ghanaopendata/ghanaian-research-english huggingface dataset:
Gender- and youth-sensitive data collection tools to support decision making for inclusive sustainable agricultural intensification

To achieve equitable sustainable agricultural intensification (SAI), it is essential to understand differential access and control over agricultural resources by women and youth, and to assess how intensification interacts with gendered and age dependent relationships. Existing packages for assessing women’s empowerment in agriculture tend to be large-scale surveys that do not provide timely results, nor are they easily integrated into a gender-transformative process. This paper applies concepts from Kabeer on gender analysis and empowerment to evaluate promising tools available for assessing inequities in SAI and supporting a gender-transformative approach. We interviewed decision makers in Malawi and Ghana to understand their needs and practices for equityanalysis. We evaluated, adapted and tested tools to detect inequities from SAI. Our results demonstrate the suitability of tools to decision makers’ needs for ex-ante assessment and early detection of disparities. We synthesize information from the testing and adaptation of tools about the resources required, the equity issues they can reveal and their potential role in a gender-transformative approach. The use of the tools needs to be part of an inclusive and culturally specific process for identifying gaps and facilitating a more equitable sharing of SAI responsibilities and benefits through iterative cycles of action and learning.

Source: UG
Gender-based Discrimination in the Workplace: A Ghanaian Perspective

Purpose and objectives: The ‘glass escalator’ phenomenon holds that men in female dominated proficiency … can rise quickly to the top. However, they can do also suffer discrimination. This phenomenon is widely recognised in advanced countries. Trained, mostly female nurses have been leaving Ghana in droves for greener pastures abroad, particularly the US and U.K., with serious consequences on the health delivery service in Ghana. Conversely, increasing numbers of males are joining the nursing profession. It examines whether male nurses in Ghana enjoy any hidden advantages, and if so, what makes the men successful (even with their limited numbers) in a women dominated field and what the implications are for both male and female nurse.

Source: UG
Gender-segregated analysis of the poultry value chain in Ghana

This study examined the poultry value chain in the Dormaa District and Sunyani Municipality in the Brong-Ahafo Region of Ghana. A multi-stage sampling procedure was used to obtain cross-sectional data from 203 value chain actors through the administration of a structured questionnaire. The poultry products considered were broilers and layers, and the value chain actors were producers, traders, and processors. The results of the Duncan’s Index of Dissimilarity of 75% revealed that the poultry value chains are highly gender-segregated (i.e., men and women cluster at different levels of the value chain). The producer level of the value chain was dominated by men, and the trader and processor levels were dominated by women. The results regarding value addition and return on investment (ROI) revealed that the producers added the highest value in both the broiler and layer value chains. The producers’ ROI was generally higher in the broiler value chain than in the layer value chain. The male value chain actors were found to add higher value compared to their female counterparts. This was because the men generally operated on larger scales than the women. The study highlights the role of the government, researchers, nutritionists and training institutions for the development of the poultry value chain.

Source: UG
A gendered analysis of living with HIV/AIDS in the Eastern Region of Ghana

Background: A gender gap exists in knowledge regarding persons living with HIV/AIDS in Ghana. Women living with HIV/AIDS (WLHIV) greatly outnumber males living with HIV/AIDS (MLHIV) in Ghana and Sub-Saharan Africa generally. This necessitates more gender-nuanced evidence-based information on HIV/AIDS to guide individuals, healthcare workers, and other stakeholders in Ghana particularly. This paper undertook a gender-focused analysis of the experiences of WLHIV and MLHIV in a municipal area in Ghana which has been most impacted by HIV/AIDS. Methods: In-depth interviews of 38 HIV-positive persons recruited using combined purposive and random sampling for one month, were tape recorded and analyzed using thematic content analysis. Participants were out-patients who were receiving routine care for co-morbidities at two specially equipped HIV/AIDS Voluntary Counseling and Testing Centers in the Lower Manya Krobo Municipality (LMKM), Eastern Region, Ghana. Results: Our data yielded three major themes: characteristics of participants, health status and health seeking behavior, and challenges encountered living with HIV/AIDS. Except for feeling of sadness due to their HIV/AIDSpositive status, there were significant differences in the experiences of MLHIV, compared to WLHIV. WLHIV were more likely to be housing insecure, unemployed due mostly to stigmatization/self-stigmatization, less likely to have revealed their HIV-positive status to multiple family members, and had more profound challenges regarding their healthcare. Most MLHIV expected, demanded, and had support from their wives; WLHIV were mostly single—never married, divorced or widowed (mostly due to HIV/AIDS). The vast majority of WLHIV complained of near-abject poverty, including for most of them, lack of food for taking their anti-retroviral medicines and/or taking it on time. Conclusions: The experiences of the MLHIV and WLHIV with living and coping with the virus mostly differed. These experiences were unequivocally shaped by differential socio-cultural tenets and gendered nuances; WLHIV had more negative experiences. Public education on the extra burden of HIV/AIDS on WLHIV, more social support, and affirmative action in policy decisions in favor of WLHIV in the study district are needed to seek public sympathy and improve health outcomes and livelihoods of WLHIV particularly. Further studies using multiple sites to explore these differences are warranted.

Source: UG
Gendered discourses and pejorative language use: An analysis of YouTube comments on We should all be feminists

Guided by Discourse and Ideology theory, this paper focuses on how authors of the YouTube comments on Chimamanda Adichie’s talk ‘We should all be feminists’ use pejoratives or insults to reinforce or challenge certain gender ideologies and practices. Since feminism is already a thorny issue, Chimamanda’s call for all to be feminists is seen as controversial and, thus, a recipe for inflammatory language use. Under the protection of social media anonymity, some participants therefore attack her, gender groups (or characteristics) or individuals who oppose their views. Emerging themes include perceiving feminism as toxic and women’s success as a potential threat to male ego, among others. The paper concludes that reducing the discussion of such important social issues to insults does not only reify the dichotomy between men and women, which feminism seeks to bridge, but it also waters down the value and relevance of the socio-cultural issues being discussed.

Source: UG
Gendered discourses: Liberia’s ‘Iron Lady’ vs. George Weah

Politics is one field in which patriarchy has enjoyed some level of acceptance over the years. For instance, some researchers (Gidengil and Everitt 1999; Sapiro 1993; Atanga 2007) have indicated that many people have always perceived politics as the field for ‘men’. Accordingly, women who subscribe to the ‘ideals’ of womanhood should not engage in politics. This does not only constrain women’s political ambitions, but it also constructs them as politically weak and unfit for such ‘serious’ business. This assumption has however been challenged by the changing roles of women as they construct multiple identities. In this paper, I discuss two texts (profiles of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and George Weah) from the BBC produced on the Liberian election in 2005, which represent both the traces and changes in patriarchal practices in Africa. Important to this election was that Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf (if elected) was going to be the first female African president– a role perceived as inconsistent with socio-cultural roles of (African) women. So, to what extent was gender (rather than experience) considered a major factor in the BBC’s profiles? The results show that this political discourse is gendered because a man and a woman are the major aspirants. However, the issue of ‘gender’ becomes ‘omni-relevant’ (Holmes 1997) and explicit only in Mrs Johnson-Sirleaf’s profile. This, I argue, is because the text producers perceive her to be ‘the deviant’ one. In this way, her political ambition is presented as a challenge to patriarchy.

Source: UG
Gendered Distributional Impacts Of Ownership Of Mobile Money Account On Farm Input Expenditures: A Micro Perspective From Rural Maize Farmers In Ghana.

This article investigates the distributional impact of mobile money account ownership on farm input expenditures among maize farmers in southern Ghana. Using cross-sectional data from 1044 farm households, we employed an instrumental variable quantile regression to account for endogeneity and selection bias. We find that socioeconomic, spatial location, and institutional factors significantly influence male and female-headed household decisions to own mobile money accounts. The empirics show that male-headed households spend more on fertilizer and pesticide relative to female-headed households. Mobile money account ownership increases fertilizer expenditure in male-headed households more than female-headed households. Male-headed families with mobile money accounts spend 13.9% and 6.5% more on fertilizer at the 40th and 60th quantiles. High 80th quantile female-headed households spend 4.3% more on fertilizer. For male-headed households, farming experience and education positively influence mobile money account ownership on fertilizer expenditure, while off-farm activity at the 40th quantile positively influences female-headed households. Our results distill useful policy implica tions that call for concerted efforts targeted at digital financial inclusion with an eye to bridging differential gender gaps.

Source: UG
Gendered Dynamics of Remitting and Remittance Use in Northern Ghana.

Until recently, the relationship between gender and remittances has received little attention in academic and policy circles. The majority of earlier studies, which largely employed quantitative approaches, suggest clear, gendered patterns of remitting and remittance use in various societies. In recent years, a body of literature has emerged which shows that the relationship between gender and remittances is shaped by social norms of household provisioning. However, most analyses on the relationship between gender and remitting behaviour give too much weight to structure over agency and therefore fail to examine how the relationship between gender and the sending of remittances is mediated by the household context and agency of household members. Drawing on qualitative data collected in Northern Ghana, which is largely a migrant sending region, and one migrant destination (the Greater Accra region), this paper contributes to the emerging body of literature on social norms and the gendered dynamics of remitting and remittance use. In contrast to earlier studies which suggest that there are clear gendered patterns of remitting and remittance use in the different societies, we argue that the relationship between gender and remitting/remittance use is more complex and is shaped by the interaction of social norms on household provisioning, the composition of households and the agency of household members. We demonstrate that, while social norms on gender roles and conjugality tend to produce gendered patterns of remitting, the household context and the agency of the individual household members may sometimes interact to produce remitting behaviours that are not consistent with the general patterns observed in the community.

Source: UG
Gendered health effects of cooking fuel technologies in southern Ghana

The introduction of clean cooking technologies in many developing countries ensures environmental quality and improved well-being through reduction in indoor air pollution. This study examines the adoption of cooking fuel technologies and its effect on health outcomes using panel data from two districts in the Greater Accra region of Ghana. The inverse probability weighting regression adjustment (IPWRA) approach was used to examine the effect of cooking fuel technologies on health outcomes. The empirical results show that factors such as tenancy, kitchen design, assets, gender, education, access to internet and tarred roads influence the adoption of cooking fuel technologies, including clean cooking fuels. The study finds that clean cooking fuels decrease female illness incidence but not male illness incidence, with large improvement for adults. The findings suggest that policies and programs aimed at promoting clean cooking fuel technologies can significantly improve well-being of females in developing countries

Source: UG
Gendered mourning: A perspective of Akan death culture in Ghana

Death is the commonest, incomprehensible, and inescapable reality confronting humanity in all nations and cultures. However, cultures vary in their conceptions of death, grieving and mourning rituals. Among the Akan of Ghana, mourning and funeral obsequies are essential cultural and spiritual practices. In this article, we draw insights from our reflective lived experiences and critical literature review to explore mourning and death rituals among the Akan as a stratified cultural system that reflects and reproduces broader gender patterns of masculinity and femininity in Ghana. We discuss the concept and cultural significance of mourning and bereavement practices, and further examine how socio-cultural notions of gender shape mourning and death rituals in Ghana. We argue that, as in many social and economic spaces in Ghana, funeral obsequies and bereavement practices represent sites for enacting and reproducing masculinity and femininity. The deleterious health and psycho logical consequences for men and women are further discussed.

Source: UG
Gendered Paths to Asset Accumulation? Markets, Savings, and Credit in Developing Countries

An extensive literature shows how property inheritance is biased against women in many developing countries, yet relatively little attention has been given to gender bias in other means of acquiring physical assets, such as the market. Using individual-level data from Ecuador, Ghana, and Karnataka, India, this study analyzes modes of acquisition and financing of housing, agricultural land, other real estate, and businesses. The findings show that women acquire fewer of their assets through the market than men, and that in asset markets, both men and women are more likely to use their own savings than to use credit. The study also analyzes current loans for asset acquisition and finds that, in general, women tend to be somewhat disadvantaged in securing formal bank loans. The results suggest that financial inclusion to promote more gender equal access to accumulation of assets should focus on both savings and credit, with priority to savings.

Source: UG
Gendered Perception of Crime and Safety. Insights from Different socio-economic urban neighbourhoods in Ghana.

Using findings from a household survey and qualitative interviews, this paper explores the gender differences in the level of crime in three different socio-economic neighbourhoods and about the ways in which violence and security issues affect women and men’s mobility in urban spaces. Generally, crime levels were considered low in all three socio-economic neighbourhoods, but there are issues of insecurity and safety. Males considered their communities to be safer than females, as a higher proportion of females than males felt unsafe walking alone, particularly at night, in their neighbourhoods. The fear of victimization among women was particularly felt in the low and middle-class neighbourhoods, and this was due to the absence of basic infrastructure such as proper lighting systems; the presence of gangsters and drug addicts; as well as limited police presence. In effect, poor urban infrastructure and services contributed to feelings of insecurity in such communities. It is therefore important to improve safety and security measures in all types of neighbourhoods, with particular attention paid to middle and low-class neighbourhoods

Source: UG
Gendered Poverty, Migration and Livelihood Strategies of female Porters in Accra, Ghana

In recent years there has been a dominant migration stream from north to south in Ghana of female youths, moving independently of their families, and mainly towards the cities of Accra and Kumasi. Young girls from rural areas, particularly the northern regions move to markets in urban centres to serve as kayayei, female porters, who carry goods on their heads for a negotiated fee. Away from support from their home communities and families, most end up living and working under very poor conditions and are exposed to both physical and reproductive health risks. The paper examines the characteristics of young female migrants working as head load porters (kayayei) in three markets in Accra and their livelihood strategies as they move into the wage market. It also examines the processes through which migration is used to address livelihood needs through an analysis of the intersecting social relations of gender, poverty and vulnerability. It discusses the survival strategies used to overcome poverty and to deal with issues of risk and vulnerability, especially in respect of their reproductive and health rights. The implications for migration policies and poverty reduction strategies are discussed.

Source: UG
Gendered vulnerabilities to climate change: insights from the semi-arid regions of Africa and Asia

Emerging and on-going research indicates that vulnerabilities to impacts of climate change are gendered. Still, policy approaches aimed at strengthening local communities’ adaptive capacity largely fail to recognize the gendered nature of everyday realities and experiences. This paper interrogates some of the emerging evidence in selected semi-arid countries of Africa and Asia from a gender perspective, using water scarcity as an illustrative example. It emphasizes the importance of moving beyond the counting of numbers of men and women to unpacking relations of power, of inclusion and exclusion in decision-making, and challenging cultural beliefs that have denied equal opportunities and rights to differently positioned people, especially those at the bottom of economic and social hierarchies. Such an approach would make policy and practice more relevant to people’s differentiated needs and responses.

Source: UG
Gene diversity, agroecological structure and introgression patterns among village chicken populations across North, West and Central Africa

AbstractBackgroundChickens represent an important animal genetic resource for improving farmers&#8217; income in Africa. The present study provides a comparative analysis of the genetic diversity of village chickens across a subset of African countries. Four hundred seventy-two chickens were sampled in 23 administrative provinces across Cameroon, Benin, Ghana, C&#244;te d&#8217;Ivoire, and Morocco. Geographical coordinates were recorded to analyze the relationships between geographic distribution and genetic diversity. Molecular characterization was performed with a set of 22 microsatellite markers. Five commercial lines, broilers and layers, were also genotyped to investigate potential gene flow. A genetic diversity analysis was conducted both within and between populations.ResultsHigh heterozygosity levels, ranging from 0.51 to 0.67, were reported for all local populations, corresponding to the values usually found in scavenging populations worldwide. Allelic richness varied from 2.04 for a commercial line to 4.84 for one population from C&#244;te d&#8217;Ivoire. Evidence of gene flow between commercial and local populations was observed in Morocco and in Cameroon, which could be related to long-term improvement programs with the distribution of crossbred chicks. The impact of such introgressions seemed rather limited, probably because of poor adaptation of exotic birds to village conditions, and because of the consumers&#8217; preference for local chickens. No such gene flow was observed in Benin, Ghana, and C&#244;te d&#8217;Ivoire, where improvement programs are also less developed. The clustering approach revealed an interesting similarity between local populations found in regions sharing high levels of precipitation, from Cameroon to C&#244;te d&#8217;Ivoire. Restricting the study to Benin, Ghana, and C&#244;te d&#8217;Ivoire, did not result in a typical breed structure but a south-west to north-east gradient was observed. Three genetically differentiated areas (P&#8201;&lt;&#8201;0.01) were identified, matching with Major Farming Systems (namely Tree Crop, Cereal-Root Crop, and Root Crop) described by the FAO.ConclusionsLocal chickens form a highly variable gene pool constituting a valuable resource for human populations. Climatic conditions, farming systems, and cultural practices may influence the genetic diversity of village chickens in Africa. A higher density of markers would be needed to identify more precisely the relative importance of these factors.

Source: UG
Genealogies of Ghana’s housing crisis: the role of colonial interventions and neoliberal reforms

The urgent need to develop and increase housing units has always featured prominently in electioneering campaigns in Ghana. Successive governments have developed countless programmes to deal with the housing deficit, but there has not been a significant improvement. As we write, the government Ghana is grappling with a housing deficit of over two million units. But why has this problem remained intractable despite what seems like concerted efforts by various administrations to provide affordable housing for Ghana’s more vulnerable populations? Focusing on the 2015 National Housing Policy, this article critically reviews Ghana’s various housing policies and reforms. exploring how colonial policies and neoliberal reforms are separately and jointly implicated, in fundamental ways, in Ghana’s currently engulfing housing crisis. Our findings reveal that the yawning gap is noticeable in Ghana’s overall effort at housing provision for the populace is rooted in the colonial logic of piecemeal intervention. This same logic has continued to traverse successive Ghanaian housing policies through the immediate postcolonial era, the adjustment years, and the current period

Source: UG