A Feminist and Human Rights Based Analysis of Public Private Partnerships in Ghana’s Markets

In Ghana, PPPs began to be part of the development agenda after the overthrow of the Kwame Nkrumah regime in 1966. Yet, they were not as common as today. From the 1980s, through the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) loan conditionalities from Bretton Woods Institutions (BWIs), the Ghanaian state has systematically pursued deinvestment in public infrastructure financing ceding this role to the private sector and local governance structures. The Central government’s fund allocation to the local government structures has always remained insufficient while the latter’s role continued to expand. On the back of their expanded mandates at the local level internally generated funds especially those in local markets have become crucial for revenue mobilisation. To increase revenue mobilisation, the local government authorities have made market modernisation and reconstruction a key part of the development agenda. PPPs have become therefore become the vehicles to modernise markets. In Ghana, markets are spaces for women’s economic survival and accumulation and historically feminised in character. The market space is also hierarchical, political and heterogeneous in its structure with varied interests and sociopolitical affiliations. With traders operating on different scales, and others in tow to transition to the higher echelon of the scale, PPPs have increased class struggles within the market. This study focused on the construction of lockable shops and open shed PPP projects at the Dome Market in the Ga East Municipal Assembly in the Greater Accra Region to highlight the ramifications of market PPPs for gender inequality and women’s socioeconomic rights. The findings of this work are based on a qualitative study and review of documents
https://dawnnet.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/A-Feminist-and-Human-Rights-Based-Analysis-of-Public-Private-Partnerships-in-Ghanas-Markets_DAWN-discussion-paper21.pdf