This dissertation explores how people use creative linguistic techniques to address the communication uncertainties that arise between self and others in West African zongos (“traveler’s camps” or “stranger’s quarters”). Found throughout the region, zongos are characterized by the mobility of their populations, their social marginality, and ethnic diversity. They reflect a long history in which Muslim travelers—clerics, traders, and explorers—constructed economic, religious, and political ties with their indigenous hosts in unfamiliar places. The research focused specifically on how the inhabitants Nima Zongo in Accra, Ghana negotiated intersubjective uncertainties in a place where everyone saw everyone else as a stranger. Based on eighteen months of continuous fieldwork from 2018 to 2020, I employed a combination of ethnographic methods, mapping techniques, linguistic analysis, and visual representation to show how individuals living in the Nima Zongo addressed this problem by using folded speech (karin magana in Hausa). This is a cryptic communicative practice in which enigmatic phrases (“The world is nothing,” “Love your friends, but don’t trust them,” “If you give kindness, you receive wickedness in return”) combine different stances, ideas, or materialities that are not typically (or should not be) linked together to address dispositions of uncertainty that arise between self and other. I demonstrate how karin magana’s linguistic structure, symbolism, and indirectness combine to propel the listener into an imaginative to-and-fro mode of trying on different perspectives. This cognitive process has the potential to help speakers and listeners find ways to, as my interlocutors put it, “keep traveling together,” a mode of being in the world that keeps stability and instability in productive tension. Rather than resolving uncertainty through security or stability, I argue that the practice of folded speech serves as an invitation to entangle with conflicting ideas to keep doubt, questioning, and possibilities problematically at play. The research contributes to the anthropology of uncertainty by not only illuminating how people employ such imaginative strategies but also by questioning the tendency to assume that stasis and stability are states towards which people universally strive. / 2025-09-25T00:00:00Z

The thesis empirically examines how microfinance products are designed and implemented, and the implications for clients’ households and sources of livelihood. The study argues that the design of products and implementation that reflect the livelihood needs and poverty context of clients is one of the effective ways to reduce poverty. It investigates the microfinance operations of three financial institutions: Sinapi Aba Trust (SAT), St Joseph’s Cooperative Credit Union (CCU) and Sonzele Rural Bank (SRB) in Jirapa, a municipality in Northern Ghana. The study deployed a mixed-methods approach to collect data from six rural and urban communities. Data was sought from secondary sources, 20 interviews, 10 focus group discussions and 120 questionnaires. The research adopted the Sustainable Livelihoods and the Making Markets Work for the Poor approaches as a guide in the framework of analysis. The study, using qualitative and quantitative analytical tools found that product designs of SAT and SRB did not reflect the needs and poverty context of the majority of their clients. Clients of SAT and SRB were found to be less involved in the product design processes, suggesting a top-down institutional approach that seldom incorporated the needs of the poor. The method of group formation has a substantial implication on members’ poverty outcomes. Groups involving only females had a significant and positive relationship with members’ household and business outcomes, while members of male-only groups had a negative relationship with their household outcomes. The thesis concludes that accessible interest on loans and incentives to encourage savings would make microfinance markets work more sustainably for the rural poor. The findings challenge a reconsideration of the design of microfinance products to integrate financial technology as an efficient approach to deliver financial services, especially in rural areas.

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The issue of the image of African countries in European media is an age-long one which has resurfaced in recent times. Eyebrows have been raised over the image of African countries in Europe and other Western Media which is always touted to be negative.The question about how the EU is reported in the African media has however been relegated to the background. This study therefore used content analysis to unearth how the EU and its member countries are reported in the African Media particularly in the Daily Graphic, a leading Daily Newspaper in Ghana in two separate years of 1998 and 2008 and whether what is reported reflects colonial ties between EU member countries and their former colonies in Africa. The study which used both quantitative and qualitative methods of research also sought to investigate the power relations between African media and their European counterpart, the sources of the stories were examined to find out whether they are stories written by European media or in-depth analysis of issues written by Ghanaian or African reporters. Special emphasis was placed on issues around trade and aid between Africa and the European Union which comes across as the key issues. The years 1998 and 2008 were selected because it has a ten year interval in which one can assess whether coverage of EU related issues in the paper has improved over the last ten years especially as the EU has grown in membership and scope, deepening its process of integration and acquiring new responsibilities in the world.Findings of the study indicated a strong tie between some EU member countries and their former colonies, (i.e United Kingdom and Ghana).The study also found out that The Daily Graphic simply borrows stories from EU sources and reproduce them with very little or no analysis, comments, or criticisms, of the issues raised that may have implications for the country or Africa’s growth in terms of aid and trade issues. This is a pointer to the fact that European media has been setting the agenda and the Daily Graphic simply follows.The study further revealed the unequal power relations between the EU and for that matter Africa which also reflects in media relations whereby as a result of poor salaries, logistical support and appropriate technology, newspapers in Africa, such as the Daily Graphic are unable to send reporters to the EU headquarters in Brussels to report issues from the African point of view and as such reproduce what has already been reported in the European media by European reporters and sent down through wire services.Again from the study, it is evident that the Daily Graphic does not report regularly on issues on EU- Africa trade and aid. In 1998, aid related issues involving the EU and Africa were only six percent while that of 2008 was 11 percent. Trade related issues involving the EU and Africa recorded nine percent in both years. Also reporters lack of interest in analysis of the issues in feature articles was reflected in 97 percent of news stories in 1998 as against three percent of feature articles in the same year while 2008 recorded a woefully two percent of feature articles as against a whopping 98 percent of news stories.One of the issues that emerged as a surprise was the fact that contrary to expectations, EU related stories not connected to Africa received more coverage than what connects Africa to Europe. This may be an indication that African media gate-keepers are not selecting stories based on the interest of the country or continent but rather still serving their colonial masters under a new colonial empire facilitated by the EU. Theories underpinning colonialism such as Edward Said’s Orientalism, modernization, media and society theories have helped to discuss some of the issues under focus.

As former colonies and newly independent states of the ‘Third World’ organized internationally around anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, Ghana became a key site in debates over development at the height of the Cold War. Contributing to the new economic and political history of postcolonial Ghana, this study examines the national development visions and international political-economic connections of the Nkrumaist state 1957-66 and the first year under the post-coup National Liberation Council through the lens of translocality. Translocality refers to the entanglement of different localities and communities, and in this context, how the idea and practice of national development is co-constituted with these connections. Kwame Nkrumah situated national development as a resource in uniting the African continent against foreign political and economic influence. The Nkrumaist state played a leading role in the formation of the Organization of African Unity, non-alignment, nuclear non-proliferation, and attempts at harmonizing national development continentally. The movements of individuals to Ghana seeking participation within the Nkrumaist project were also racialized and gendered. Women Pan-Africanist activists organized conferences and made internationalist commentaries, making claims for inclusive economic development and participation. Furthermore, Ghanaian national development, dependent on mixed-planning foreign capital, markets, and technologies to finance projects, became increasingly subject to non-national departmental debates and an emerging liberal disciplinary politics through 1962-1966. The International Monetary Fund, Britain and the United States came to a consensus regarding a balance of payments and foreign reserve crisis in Ghana. After a military coup d'état in 1966, the NLC introduced an IMF reform package and embarked on a program of unmaking Nkrumaism. This study contributes to understanding the translocal dynamics of postcolonial development and development discourses. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / I argue that Ghana’s national development from 1957 to 1968 was conceived of, practiced, and situated within, transnational and international connections that can be best understood through the concept of translocality. Translocality refers to the entanglement of different localities and communities, and in this context, how the idea and practice of development cannot be separated from these relational connections. The research supporting this concept contributes to understanding African postcolonial national development in tension and co-constituted with non-national dynamics. As an idea and policy mandate dictated by Kwame Nkrumah, national development was defined as a resource in the struggle for Pan-Africanism but also entangled with the politics of Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and international creditors. These translocal connections are explored through the activisms and commentaries of women Pan-Africanists, activists, and political moderates travelling to Ghana as well as the formal Pan-African diplomacies in pursuit of the economic unification of Africa. Ghana’s development future was also subject to the interdepartmental politics of international creditors and an emerging liberal economic consensus. This study is necessary because it changes our understanding of how the politics of postcolonial development is understood, as co-constituted with non-national political, economic and social dynamics.

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no / Empowering children and young people is often cited as the goal of participation. However projects that seek to empower children and young people show little attempt to define what empowerment means. There is an implied but inadequately explored conceptual link between participation and empowerment. This paper explores the link between participation and empowerment by discussing a research with 15–17 year young people involved in two participatory initiatives in Ghana. The paper discusses the various typologies of children's participation and the concept of power, and concludes that participation does not lead to empowerment. Therefore the increasing theorisation of children and young people's participation as empowerment is flawed. The paper argues that children and young people's participation should instead be conceptualised as recognition and dialogue.