Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This poster presents research on the relationships between education, “health knowledge” (beliefs about disease causation), and child health behaviors and outcomes in Ghana, West Africa. The research includes two sources of primary data: 1) quantitative analysis of a representative survey of 2500 respondents conducted January-July 2002 in coastal Ghana and, 2) qualitative research on health knowledge and behaviors to be conducted in January 2003. Preliminary fieldwork in coastal Ghana in 2001 highlighted an apparent disconnect between knowledge of disease etiology and health behaviors; respondents expressed high levels of health knowledge (e.g., reported hygiene- and contagion-related causes of child illness), but practiced relatively low levels of household hygiene.

Although child survival has generally increased in sub-Saharan Africa over the past several decades, the region continues to suffer from high levels of infant and child mortality. Moreover, the experience of child illness and death is not uniformly distributed throughout the region; large differentials in infant and child morbidity and mortality occur by demographic, social, economic, and geographic characteristics. This research is aimed at exploring some of the determinants of child health in Ghana.

Theories of mortality change and the determinants of child health inform this research design. Preston and Haines (1991), in their analysis of child mortality in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century, identified health “know how” – acceptance of the germ theory of disease causality and associated hygienic practices – as an important determinant of mortality decline. Moreover, Preston (1985) theorized that health knowledge was a product of formal education. Similarly, Caldwell (1979), in research in Nigeria, hypothesized that maternal education has an independent and direct effect on child health, and identified health knowledge as one causal mechanism through which education operates. Yet despite theorists’ emphasis on the importance of health beliefs in morbidity and mortality research, empirical research on this topic in Ghana is limited.

Toward exploring health knowledge as an intermediate variable in the education-child survival relationship and investigating health knowledge in a representative sample, this study includes primary data collection with a population-based survey of 1300 households in coastal Ghana, as well as follow-up qualitative research on child health beliefs and practices to begin in January 2003. This poster presentation will emphasize the results of both the quantitative and qualitative research on knowledge of symptoms, causes, prevention and treatment behaviors with respect to three serious child illnesses in Ghana: malaria, diarrheal disease, and respiratory infection.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This study examined the media policies regarding the international flow of programs on four television stations in Ghana specifically, Ghana Television (GTV), TV3, Metro TV, and Crystal TV, during the period of 1969 and 2003. The emergence of media policies including censorship in Ghana showed that television has transitioned from the role of development to that of reflecting the global and local phenomena.

The qualitative content analysis approach was employed to analyze the contents of television program guides and the results were related to the issues of development, dependency, globalization, and localization. The media policies in Ghana and the language of transmission were also discussed.

The findings showed more local than global programs on GTV during the period under study. In contrast, there were more global than local programs on TV3, Metro TV, and Crystal TV. Most of the global programs in the categories of news, sports, sit-com, soap/drama, and action/adventure, were from the USA though others came from Europe, Asia, and other African nations. Also, media policies exist, by ways of an act of the constitution of Ghana in 1992 and broadcasting standards responding to globalization.

Globalization has a wide scope with dimensions of culture, and communication including the media in Ghana. The quest to maintain national identity through media policies coupled with the selection of specific foreign programs, in the face of globalization, yield evidence of complex interactions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The social regulation of rights to allocate and use land is of critical importance in the development of the predominantly agrarian economies of West Africa. Increasing conflict over land takes place within a context of legal pluralism, where customary systems are still dominant, but to different degrees and within different legal contexts. This paper compares the cases of Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire, which illustrate contrasting forms of legal pluralism, and analyses the effectiveness and equitability of a wide range of state and non-state institutions for providing accessible dispute resolution. It concludes that state courts serve a real need for authoritative remedies and should be enhanced and supported. The introduction of ADRS also needs state support. Customary or traditional justice systems have played a key role in protecting land rights where they have been legalised by the state, as in Ghana. But where there are powerful chieftaincies, as in southern Ghana, they are not necessarily suited to ADR solutions because of their formality and embeddedness in local power structures. Situations of polarised inter-communal conflict as in Cote d’Ivoire also undermine their capacity to be effective.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This conference paper examines the transnational activism of a group of black women radicals who traveled to Africa during the 1960s. The paper centers Vicki Garvin’s travels to Nigeria and Ghana and Pauli Murray’s work as a law professor and legal consultant in the formation of Ghanaian constitutional law. Pauli Murray, who held strong ties to the anti-Communists left in the U.S, including a brief membership in expelled Communist Party leader Jay Lovestone’s Marxist faction and a working relationship with black socialist A. Philip Randolph, lived in Ghana for almost two years. Vicki Garvin, a labor activist with the CIO’s United Office and Professional Workers of America Union and a Communist Party supporter, made the move to her imagined “homeland” in 1961. As products of 1930s radicalism, Murray and Garvin were politicized during a particularly vibrant and radicalizing moment of Pan African activism and internationalism in the United States. Garvin and Murray attempted to actualize their transnational visions by traveling to the African continent and joining a politically varied expatriate community in Ghana. As relocated African Americans living and organizing in Africa, these women participated in a range of activities from organizing campaigns against the U.S. embassy, to lending their skills to Ghana’s nation building efforts and helping to sustain black diasporic networks and political spaces.
A detailing of these women’s experiences presents an, often absent, perspective of transnational politics that reveals the cultural and economic complexities of expatriate life and underscores the range of gendered and political challenges these women faced. In addition, this paper explicates the power and limits of a transnational activisms that connected black liberation struggles in the United States to anticolonial struggles in Africa, while negotiating a range of Cold War politics. It also illustrates the ways such experiences were influenced by political alliances within the organized left. Therefore the paper’s examination of Cold War travels references not only the impact of U.S. Cold War policies internationally and African American’s relocating to Ghana, but also the ways political differences among black leftists traveled to Africa and were reframed within this context. Such inquiry suggests a new framework for understanding the legacies of 1930s U.S. radicalism as well as the relationship between left internationalism and Pan African activism in the 1960s.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper considers Ghana's transition back to multi-party democracy in the 1990s, and examines the interaction between the domestic dynamics of political liberalisation and international factors.

The paper begins with a close examination of the variables affecting political change in Ghana. It traces the process of political liberalisation beginning with the institution of District Assemblies, and culminating in the ouster of the incumbent regime from office as the opposition was voted into power. While Ghanaian civil society was prominent in this process, what was striking here was how Jerry Rawlings and the PNDC bgan to liberalise Ghana's political system not purely as a result of weakness or political failure but indeed out of a position of relative strength.

The paper then proceeds to consider how these variables were impacted by a range of international level variables. In particular, it examines how, if at all, international pressures and influences interacted with domestic-level processes. The paper concludes that the role of the IFIs and associated donors was crucial in reinforcing domestic pressures for multi-party elections.