Distressed in Hope: School Fees and the Structural Shaping of Health in Upper West Ghana
Health, Money, Commerce, and Wealth
ISBN: 978-1-83549-034-1, eISBN: 978-1-83549-033-4
Publication date: 30 May 2024
Abstract
This study assesses distress in the lives of farming population in Ghana's northern interior. Whereas recent studies addressing mental health in Africa produce evidentially sound analyses of the correlated role of food and water insecurity, this study engages with how and why worries over educational costs feature so prominently in a measure of psychosocial well-being. While it is significant that education identifiably figures in escalating the experience with distress, my contention is that what is more important is putting that escalation into the context of why. I use Narotzky and Besnier's framework for understanding the economy as the interactions between crisis, value, and hope to situate a mixed methods study concerned with how distress is proximately shaped by the interactive socioeconomic features of daily life (paying school fees, buying food, cultivating maize, etc.) but ultimately shaped by structural features of the political economy that direct people's objectives amid chronic crisis. My proposition is that because education is where value resides, it is a primary vehicle by which people are acting in crisis in a hopeful manner. In this way, this study leverages the tools of economic anthropology within debates about how to best assess the ways in which health and illness are shaped by socioeconomic realms.
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Acknowledgements
Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Womens Empowerment in Agriculture Index Fellowship administered by the International Food Policy Research Institute; a US Borlaug Fellows Graduate Research Grant (#1021RR104338); and a Lemelson Pre-Dissertation Award from the Society for Psychological Anthropology. The author extends appreciation to the communities that hosted this research as well as her teammates in data collection. Substantial feedback from two anonymous reviewers has been quite helpful for re-evaluating how to best put the results into the context of the breadth of the literature explored.
Citation
Ham, J.R. (2024), "Distressed in Hope: School Fees and the Structural Shaping of Health in Upper West Ghana", Wood, D.C. and Swamy, R. (Ed.) Health, Money, Commerce, and Wealth (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 43), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0190-128120240000043002
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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