School of Social and Political Science

Description

The Centre of African Studies is delighted to welcome you to the following seminar as part of their seminar series 2023/2024:

"When the State is your landlord: The Precarity of Urban Agriculture in Accra"

Speaker: Professor Dzodzi Tsikata, Distinguished Research Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana.

This seminar is based on a recent study of urban agriculture in Accra in Ghana, where agriculture contributes substantially to GDP and employment, but is subject to the cyclical crises of commodity prices that affect the overall economy. The study is one of several case studies of precarious work undertaken as part of the “Transregional Research on the Changing Nature of Precarious Work in Africa and the Arab Region” Project, a three-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation, which examined precarious work in Egypt, Ghana, and Kenya. The study finds that urban farmers share the vicissitudes of precarious work with other workers across Africa who make a living in different sectors as self-employed, casual, or formal wage workers under conditions of self-exploitation and immiseration. Commonalities notwithstanding, urban farming in Ghana has specific characteristics and conditions that influence the fortunes of its practitioners. Ghana’s location within Africa of the trade economies, and sector specificities such as proximity to urban populations and produce markets, the status of urban farmers as long-term rural-urban migrants and their insertion into global value chains as consumers of imported agro-chemicals, seeds and other inputs has shaped their key relationships, conditions of production and their livelihood outcomes. Increasing land use competition is deepening the precarity of work in the urban agriculture and influencing urban farmers’ strategies for survival and resilience. The study highlights the important role of the state and state policies in deepening the precarity of work.

When: Wednesday 6th March 2024 (3.30-5pm GMT)

Where: Chrystal Macmillan Building, Seminar Room 2

Format: Hybrid.

For online attendance, please register via Eventbrite

Speaker Biography:

Dzodzi Tsikata is currently Distinguished Research Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London and Adjunct Professor at the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana. Her work in the last thirty years has been in the areas of the land and labour relations of agrarian and urban informal economies, the trajectories of social policy and gender and development policies and practices in Africa. Dzodzi is the principal investigator of the “Transregional Research on the Changing Nature of Precarious Work in Africa and the Arab Region” Project and the Gender Equitable and Transformative Social Policy for Post-COVID-19 Africa (GETSPA) Project. Her recent publications include, with Joanna Bourke Martignoni, Christophe Gironde, Christophe Golay and Elisabeth Prügl, an edited book, “Agricultural Commercialization, Gender Equality and the Right to Food: Insights from Ghana and Cambodia,” Routledge, Taylor, and Francis (2023). She is a member of the Editorial Collective of Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy and the Managing Editor of Feminist Africa Journal.