (UCC), plus other participants who contributed to the discussion, c) because it gave us an opportunity at the end to reflect and refine our next steps; d) as a result of the contacts and conversations at the workshop, we anticipate inviting Prof Darkwah to contribute to the final edited volume. The project succeeded in engaging a wider academic audience (from research-masters' students to professors) at UCC. Please see the REPORT on the conference, on the project website (under 'News & Events'). The report was largely compiled by Prof Britwum, hence the abundance of photographs. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2022 |
| URL | https://www.labouringhana.com/ |
| Description | Project Midway Workshop |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Participation in an activity, workshop or similar |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Study participants or study members |
| Results and Impact | The Midway Workshop for the project was held on 24-25 July 2023 at King's College, Cambridge. It was organised and hosted by the UK PI, Gareth Austin. This second of three workshops was partly intended to engage with a wider audience, comprising both expert commentators and postgraduate students. It was also, and primarily, intended to enable the team to take stock and reflect critically on our research to date, and discuss how each work-package, and the project as a whole, could best be pursued and completed. The Workshop was intended to mark the approximate halfway point of the project. In practice, in a sense it was less than halfway, because the two doctoral researchers (Felix Yao Amenorhu and Felix Hedvig Lagercrantz), and the postdoctoral research assistant (Igor Martins), began their employment by the project at the beginning of the European 2022-2023 academic year, so for them this was not even one year in. The workshop was no less productive for this. Each member of the research team presented their individual work to date: their aims, sources and methods, and their provisional conclusions. So there were papers from Amenorhu, Austin, Lagercrantz, and also Akua Britwum (consultant from the University of Cape Coast), Andreas Eckert (the German PI), and Nana Yaw Sapong (consultant from the University of Ghana). Feedback and suggestions were provided for the second half of the project, plus wider reflections on the significance of the findings for the contemporary labour history of Ghana and Africa. We were fortunate to have excellent, detailed comments from two distinguished discussants, Dr Cyrelene Amoah-Boampong (University of Ghana) and Professor Paul Nugent (University of Edinburgh). Three Cambridge PhD students also attended, making valuable contributions to the conversation: Muhammed Alakitan (from Nigeria), Sakae Gustafson (Japan), and Reetika Subramanian (India). For a longer REPORT, including abstracts of papers and summaries of discussions, please see the project website, under 'News & Events'. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.labouringhana.com/ |
| Description | Project Website: https://www.labouringhana.com/ |
| Form Of Engagement Activity | Engagement focused website, blog or social media channel |
| Part Of Official Scheme? | No |
| Geographic Reach | International |
| Primary Audience | Postgraduate students |
| Results and Impact | The website is intended to inform and interest wider academic and educational audiences. The site was developed by Dr Igor Martins, the Postdoctoral Researcher on the team. It only went public two days ago, 13 March. But Igor and I have already publicised it to people attending an online seminar in African Economic History, and are sending an announcement and link to the African Economic History Network asking that it be included in their next newsletter, which goes to 100-200 people, mostly faculty and graduate students. The Berlin-based members of the team, especially Prof Andreas Eckert, will publicise it among social and labour historians internationally. The 3 Ghanaian participants in the project will publicise it widely, so we are confident that it will reach colleagues, graduate students, undergraduate students, perhaps secondary school students in Ghana, and a limited number of the general public, especially in Ghana. For this report, I ticked the box '51-100' people: which is more than can have visited it since it opened so recently, but a lot less than are likely to have visited the site by the time of the next report. It is too early to answer the next question, so I have selected 'Requests for further information' as the most likely. |
| Year(s) Of Engagement Activity | 2023 |
| URL | https://www.labouringhana.com/ |