Ghana

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post covers December 7 to December 13.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post covers July 27 to August 2.

Welcome to “Women Around the World: This Week,” a series that highlights noteworthy news related to women and U.S. foreign policy. This week’s post covers March 25 to March 31.

Across West Africa, Pentecostal pastors hold huge public sway. Their influence is a reflection of deepening distrust of the secular state and its ability to fulfill citizens' demands.

Tareian King is a former intern with CFR's Africa Program and a student at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. She is also the founder of Nolafrique, an e-commerce platform that enables artisans in African villages to have global exposure and opportunities for scale up. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA) is making the news again as the Trump administration continues its efforts to diminish the program. DACA protects eligible immigrant youth who came to the United States when they were children from deportation and allows them to apply for jobs. Recipients of the DACA program are often referred to as “Dreamers.” Since 2017, there has been an ongoing legal battle to save the program, which shields approximately 700,000 immigrants in the United States. While the media has readily portrayed DACA as a policy for Latinx, it is also relevant for Africans. The last report by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services on DACA recipients revealed that in 2017, 1,020 Nigerians, 490 Ghanaians, and 700 Kenyans reaped the benefits of the DACA program. On average, African immigrants make up only 1% of DACA recipients. While the number is small compared to, for example, 79.4% of Mexican recipients, for those Africans involved, the continuation of the DACA program is just as important for them as it is for Mexicans. Africa has the fastest growth rate of migration to the United States; it is more than double the rate of migration from Asia, South America, or the Caribbean. As of 2018, there were more than two million immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa residing in the United States and this number will continue to increase. From 2010 to 2018, the number of African migrants in the United States increased at a rate of almost 50%, higher than in previous decades. While Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Ghana have the highest number of immigrants in the U.S., Nigeria being the highest, it is Cameroon that provides the perfect example of why Africans may want to fight for DACA. Cameroon has the fastest growing population in the United States. In 2018, the number of Cameroonian immigrants in the U.S. doubled to 80,000 since 2010. Despite being the fastest-growing population in the U.S. in recent years, only 130 (0.0%) Cameroonians were DACA recipients in 2017. As more Cameroonians migrate to America, there will most certainly be an increase in the number of children who migrate with them.  Africans’ interest in the fight for DACA is not as much about the present, as it is about the future. The point is not that there are only 130 Cameroonians who have received DACA, but rather, for example, that there are growing numbers of Cameroonians legally in the United States who may overstay their visas. Their children might be eligible in the future for DACA. If the DACA program is no longer available to such African youth, they may be forced to navigate America’s daunting immigration system. This may include deportation, difficulty in registering for higher education, and lack of work authorization.

CFR Senior Fellow for Africa Studies Michelle Gavin interviews Founder and President of the African Center for Economic Transformation Dr. K.Y. Amoako.

Tareian King is an intern with CFR's Africa Program and a student at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University. She is also the founder of Nolafrique, an e-commerce platform that enables artisans in African villages to have global exposure and opportunities for scale up. The year 2019 marked four hundred years since the first enslaved people from West Africa arrived in the United States. The president of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, declared the anniversary the Year of Return. It celebrated the resilience of African Americans and encouraged them to return to Africa, visit, apply for Ghanaian citizenship, and take advantage of investment opportunities. Festivities included naming and healing ceremonies, trips to heritage sites, musical performances, lectures, investment forums, and relocation conferences. According to the minister of tourism, the initiative generated $1.9 billion in tourism revenue. Although all members of the African diaspora—both recent immigrants and descendants of the transatlantic slave trade living predominantly in the Americas—were included, the primary focus was on African Americans. The connection between African Americans and Ghana is not new. In 1957, Ghana became an inspiration for African Americans when it became the first sub-Saharan African country to win independence from a colonial power. Ghana’s independence also gave momentum to the Pan African movement, which, among other things, encourages solidarity among all African diaspora ethnic groups to obtain political and economic power. Martin Luther King traveled to Ghana to celebrate its defeat of colonization, and Malcolm X and Maya Angelou worked in Ghana during the presidency of Kwame Nkrumah. W.E.B. Dubois died in Ghana as a Ghanaian national and today, there is the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Center for Pan-African Culture in Accra. Marcus Garvey, the famed Jamaican Pan-Africanist, advocated for the return of African Americans to Africa. He founded the Black Star Line to help blacks return to Africa, which is the origin of the black star on the Ghanaian flag and for name of the national football team. Ghana’s Year of Return initiative sought to not only carry on this relationship, but expand it. The initiative is a part of a larger strategy to make Ghana less reliant on aid by drawing on, among other things, business and investment from African American. The goal of President Akufo-Addo’s broader development agenda, called “Ghana Beyond Aid,” is to achieve self-reliant growth and to break out of the mindset of dependency. According to Akufo-Addo, Ghana does not need foreign aid; instead, it needs the African diaspora to return, build, and invest. The United Nations Sustainable Development Partnership (UNSDP) adopted his agenda as part of its plan for African development. Ghana is well-positioned to become less reliant on aid. In 2017, Ghana received $1.25 billion in official development assistance (ODA). This was only 2.1 percent of Ghana’s GDP of $59 billion in 2017. (ODA is government aid that promotes and specifically targets the economic development and welfare of developing countries; it excludes military and anti-terrorism activities.) Moreover, Ghana already attracts substantial investments from abroad. For example, the value of French foreign direct investments in Ghana in 2017 was $10.5 million for a total stock amounting to $1.7 billion, and China will have begun work on $2 billion worth of infrastructure construction in Ghana. But, African Americans will have programs specifically created for them. As part of “Ghana Beyond Aid,” the president announced the launch of "Beyond the Return: The Diaspora Dividend,” a multi-million dollar fund to attract investment from members of the African diaspora. It will consist of special diaspora investment programs, Sankofa Savings accounts, and diaspora housing schemes. The ministry of finance stated that the African diaspora will be able to invest in "tourism infrastructure, agriculture value addition, real estate, music, culture, and retirement homes.” In Ghana, African Americans have no language barrier and the country has a transparent legal system and a business environment that makes it a secure and reliable destination for investors. Ghana is also the only country to provide people of African ancestry the legal right to stay in the country indefinitely through its Right to Abode law. During the Year of Return, Ghana waived a number of bureaucratic hurdles and granted one hundred African Americans citizenship based on their African ancestry alone. At a memorial ceremony for George Floyd, Ghana’s minister of tourism, Barbara Oteng-Gyasi, told African Americans to “come home, build a life in Ghana.” Ghana’s courtship of African Americans has grown from one based mostly on solidarity in the face of black oppression to one also based on business and investment. Ghana hopes to attract investors with an interest in its development, while some African Americans can profit personally from the relationship. With available business opportunities, a welcoming environment, and an opportunity to leave behind racism and police brutality, some African Americans may accept Ghana’s invitation.

Alvin Young is a Rangel Fellow and master's candidate at the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. On March 20, Ghana's parliament passed the Narcotics Control Commission (NCC) bill in response to the dramatic growth in domestic drug consumption. The NCC treats illicit drug use as a public health crisis rather than strictly a law enforcement issue by decriminalizing certain narcotics and prioritizing treatment and rehabilitation for drug addicts. This is an important shift in Africa’s approach to combating the trade and use of illicit drugs. Initially, observers saw many African countries, including Ghana, as transit hubs for opioids and psychoactive substances destined for Europe and the United States. But times are changing. Researchers at the ENACT foundation, an EU-funded project to help combat transnational crime in Africa, estimate [PDF] that there will be an additional 14 million Africans using illegal drugs by 2050, reflecting a rapidly growing consumer market in Sub-Saharan Africa. These alarming projections, coupled with an African population expected to reach 2.5 billion people by 2050, will require that the African Union and its member states continue to create sustainable interventions such as the NCC that aim to reduce drug use and prioritize treatment, not criminalization.   In recent years, some East African countries have seen large consumer markets for illicit drugs develop similar to those in West Africa. Kenyan criminal networks that transport heroin to Western markets from the Port of Mombasa developed local markets with an estimated [PDF] 55,000 heroin users. Some reports claim that 3.5 percent of the population in Mombasa has tried heroin. Furthermore, the United Nations 2018 World Drug Report notes [PDF] that Kenyans between ages eighteen and twenty-four use cocaine, heroin, and prescription drugs at a rate three times higher than those aged thirty-six and older. In 2015, President Kenyatta declared war on drugs and called on security forces and politicians to lead the crackdown on the country’s growing drug ecosystem. But that likely will not be enough. CFR’s Senior Fellow Michelle Gavin argues that Africa’s growing illicit drug crisis will require a new focus on public health and education initiatives, in addition to improved law enforcement. Ghana’s parliament is taking a positive step in that direction.  Africa’s rising illicit drug use has not gone unnoticed by the African Union. To address the challenge, the African Union’s Plan of Action on Drug Control [PDF], or AUPA, highlighted the need to reduce illicit drug use on the continent through a greater emphasis on public health programs. However, most African policies to counter illicit drugs still prioritize prohibition and overlook the growing public health crisis. As local illegal drug markets continue to grow, it is not clear to what extent AU member states will implement the AUPA and other forward-thinking approaches. For now, African countries and their ministries of health are consumed with the coronavirus, but, illicit drug use has become and will remain an important public health issue. 

Adam Valavanis is a former intern with the Africa Program at the Council on Foreign Relations. He received a master’s degree in conflict studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science. West Africa is facing a growing threat from Islamist extremist groups. Many of these groups originated in Mali but have since spilled over its borders, with jihadis establishing themselves in the north and east of Burkina Faso. The country has become a desirable haven for many groups because of the security vacuum that has defined the country following the deposition of longtime strongman Blaise Compaore. The presence of these groups, including Ansaroul Islam, Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, and Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimeen, has precipitated a rise in interethnic and interreligious tensions in a country that has for years been characterized by peaceful coexistence.  Burkina Faso's inability to clamp down on many of the extremist groups operating inside its borders has allowed such groups to use the country as a launch pad for attacks in coastal West African countries, most notably Benin. Burkina Faso borders Pendjari National Park in Benin's northwest. This forest has become the site of several incursions by jihadis, who have attacked communities and tourists in the area. The situation has become so dire in the north that both France and the United States have issued travel warnings for Pendjari and the surrounding areas. Such incursions by Islamist groups come at a time of political fragility in Benin, following its controversial legislative elections in April. The protests and general sense of insecurity that have gripped the country in the last few months could provide fertile ground to extremist groups looking to gain a foothold in the country. Officials fear that jihadis have also infiltrated Togo and Ghana.  Currently, the most comprehensive effort to combat Islamist terrorism and intercommunal violence in the region is the G5 Sahel Joint Force, a security partnership between five states in the Sahel and supported by France. Unfortunately, the G5 has faced funding shortfalls, preventing it from quickly and effectively responding to threats as they arise.  For most of the past decade, coastal West Africa has been spared the Islamist violence that has dominated the Sahel. It hosts some of the continent's most stable democracies, including Senegal, Ghana, and Benin. The region has also become a hotspot of foreign investment, attracting interest from the West as well as China and Turkey. The presence of Islamist groups, along with ongoing issues such as corruption and drug trafficking, threatens to upend all of this.  

Each year, Reporters Without Borders (RWB) publishes a list of 180 countries rank-ordered according to the degree of freedom the media enjoys. RWB uses objective criteria, which it outlines on its website. It cautions that it is measuring media freedom, not media quality. Its list is divided into five bands, from best to worst.  The top band consists of seventeen countries, mostly in Europe but none from the African continent. The second band consists of thirty countries, five of which are African. For comparison’s sake, it includes countries like Canada (no. 18), France (33), the United Kingdom (40), and the United States (45). The African countries are as follows: Ghana (23), Namibia (26), South Africa (28), Cape Verde (29), and Burkina Faso (41). In these African countries, freedom of the media is roughly equivalent to that of the United States and big NATO allies. In fact, they all actually rank higher than the United States and, with the exception of Burkina Faso, the United Kingdom.  The third band runs from Botswana (48) to Bolivia (110). There are twenty-one African countries, including Senegal (50), Liberia (89), and Kenya (96). Others in this band include Hong Kong (70), Mongolia (71), and Israel (87).  The fourth band runs from Bulgaria (111) to Kazakhstan (158). This band includes seventeen African countries, including most of the large ones: Uganda (117), Nigeria (119), Angola (121), Ethiopia (150), and the Democratic Republic of Congo (154). This band also includes India (138), Russia (148), and Turkey (157).   The fifth and final band, representing the countries with the worst media freedom, runs from Burundi (159) to North Korea (180). It includes five African countries in addition to Burundi: Somalia (168), Equatorial Guinea (171), Djibouti (173), Sudan (174), and Eritrea (179). This band also includes Cuba (172), China (176), and Syria (177). The bad news is that the twenty-eight African countries in the bottom half of the list outnumber the twenty-one in the top half. Further, Africa’s largest states by population are in the bottom half: Nigeria, Ethiopia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The good news is that the top half includes almost all of the states of the southern cone (Namibia, South Africa, Botswana, and Lesotho), Ghana, and several francophone states around the continent, such as Senegal, Madagascar, Niger, and Ivory Coast. Other good news is that the five African states comparable in media freedom to the United States include two large, important ones: Ghana and South Africa. The RWB index provides a useful tool for comparing media freedom around the continent. It also provides yet another example of the diversity of the African continent. With respect to media freedom, Ghana and South Africa, for example, are far removed from Sudan and Eritrea.   

Breanna Wilkerson is an intern for the Council on Foreign Relations. She graduated from Spelman College with a degree in Women’s Studies and is the founder of GlobeMed at Spelman. Ghana gained independence from Britain in 1957, making it the first nation in sub-Saharan Africa to shatter the chains of colonialism, and it is now considered a success story of African development. It has been named the seventh most prosperous and second safest nation in Africa. However, Ghana is not exempt from the global problem of widespread domestic and sexual violence. Ghanaian women face barriers in reporting violence. These obstacles are rooted in a cultural belief that domestic and sexual violence is a private matter that should be addressed outside of the criminal justice system. A public health report shows that 33 to 37 percent of women in Ghana have experienced intimate partner violence in the course of their relationship (this includes physical, sexual, and emotional violence). In Ghanaian schools, studies found that 14 percent of girls are victims of sexual abuse and 52 percent have experienced gender-based violence. These numbers are likely understated, as girls tend not to report crimes for fear of reprisal. Under the international human rights law, the Ghanaian government is obligated to address, prevent, investigate, and punish domestic violence perpetrators. It has taken critical first steps, one of which is the establishment of the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU). DOVVSU is a department within the Ghana police service established to protect the rights and promote the welfare of women and children by preventing and prosecuting crimes committed against them. The unit has been instrumental in bringing a once private matter into the public sphere. Today, DOVVSU has eighty-seven offices across the country and plans for continued growth. The unit provides the main entry point into the justice system but recognizes that its efforts are more effective when it works in partnership with other ministries and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). DOVVSU and NGOs at the grassroots level have created culturally sensitive workshop curriculums directed at sexual assault against women and children. They have been taught in over 150 primary schools across the country since 2010. These dynamic curriculums work toward deconstructing cultural victim blaming stigmas by defining domestic and sexual violence, educating pupils on the warning signs, and directing them toward safe avenues of counseling if assaulted. Although grassroots level organizing has been initiated to reduce stigma around gender based violence, there is still more work to be done. For instance: Ghana should improve the guidelines and procedures used in handling reported cases to promote the best interest of victims; More in-depth sensitivity training of DOVVSU staff should be implemented; Greater evidence-based research and advocacy needs to be conducted; and, The implementation of alternative dispute resolutions should be established, coupled with in-camera hearings for sensitive cases to reduce stigma. Sexual and gender based violence isn’t just a problem for women, but the entire community at large. It will take a collective effort to ensure a large-scale prevention of its occurrence, but Ghana’s DOVVSU is a good start.

This is a guest post by Jim Sanders, a career, now retired, West Africa watcher for various federal agencies. The views expressed below are his personal views and do not reflect those of his former employers. Ivor G. Wilks, a pioneer in the Western study of African history, died October 7, 2014 at the age of 86, after a long illness. He was my Ph.D. adviser at Northwestern University in the 1970s and was perhaps the foremost authority on the Asante of central Ghana. His Asante in the Nineteenth Century, the Structure and Evolution of a Political Order (Cambridge, 1975) is a landmark study of more than 1,000 pages, that set an example for the historical analysis of pre-colonial African states. The book remains influential today. British born, he was Herskovits Professor Emeritis at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Far ahead of his time in terms of his approach to innovation, Wilks founded the Asante Collective Biography Project, an intiative he started at Northwestern with a handful of like-minded students. The "Asante Seminar," as it was known at the beginning, met in the basement of Harris Hall, the history department building. We pooled information on 19th-century Asante officials, gleaned from primary sources and transferred by hand to note cards, then constructed biographical sketches of them, going into as much detail as available information allowed. Often specific dates did not exist, and so the concept of "career periods" was born, a framework which enabled new information to be easily added, when it turned up. This approach revealed previously unknown aspects of Ghanaian history. In his major work on Asante, Wilks demonstrated that states with a strong historical center—e.g. , Kumase, Paris—have a way of staying together over long periods of time. He was correct. A succession of brilliant Asantehenes, (Asante kings), created a modern state. While Wilks’ use of terms such as exchequer for national treasury, and references to a merit-based civil service, generated occasional criticism, from those who felt he was imposing Western concepts on Africa, his purpose was to show that the Asante had created a modern state, similar to European counterparts of an earlier period. Owing to resulting social and political stability, Ghana escaped civil wars so common in other African countries. Its current political boundaries closely approximate those of the 19th-century Asante kingdom. In other words, much of modern Ghana was already created before the British arrived, and Ghana endures to this day. (So does France!) Strongly influenced by the French Annales school, Wilks sensed the incompleteness of conventional treatments of Ghana’s history. His masterpiece thus commences not with an event, but with an analysis of the Asante system of great roads. At a time when oral tradition represented a key source for African history, Wilks remained empirical, training students in archival research and how to use documentary evidence to check data obtained orally in field interviews. As a result, I spent many hours in the Cape Coast branch of the National Archives of Ghana making notes on British Commissioners’ lists of paramount chief enstoolments and deaths, so as to compare them with what I was told in villages about "the ancestors," amidst inquisitive goats, mosquitos, and the fog of alcoholic libations. Regno-chronology proved a tedious, frustrating, exhausting, and, occasionally, illuminating endeavor. Years later, when by unexpected circumstance I found myself working for the U.S. government in our nation’s capital, I noticed that among colleagues with Ph.D.’s, many had studied politics or national security issues at American institutions. A lack of grassroots exposure to Africa, a by-product of sitting in villages talking to chiefs and older informants, and a lack of experience in mining archives for data, then attempting to construct a coherent picture of the past on the basis of incomplete information, seemed to me to handicap them. Such skills and experience apply directly to developing the kind of analysis policymakers need, now more than ever. Legendary for his generosity, both at the office and at home, Wilks inspired a broad range of students with an understanding of history’s importance. In a 1995 communication, he wrote: "I am sure you are right in suggesting that policy must be rooted in history—in an understanding of the nature and development of society—for certainly in much of West Africa society was not reinvented in the colonial period. Historically deep structures still determine much of the late 20th century life—e.g., notions of what does nor does not constitute corruption!" All of this logically underlies "a real understanding of the situation as opposed to merely describing a journalistic present." With turmoil spreading around the world, that legacy could not be more timely.

This is a guest post by Cheryl Strauss Einhorn, a journalist and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Long hailed as evidence of Africa’s growing political and economic stability, Ghana is suffering a reversal of fortune. One week ago as President John Mahama arrived in Washington for the U.S.-Africa Summit, his government finally admitted it needed urgent help to fix its faltering economy and contacted the International Monetary Fund for financial assistance. "The ultimate objective is to stabilize the cedi (Ghanaian currency) in order that domestic prices will be brought under control," Finance Minister Seth Terkper told a local radio station Joy FM. Indeed, despite being rich in natural resources with plentiful oil, gold, and cocoa, West Africa’s second largest economy has been in disarray, its problems laying bare many of the challenges facing the continent as a whole. Ghana’s oil production levels remain stagnant and gold prices are languishing, yet the government has drastically increased its spending. Critics charge that it has overspent on pricey offices and golf courses, as well as public sector wages and subsidies for utilities and fuel. The result: investors have lost faith in Ghana’s ability to pay its debts. Ghana’s cedi is the worst performing currency in the world this year. Its value has been nearly cut in half against the U.S. dollar, sparking a significant rise in the cost of living. Inflation, at 15 percent, is at a four year high and economic growth is slowing just as the nation faces a double digit budget deficit as a percent of GDP. The economic crisis has led to a series of labor protests. News reports recount five separate demonstrations organized against Ghana’s government in July alone with the largest gathering thousands in the streets of all ten regional capitals. More protests are reportedly planned. Yet an IMF bailout may not provide any immediate relief. Instead, it is likely to inflict marginal pain on Ghanaians as the IMF demands faster spending curbs that will impact public wages, subsidies, and taxes. Moreover, Finance Minister Terkper told reporters that Ghana will continue to extend its borrowings, despite expensive terms. Bond yields are near 10 percent. Yet he said Ghana plans to seek over one billion dollars from international investors to fund new infrastructure projects and pay down debts. Terkper predicts an IMF package would increase the bond offer’s appeal, signaling that the IMF believes Ghana will improve its macroeconomic management. But is that assumption correct? President Mahama has been a poor economic steward and stubbornly refused to go to the IMF amid claims that Ghana could fix its own problems, which it did not, or could not. And Ghana has been here before, having tapped the IMF multiple times. Ghana had a golden opportunity in 2005, when as part of a global relief plan for poor nations, most of its debt was cleared. Yet today its economy is in shambles. The question remains: Is Ghana a stable and favorable investment destination, or is it a cyclical economy, beholden to a few volatile commodity markets with a government unable, or unwilling to exercise fiscal and economic restraint?

This is a guest post by Jim Sanders, a career, now retired, West Africa watcher for various federal agencies. The views expressed below are his personal views and do not reflect those of his former employers. There is currently a view that America’s role in the world is shrinking, as the country and its leaders reportedly become more “isolationist.” That term is code for Washington’s unwillingness to use military force in situations where experts, in and out of the press, believe it ought to be applied. And while potential political candidates refer to the U.S. as “the indispensable nation,” they too tend to see engagement through a military lens. Thank goodness political pundits are often wrong. In sub-Saharan Africa, U.S. engagement remains robust, vitiating the isolationist charge, and that engagement is not necessarily military. A broad range of non-governmental organizations and individuals are active in African countries. Their presence supports William Easterly’s view that progress in reducing African poverty, and other socio-economic ills, is in part, a result of “the work of entrepreneurs, inventors, traders, investors, activists—not to mention ordinary people of commitment and ingenuity striving for a better life.” “Ordinary people of commitment” are accomplishing much at the grassroots level, far from elite pundits’ field of vision. The Ayisatu Owen International School in Techiman, northern Ghana, is a sterling example. Founded in 1997 by American aid worker Wilfred Owen, his wife Ayisatu, and the student group For One World, the school opened with one teacher and four students. By 2010, the school had grown to over four hundred students and thirty-eight teachers. It continues to expand as additional resources and personnel arrive. Writing in his annual Christmas Letter, Owen commented that operations are supported by forty-one For One World volunteers and that the teaching aids and material brought in by students (mostly girls) from Vermont’s St. Johnsbury Academy have “actually overwhelmed us.” Outside the realm of government policy, there is little isolationism in America. Volunteer participation in the school is flourishing, Owen says, and it often comes from high school and college students from the U.S., who are deepening their commitment to international engagement by volunteering in Africa. Their initiative is working. The Ayisatu Owen School has been judged the best private school in Techiman, Ghana, and girls’ scores on national exams are ranked among the highest in the district. Engagement with Africa at the grassroots by ordinary Americans may well prove more effective than the efforts of “Davos man” and his elite counterparts.