Feminist contributions to geography coming from, and focused on, Ghana

Abstract

This is a brief discussion of feminist and gender-focused geography from Ghana. I am deeply indebted to the work of Mariama Awumbila at the University of Ghana (UG), a geographer who has written elsewhere on the development of feminist and gender-focused research in Ghana, in African institutions, and by African scholars (see Awumbila 2007a, 2007b). Women’s activism and scholarship in sub-Saharan Africa is sometimes labeled “feminist,” but the term is controversially linked to Western ideas. Today in Ghana, young women may embrace issues of equality and empowerment but shun the label as elitist, while older women more readily identify with it (Bawa 2018). Recognizing this, in this piece I cautiously refer to feminism in Ghana in discussing the relationship between women’s rights activism in the first few decades of Ghana’s nationhood and the development of practice and scholarship aimed at addressing gender inequalities that involved activist-academics (Bawa 2018), but I will also refer more broadly to scholarship as gender-focused. I begin with a brief discussion of the development of feminist and gender-focused scholarship in Ghana. I then speak to the progress made over the last decade since Awumbila’s reviews were published. I will briefly examine the contributions made by geographers both from within and outside of Ghana who have contributed to the documentation of women and gender dynamics in Ghanaian societies, and have worked to critique feminist and gendered analyses imported from global North contexts.