Who gets to go to school? Exploring the micro-politics of girls’ education in Ghana

Abstract

Government implemented education access policies occupy a prominent place in the discourse on access to education. Education access issues have, thus, been examined almost exclusively from macro-level structural perspective. The micro-politics that take place behind the scenes after structural access issues have been resolved is minimally broached. Drawing on qualitative data from first generation educated women in Ghana and their mothers, this paper addresses the dark underbelly of girls’ access to education, and the resistance activities undertaken by women to ensure that girls who become causalities of non-enrolment decisions are enrolled. Thus, the paper is guided by two questions. How do girls who become casualties of non-enrolment decisions go to school? How does the resistance activities women take against such non-enrolment decisions enable access for girls? In presenting the roles played by different actors such as mothers and kins, this paper makes an argument that, through women’s resistance activities such as subverting the norms, covert diplomacy, and infractions of gendered rules in decision-making, women resist structural distribution of norms that exclude them from decision-making before girls can go to school unimpeded.

Keywords:

• Micro-politics
• Ghana
• Qualitative research
• Non-enrolment
• Girls education access
• Family

Introduction

Existing account of gender equality in education tends to highlight macro level arguments (government education interventions, normative and institutional policies, and structural concerns) that build demand and supply of education, and underlines how children access education (Akyeampong, 2009; Aziabah, 2017; Donge, 2003; Kadzamira & Rose, 2003; Mukudi, 2004; Oster & Thornton, 2011). For example, education reforms, fee-free policies and cost sharing education policies (Adu-Gyamfi et al., 2016; Akyeampong, 2009; Johnstone, 2003; Lewin, 2009).

Macro-level or structural factors influencing girls’ access to education also include global education frameworks, for example the 1990 Jomitien Framework for Action (UNESCO, 2000), Dakar Framework for Action and Millenium Declaration 2000, and the 2015 Incheon Framework for Action and Sustainable Development Goals (UNESCO, 2015). Specifically, Education for All (EFA) platform of action, the Millenium Development Goal (MDG 2) and Sustainable Development Goal (SDG4) spotlight gender equality in access to education (Monkman & Hoffman, 2013; UNESCO, 2003; UNESCO-UIS, 2018; Unterhalter, 2012; Waage et al., 2010).

These declarations have made girls education visible as a development agenda and shaped local and national education policies. Furthermore, efforts by the international education community such as UNESCO, UNICEF and other funding agencies have led to an increase in access to education. These organisations have made achieving these strides possible by mobilising resources from both traditional and new donors to support educational policies, programs, and interventions of developing countries (Coombs, 1985; Tilak, 1988; UNESCO, 2014).

Apart from the global context, we can explore the macro structural context as a normative issue at the national levels. In Ghana, several education reforms and policies have been enacted and implemented since Ghana attained independence. These include the Accelerated Development Plan (ADP) in 1951 (Akyeampong et al., 2007), the Education Act 1961 (Ahadzie, 2000), the Free Compulsory Basic Education (FCUBE) introduced in 1995 (Ahadzie, 2000; Akyeampong, 2009) and the capitation grant (Thompson & Casely-Hayford, 2008). The details of each policy are different, ranging from reforms that shortened or lengthened the time spent in school in responds to the country’s economic structure, or those that made education at the primary school levels free in responds to the EFA declaration such as the FCUBE, or those intended to decentralize education participation such as the capitation grant. Notwithstanding the differential focus in policies, these normative regimes and reforms shared a common goal to widen education access at the primary school levels.

Apart from the policy context, interventions at the macro and meso levels are usually demand-based and supply-based. Demand-based interventions are fee-free policies, conditional cash transfers and merit-based scholarships (Garlick, 2013). Interventions of this nature are introduced to defray the cost of education to enable children access education independent of socio-economic status (Banerjee et al., 2013; Bock & Cammish, 1997; Casely-Hayford, 2000; Logan & Beoku-Betts, 1996; Morley et al., 2009; World Bank, 2011). Example of such intervention in Ghana is the free SHS policy, introduced in 2017 in responds to the SDG4 (Chanimbe & Prah, 2020; Matey, 2020; Nurudeen et al., 2018). Supply-based interventions, however, are interventions that build supply of education such as teacher capacity, school construction, curriculum and quality of resources, and other interventions which usually occur at the school level, such as the provision of separate toilets for children (Birdthistle et al., 2011), sanitary products (Oster & Thornton, 2011), water treatment and sanitary programs (Freeman et al., 2011).

These policies, reforms and interventions have been implemented under three main financial models, cost-sharing, partially free, and completely free financing models. Each model has financial implication for parents to either share the cost of education with government, pay only a nominal fee or pay no fees at the point of school enronment (Asare-Bediako, 2014; Johnstone, 2003; Koramoah, 2016)

Whilst the above macro and global contexts has shaped education access and girls’ education in recent times, institutional contexts have not always been receptive to girls’ education in Ghana. Formal education in Ghana started with boys. Darkwah (2010), posit that the government later spearheaded the inclusion of girls solely to equip them to become better wives and not necessarily to question power relations that existed between the genders (Graham, 1971, p. 72). The ratio of girls to boys in schools have increased over the years. That notwithstanding, gender inequality has persisted throughout the education provision trajectory of Ghana. For example, the 2003 demographic and health survey indicated that the ratio of people who had never been to school was 28.2% women as compared to 17.6% men. The gap in gendered access to formal education increases and becomes more pronounced even as one climbs the academic ladder. Bearing in mind this observation, it is important to note that women who were born within the generation that the chapter is situated that is from 1917 to 1957, were more likely to have never been to school and consequently participated less in formal sector employment which required formal education.

Whilst macro-level Institutional and family biases hamper and or enable access to education for girls, the macro-structural access issues such as fee-free policies, cost-sharing policies and other demand and supply concerns have been the predominant focus of education access research.

Despite the normative and institutional context of access, with its free education policies, inequality axis of gender, region, family, and school-based disparity, mediate access outcomes. Equal access to education in Ghana has, thus, remained an elusive goal for several people especially females because reforms and policies are usually gender neutral. They do not specifically address the gendered access to education. Within these structural constraints and normative contexts, families make education access decisions at the micro-household levels. Micro-level family issues are important because the implementation of structural policies whether cost sharing or fee-free, has financial implications for families. Access to education is not automatic, rather, whether, how, and the extent to which policies translate into practical access or actual enrolment that can be visibly tracked happens at the micro-household level.

Micro-level household issues as key determinant of access continues to persist, but it is minimally broached. The few studies that explored micro-level education access issues emphasize economics. It pays little attention to the micro-politics that occurs during the process of access (Bray & Kwo, 2013; Fuller et al., 1995; Glick & Sahn, 2000; Lloyd & Gage-Brandon, 1994; Monkman & Hoffman, 2013; Powell & Steelman, 1990; Ranasinghe & Hartog, 2002; Sathar & Lloyd, 1994; Yamada & Ampiah, 2009).

Although various researchers have explored the family as a key determinant of access, research on the family and its relation to gendered access emphasize how the socio-economic status of students affects their (in)ability to access and participate across all levels of education (Banerjee et al., 2013; Bock & Cammish, 1997; World Bank, 2011). Studies of families tends to concentrate disproportionately on family incomes and how income shocks influence families’ decision on access, gender, and quitting school, with girls more likely than boys to quit school (Boyle et al., 2002; Fuller & Liang, 1999; Hunter & May, 2003).

Other issues such as cultural perceptions (Nosike, 1996; Pryor & Ampiah, 2003), sexist curricula, sexual violence, and differential treatment of children at school also limit girls’ access and influence retention (Aikman & Rao, 2012; Mirsky, 2003). Overall, the literature is skewed in favor of macro-level factors. When attention is paid to micro-level household and family issues, the micro-level politics (e.g. tensions, contentions, resistance, and negotiations) that characterize how family members respond to the everyday non-enrolment education decisions even when the macro-level education structural issues have been resolved is rarely addressed.

This paper, therefore, proceeds from the assumption that beyond the macro-level reforms and interventions, how families respond to micro-level non-enrolment decisions, also play a part in determining who gets to go to school and whether those who are denied access will be able to go to school, nonetheless.

Furthermore, our understanding of girls’ access experience lacks nuance. This is because there is a tendency to place girls in one category regardless of their access experience. Access is often treated as a binary category of access and non-access. The most recognized (non)access experience explored in literature are, when children attend school because of government access policy such as fee-free education policy, and when children do not access education because of different cost conditions. The question, whether girls go to school even after non-access decisions are made at the family level is left relatively unexplored. Thus, the main question driving this research is: How do girls who become casualties of non-enrolment decisions go to school? How does the resistance activities women take against such non-enrolment decisions enable access for girls?

In addressing the above questions, the goal is to highlights how power over decision-making around access to education and the resistance activities against non-enrolment decisions intersects with broader kinship and socio-cultural dynamics to structure (non)access or enrolment outcomes for girls.

The paper will contribute to the literature on education in three ways. Analytically, it provides a nuance account of education access challenges by examining context specific factors. This approach is apart from the disproportionate concentration of explaining access to education quantitatively which involves mapping patterns of enrolment and other access indicators.

Empirically, this Ghanaian case demonstrates that we can apply Lukes’ concept of power to explore micro-politis of access to education within family institutions. The findings can be profoundly revealing in understanding girls’ education history, and women’s agency in other matrilineal societies with specific features like the matrilineal groups in Ghana. For example, whilst the study focuses the Akyem matrilineal group in Ghana, the findings are important in understanding other matrilineal kinship groups that exhibit considerable degrees of cultural homogeneity to that of the matrilineal society in Ghana such as the Ovambo of Namibia, the Bemba of Zambi, the Yao of Malawi and the Cewa of Malawi (Nukunya, 2003).

Theoretically, it is also an attempt to locate education access in kinship discourses. In addressing the question around micro-level access to education, the goal is to situate education access in kinship discourses. It also emphasizes how kinship affiliation particularly matrilineal ties structure the education access of its members. Earlier kinship research has centred on how matrilineal ties undermine marital bonds and create conditions for marital disruption because wives allegiance to their matrilineal lineageoverride their loyalty to the conjugal ties (Anarfi & Awusabo-Asare, 1993; Bleek, 1987; Goode, 1963, Hagan,1983; Hutchinson, 1990; Larson, 1990; Mikell, 1997; Oppong, 1974, 1977; Poewe, 1978; Radcliffe-Brown & Forde, 1950; Schneider, 1964, 1981). Recent kinship discourse exploring other significant relationships in Ghana has focused on health (Crentsil, 2007), elder care (Coe, 2017), welfare, and social support (Caldwell, 1966a, 1996b; Tsai & Dzorgbo, 2012). Little attention is paid to how kinship ties and matrilineal filiation structure education access for girls. This paper, thus, adds to the paucity of knowledge on education access and kinship.

Policy wise, the paper increases our understanding of education access creation at the micro-level households and how the organisation of kinship imposes certain power structures within the family. Understanding the gender dynamics of household decision-making and the consequent strong son preference for education access will enable policy-makers to design policies that target deeper attitudinal changes toward girls’ education. Additionally, it highlights the rarely explored mediating role of gender norms in shaping resistance within the family.

The paper is structured as follows: Following a synopsis of the literature on impact evaluation studies, I discuss Lukes’ notion of power and Scott’s idea of resistance as the conceptual frameworks for this paper. Next, I outline the methods and data collection process. In the remaining sections, I present the empirical findings and discuss their implications for theory and policy.

Impact evaluation studies of education intervention and the need for micro-level analyses

Several impact evaluation studies on education interventions and policies suggest that access indicators, such as enrolment, participation, completion rates and gender parity index, improve when education interventions are implemented (Akyeampong, 2011; Baird et al., 2011). Studies on education policies and interventions in different countries also reveal that not everybody is granted access (Obanya, 2011; Ohba, 2009). In fact recent studies on access support both the access oriented claims of education intervention, (for example, Asante (2022) and Duflo et al., (2017), and those who question the ability of interventions to improve access (for instance Branson & Lam, 2017; Ponce & Laoyza, 2012).

Most of these studies have reached quite independently, but broadly similar conclusions that access has expanded, but across the board interventions may disproportionately benefit the rich and not the poor (Ahadzie, 2000; Akyeampong, 2011; Conn, 2017; Glewwe et al., 2014; Lucas & Mbiti, 2012a). Accessibility gap could be with respect to region, socio-economic status, location, and gender (Somerset, 2009; Pritchett, 2013).

Gendered access to education explains the differential participation of people in the labor force. For instance, in Ghana, men often participate in the formal sector which requires formal education, as compared to women who are mostly seen at the informal sector (Darkwah, 2010). The efforts at the macro level to fix this with normative and institutional reforms and education interventions including, fee-free policies, have proved to be necessary but not sufficient to bridge this gap.

Whilst some scholars have demonstrated that, factors which deny access or influence retention such as socialization, socio-cultural practices, belief systems, poverty, and ignorance persist and account for the differential access and participation of females and males in formal schools (Adomako-Ampofo, 2001; Mensah, 1992), little attention is paid to the day-to-day micro-level realities that engender non access to education. We can, therefore, not be certain whether enrolment in school is less structurally prescribed by policy and more driven by other micro-level factors. Researching micro politics at the individual household levels to complement other research in this area can broaden our understanding of education access, participation, retention, and broader gender education access concerns.

At the micro-household levels, we know that when enrolment decisions are made, given favourable structural education interventions and other micro-level household support, girls attend school unimpeded. What we do not know is whether and how girls manage to go to school after non-enrolment education decisions are made. Thus, a focus on the key resistance, tensions, contentions, and negotiations of access as an aspect of micro-politics, can address this knowledge gap.

Conceptual framework

I frame the paper with two concepts, power, and resistance. Employing these two concepts is necessary to explore the distribution of power available to different members of the family as they make education access decisions. I also employ the concept of resistance to enable me to highlight the resistance activities women employed when girls became casualties of non-enrolment decisions. First, the concept of power.

Power

Scholarship on the power dynamics in the family often portray husbands as family heads and the most powerful in the nuclear family hierarchy (Choi et.al., 2014). In nuclear families, decision-making power flows vertically with men at the top. However, there are variations in the distribution of power within contemporary families due to a variety of family processes and new family dynamics, which depart from the strict categorization of traditional family formation and process under the lineage systems.

Determining the hierarchy of family structure and the distribution of power in a matrilineal society is not straight-forward given that women continue to belong to their maternal families after marriage. Members of the family, usually the maternal uncles, and maternal grand uncles all play a role when decisions around children of sisters are made in a matrilineal society. The complexities around such decisions make it difficult to categorically distinguish between power actors as the application of power in decision-making is usually not mutually exclusive. I will however rely on Lukes (1974/2005) concept of power to categorize power actors based on how power is applied. I explain these based on who has power- to (Allen, 1998, pp. 34–35; Lukes, 1974/2005), power-over (Lukes, 1974, p. 36; Lukes, 1986, p. 1; Wartenberg, 1990, pp. 85, 118) and how power-with (Arendt, 1969, p. 44) is achieved. Everybody has “power-to,” that is the ability to do or not to do something. However, there are those who exercise power-over. Power-over is exercised by those in authority. It deals with asymmetric power relations (Lukes, 1974). “Power-with” also explains the exercise of power in solidarity with others to achieve a collective empowerment (Arendt, 1969; Lukes, 1974/2005).

Those with “power-over” could exercise power in solidarity to achieve “power-with.” Those with “power-to” could also apply power as a collective empowerment to achieve power-with in response to power-over. These actors can form allies within the family (nuclear or extended) and outside the family (friends or non-friends) in their exercise of power. Those who exercise power-over, also have power to.

Incorporating Lukes’ concept of power will enable me to explain the diverse types of power that the decision-making structures of the family allocate its members. The male members of the family, usually the father, uncles and maternal grand uncles have power-over. Wives and or mothers also have power-over children but may not have the same degree of power over husbands and brothers or uncles. “Power-to” is the most basic among the types of power applications. Daughters who are usually the least in the hierarchy of families’ structures of decision-making have power-to. Daughters can apply power-to, they can culminate it in solidarity with others to produce power-with. There can be different applications of power depending on the actor’s interest.

Resistance

To make sense of the different forms of resistance that took place when non-enrolment decisions were made, I adopt James Scott’s concept of resistance. Employing this concept is essential to understanding the everyday resistance activities of women within the family. Analyzing women’s resistance to non-enrolment education decisions enabled me to explain how they challenged what Kabeer (2013, p. 3) describes as structural distribution of norms, resources, and responsibilities, which served to exclude them from decision-making process. Structural distribution of norms explains the differential capacity of people to undertake actions due to the (de)limitation imposed by the norms that position individuals within social hierarchies of their family.

Scott (1985) observed resistance when he examined the roots of peasant rebellions in South-East Asia. His seminal work “Weapons of the weak” examines the different approaches to resistance such as the war of words, sabotage, boycotts, disguised strikes, theft, and reciprocity among the poor in an atmosphere of peasant overt compliance. Scott argues that non-confrontational protest is the preferred response employed by peasants to deal with oppression. He calls the overt relationship between the powerful and their subordinates’ public transcript (1990, p. 2) and he describes what happens at the backstage when power holders are not watching hidden transcripts (Scott, 1990, p. 4). Resistance concept has been used in other works. For example, Yitah (2012), highlighted the protesting strategies of women from Kasena Nanakana who challenge the use of gender as the basis for their roles and rights at home without openly revolting. Haddad (2004) also adopt Scott’s hidden and public transcript in exploring women’s adoption of prayers in prayer camps as a form of resistance to patriarchy.

The concept of resistance will provide a useful analytical lens for examining the experiences of the first generation educated women (FGEW), and how these women defied the constraint of structures of decision-making in their families. It will further enable me to explain the resistant activities mothers undertook to enable the education of their daughters even though the decision-making structures tended to favor men (Sportel, 2016).

This paper, informed by the concepts of resistance and power enabled a complementary understanding of the distribution of power in the family structure and how women’s experience of such structure influenced their approaches to resisting non-enrolment education decisions. By enumerating different actors such as mothers, daughters, family relations, allies, and their resistance role when non-enrolment decisions were made, the paper provides a depth of understanding on how resistance practices of women enabled access to education for women who were born between 1917-1957. The concept of resistance has been explored in other gender and education research. For example, Dobson & Ringrose (2016) explores resistance within schools and beyond (Ringrose & Renold, 2012). Whilst these studies provide profoundly revealing insights on resistance within schools and beyond, this paper examines resistance outside school. It specifically explores the kinds of resistance that takes place before access to school is enabled, and the analyses is limited to resistance within matrilineal Akan families in Ghana.

For this paper, I integrated the two theories, power, and resistance to frame the analyses of the themes and to show how the application of power can produce resistance. There was the need, therefore, to conceptualize the types of power and family members use of these types of power. Lukes’ theory of power made such conceptualization possible. To better understand how power is challenged, I unmask the resistance strategies and agents of resistance. These two were relevant in exploring the issues of decision-making and the responses to non-enrolment decisions. Indeed, power and resistance cannot be seen to be disconnected or detached from each other in this context, given that existing power relations shape different forms of resistance (Sharp et al., 2000).

Fieldwork and methods

This paper draws primarily on semi-structured interviews, autobiographical narratives, and in-depth informal conversational interviews with women from a typical matrilineal society in the Eastern region of Ghana. The participants were purposively selected. The selection criteria for participants included the successful completion of tertiary education or above and being the first-generation in the family to pursue post-secondary education.

Throughout the paper, I refer to this generation as first generation educated women (FGEW). I selected this group of women because they belong to a generation whose education access experiences are rarely accounted for in education access literature. Second, participants had to be natives from a typical matrilineal society of the Akyem traditional area due to the need to understand how women’s resistance activities around non-enrolment education decisions played out in a culture where children traced their lineage using the mother line. It was also to enable me to explore how matrilineal relationships in this area influenced access to education for their first generation educated female members.

This traditional area has a history of stereotyping families based on professions. I took advantage of this knowledge to approach these families to obtain various contacts which were useful in the selection of initial interviewees. The first set of interviewees were ten FGEW. I also approached the traditional authorities in the study area, and they helped me identify twenty-two other families. I asked about the FGEW, however, I realized that eight of them formed part of the ten initial participants. It meant that I had fourteen people to select from, seven had already passed on and frantic efforts to contact their daughters who might qualify for the study as family members or relatives proved futile because three of them had travelled to Europe. Telephone conversation was not a viable option as the aim was to critically examine relationships and how access is negotiated through resistance. Therefore, face to face interview was important to aid in observing interviewees mannerism and non-verbal cues to contextualize my findings.

Furthermore, researching micro realities and politics within families especially resistance activities could also mean that interviewees may talk about other relatives or family members who were less than encouraging and congratoratory, and a source of conflict in their quest to access to education. The nature of the studies, thus, made it impossible to consider interviewing over the phone.

I conducted fifteen interviews that were informal, in-depth, and autobiographical narrative in nature. The autobiographical narrative approach stresses the importance of understanding individual experiences through narrative. Clandinin and Connelly (2000, p. 26) recommends autobiographical narrative methods as the most effective method for enquiring into the experiences or stories of people. Employing this method, thus, enabled the research participants to recollect and re-tell their experiences of education access. Telling their stories also involved telling the stories of those who influenced their access or non-access to education (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006, p. 477; Saleh et al., 2014, p. 272).

A key aspect of the narrative research is that it allows the researcher to participate in the study by entering the world of the participants’ identity, meaning and practical knowledge (Bolívar & Domingo, 2007, p. 4). Accordingly, my identity as female, educated and an insider researcher shaped how I retold their story. I threaded their voices as much as possible, however, instead of focusing too much on participants identity, I focused on exploring their experience of access and non-access in the analyses. This enabled me to avoid a weakness in narrative research where participants focus on their identity, diverting the attention from the topic under study to participants’ identity (Weiner, 1994, p. 11).

Participants shared their individual experiences of education access and gave an account of resistance to non-enrolment education decisions. Employing the in-depth interview as a tool enabled me to probe for clarification and elaboration on the issue.

While interviewing the FGEW, they acknowledged the roles played by other relatives in their access stories. These were their mothers, fathers, uncles, grand uncles, and other neighbours. I urged the participants to help me secure the participation and cooperation of other participants who were alive.

This snowballing technique yielded twelve more participants including mothers, fathers, and other family members of the FGEW. The interview with the twelve participants further yielded three more referrals who were allies and/or supporters of education access decisions.

Overall, I interviewed thirty participants. I classified Fifteen of those as FGEW because they were the first females in their families nuclear and or extended families to receive formal education up to the tertiary level. The other fifteen were relatives, friends, non-allies, allies and or supporters of the FGEW. I selected this set because they played roles as allies, or supporters of enrolment or non-enrolment decisions. I did not interview all mothers because some of the mothers of the FGEW had passed on at the time of the data collection.

The research participants were between the ages 64 and 104 years. Interviewing older women came with its own challenges. On few occasions, memory loses and the inability of two participants to recollect the exact details of what happened meant that the interview times were prolonged. I had to rely on their children to verify the experiences they had shared with me.

I spent seven months on the field at the study area, researching the FGEW who were born between 1917 and 1957, and their families in this matrilineal society as they recollected and told their experience of education access and resistance to non-enrolment education decisions. The questions that guided the data collection were: how do girls who become casualties of non-enrolment decisions go to school? How does the resistance activities women take against such non-enrolment decisions enable access for girls? I got ethical clearance from the Ethics Committee for the Humanities (ECH) Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of Ghana.

The table below summarizes the demographic characteristics of the first generation educated women I interviewed (Table 1).

Table 1. Characteristics of the first generation educated women.

Name	Age	Marital status	Number of children	Profession
Darkoah	83	Widow	03	Teacher
Nana Tiwaa	66	Married	02	Development Planner/ Economist
Hannah	81	Widow	02	Teacher
Mary	89	Widow	05	Midwife
Donkor	81	Widow	10	Banker
Obea	81	Divorced	04	Midwife
Oye	104	Widow	03	Midwife
Angela	64	Married	02	Lawyer
Deborah	69	Married	02	Tax Officer
Lucy	100	Widow	04	Midwife
Pomaa	70	Married	0	Lawyer
Akua	65	Married	01	Journalist
Charity	100	Widow	03	Midwife
Akosua	80	Married	03	Midwife
Gyankroma	87	Married	02	Lecturer

The names are pseudonyms.

The advocacy and transformative philosophical worldview which emerged from the writings of scholars from diverse ethnic, racial groups, and feminist persuasion (Mertens, 2003) influenced my positionality and explain the biases I brought to this research. The basic assumption is that all knowledge reflects power and social relationships within a society. It places importance on the lives and experiences of marginalised groups such as women and encourages doing research with a political agenda (Creswell, 2009, pp. 1, 7). In this paper, the political agenda was to explore the education access stories of the rarely explored women, whose education marks a turning point in the history of education both in their families and communities in written work, and to give prominence to the legitimization of their subjective knowledge. My own position as an educated woman from the study area influenced the research process.

On data analyses

I employed thematic network analyses. This involved familiarizing myself with the data, both interview transcripts and the autobiographical narratives (Charmaz, 2000). I then employed indexing based on the research questions to enable the ideas to emerge. Initial codes were generated. Further, I employed focused coding techniques to organize the codes into developing categories. I collapsed the similarities that I found in the categories into themes. Consistent with Grbich’s (2007, p. 21) and Neuman’s (2006, p. 461), suggestion to map themes, I mapped out the themes based on the similarities in the categories. I ascertained whether the themes formed a coherent pattern and whether the themes reflected the meanings of the research participants and the subject I was exploring. I grouped the sub-themes under the main themes. I then constructed and analysed a coherent account of the story from the data. I explored this story within and across the themes that emerged. I analysed these resistance themes under the findings and discussion section. I examined power as happened within the context of family power structure to put these resistance strategies into perspective.

Context: power within the family structure, tensions, contentions and resistance

In the matrilineal society of the Akyems, in the Eastern Region of Ghana, it has been reported that traditionally, marriage does not alter a woman’s relationship to her immediate kin (Poewe, 1978). She belongs to her kin and her children also belong to her matrilineage or maternal family as they trace their lineage through mothers and not their fathers. The importance matrilineal descent accords to maternal ties in terms of inheritance, succession, and status (Fortes, 1950; Hesckovits, 1937; Rattray, 1929), makes negotiation of access to education for girls interesting. First, those who wield power over and make decisions are usually the woman’s family. A woman’s brothers and maternal uncles and grand uncles have power of co-decision in the children’s upbringing. Even in matrilineal societies, the men hold the most power because they make major decisions on access to land, income, and education even though they are the cut-off points when tracing a lineage. These men are the maternal grand uncles who are usually the heads of the matriliny, the maternal uncles, followed by the mother’s brother or children’s maternal uncle. They hold power over the women and children related to them through their mother’s lineage (Phiri, 1997, p. 22; Rothman, 1994, p. 141). Transfer of properties and traditional offices such as the position of a chief is through the female line, however women serve primarily as the connection to properties and traditional offices which invariably go to male members of the family (Petersen, 1982, p. 141).

Matrilineal descent system is expressed in three types of families in Ghana, the nuclear family, extended family, and polygamous family (Oware-Gyekye et al., 1996). In the nuclear family however, even though the children do not belong to their father in the matrilineal society, the father or a woman’s husband exercises some authority as he names the children and participate in the day-to-day training of the children (Nukunya, 2003). Categorizing power in the matrilineal family is complex for two reasons. First, the nature of the matrilineal extended family subverts marital or conjugal unions as women accord importance to their matrilineal families as compared to their marital unions (Anarfi & Awusabo-Asare, 1993; Bleek, 1987; Goode, 1963, Hagan,1983; Hutchinson, 1990; Larson, 1990; Mikell, 1997; Oppong, 1974, 1977; Poewe, 1978; Radcliffe-Brown & Forde, 1950; Schneider, 1981 Schneider, 1964). Second, apart from the traditional expectation of the involvement of a woman or wife’s maternal family members in the affairs of her children, social change has altered this power structure to an extent and enables husbands or fathers of the children to lead their families even in matrilineal societies (Kpoor, 2014, 2016; Nukunya, 2003).

Husbands are, thus, regarded as the breadwinners and oversee the family finances even if women contribute fairly to the family finances. Husbands or children’s father invariably have some power-over wife and children in the matrilineal nuclear family unit, a subset of the extended matrilineal family and society. The women usually make decisions on the general upkeep of the house and perform care giving responsibilities. They contribute to family finances but are not the overseer of family funds. They also have power over children and not their husbands. The people worked outside the homes as farmers, traders, teachers, clerks, birth attendants and earned money from these jobs. Within this structure of power and set up of traditional distribution of norms that give men more power, responsibilities, coupled with ongoing social change in the family (Kpoor, 2014, 2016), families make decisions around children’s access to education. Family members, particularly women also resist non-enrolment education decisions around girls’ education. Whilst the husbands or fathers’ power-over is restricted to the nuclear family and is applied over the wife and children, the power-over of the sister’s brother transcend from power-over his own nuclear family to that of his sister’s children. The mother’s maternal grand uncle exercises the highest form of power-over as his authority extends to the extended family. Per the distribution of power within the family, men have the capability to affect education access outcomes. They have power-over in decisions (Lukes, 1974, pp. 12–13). Sometimes, power can be applied in tandem with others to achieve power-with (Arendt, 1969, p. 44). The permutations are for example, two people with power-over, two people with power-to, one person with power-to and another with power over. The application of power is not always mutually exclusive or categorically distinct. Lukes’ categorization of power is, however, employed to classify power in the family during education access negotiations and decision-making.

Based on the type of power available to different family members, those without power-over to influence key education access decisions, respond to non-enrolment education decisions differently and the family power structure plays a key role. I categorize family members into pro-educators and anti-educators. Both pro-educators (they are the decision-makers who make enrolment or access decisions and their allies andthose who rebel against non-enrolment decisions and their allies), and anti-educators (those who make non-enrolment decisions and their supporters), garner support for their education decisions. The tensions and contentions, however, came whenever non-enrolment education decisions were made. In the quest to ensure that girls go to school, pro-educators who wielded just their power-to resisted non-enrolment decisions of anti-educators. They used different approaches of resistance varying from fiercer opposition to quieter forms of negotiations. These included subverting the norms, fleeing the site of persecution, and covert diplomacy. These approaches which are mostly everyday forms of resistance used by different women within the social hierarchies of their families are examined below.

Findings

Subverting the norms: mothers’ infractions of rules of subordination

There were four kinds of infractions that mothers deployed in their acts of resistance and negotiations. These infractions are employed by resisters who poses power-to in the context of the family’s distribution of power.

Refusal to submit

First, the mothers in this context disobeyed their husbands in subtle ways through non-compliance of their instructions. Men were key decision-makers therefore the traditional expectations that men lead, and women follow applied. Husbands wielded more power over wives, to make education decision. Wives resisted their husbands’ power over them to take decisions when they are unsatisfied with non-enrolment decisions. The case of Aduome, mother of a FGEW illustrates this. Initially, she supported her husband’s decision in hopes that he might reconsider his non-enrolment decision. She hoped that her position against non-enrolment in subsequent decisions would be considered. When she realized that this would not work, she shows her displeasure through murmuring. Subsequently, she made use of collective power (power-with) by drawing on the informal alliance with her mother. While she did not question her husband’s decision, she indirectly resisted by convincing her mother and maternal uncle to send her daughter to school. Aduome’s infractions in response to her husband’s non-enrolment decision is captured in her words below:

My daughter had to leave school temporarily for two years but when I could not persuade my husband to reconsider his decision. My mother and my uncle paid for my daughter’s school supplies for two years. These two years were very turbulent in my marriage because as a wife it is expected that my individuality in decision-making should not overshadow that of my husband.

Even though Aduome refused to submit, this happened only after her unflinching support of her husband’s non-enrolment decision did not make him change his decision. Conforming to gender construction in hopes that respect would be earned during decision-making is a resistance strategy. A different form of resistance is however employed when the first attempt at resistance fails.

Mothers as breadwinners

In other instances, the mothers of the FGEW, challenged the conventional role expectations of the wife by assuming income-generating activities that they would otherwise not do. Most women worked with husbands on a farm and there was division of labour as the women did the planting and the men tilled the land for cultivation. Even though traditionally it was not out of place for women in this matrilineal community to have their own farms, they were nonetheless expected to contribute labour on their husbands’ farms. Time constraints made it difficult for women to do both. As a result, most married women did not have their own farms. Traditionally, marriage was based on the idea that men will take on the primary bread winning role while the women are expected to manage the home. As a result, even though, most women collaborated with their husbands on the farm, the actual monetary benefits accrued from the farm went to the husbands who then determined what to do with the money. Accordingly, women who wanted daughters to go to school lacked the necessary resources to enable education access.

To resolve this situation, a few women decided to manage farms of their own without directly usurping their husbands’ power-over them. Amoakoa’s situation is a good example. She facilitated her daughter’s access to education when she earned her own income as a sign of subversion. In a context that promoted unequal gender roles, she was transgressing traditional role expectation by becoming a breadwinner. Amoakoa, mother of a FGEW explained that:

When my effort to persuade my husband about his non-enrolment decision failed, I told my mother about it. She took me to my uncle and took land for me. She gave me money and I started my own farm. Within four years, I had three farms… I had my own money, and I sponsored my daughter’s education myself going forward. It was not easy because it nearly led to divorce. My husband said I think myself as equal to him and I have become very disrespectful …but I could not shuffle between going to the farm with my husband and attending to my own farms, so I concentrated on my farms. My mother encouraged me by reminding me that, in our tradition, a woman did not need a man’s approval to have her own farm.

The most common way in exercising power-over is in decision-making around resources and children (Emery, 2012). The breadwinning role of fathers which is culturally prescribed (Dreyer, 2011, p. 2), enhances their power-over during such decision making. Men’s power over can be undermined when women begin to take breadwinning roles (Atkinson et al., 2005, pp. 1138–1139). By earning her own money, the resister was infracting on rules that allowed men to oversee family resources and consequently cemented their positions as key decision-makers in the family. This resistance was made possible by the application of power-with (her own power-to, her mother’s power-to and her uncle’s power-over). Women resist in response to power excised unsatisfactory by a power-over holder over them. However, it also involves the exercise of diverse kinds of power which could be drawn from different people within the family’s hierarchical distribution of power.

Questioning their husbands’ decisions

The war of words or speaking up as a resistance approach has been employed by those with less power to express their displeasure of structural constraints that disproportionately affect them. Consistent with the literature on resistance (see Scott, 1985), the findings in this context suggest that some mothers of the FGEW also spoke up against non-enrolment decisions. Speaking up as a resistance approach is used as an adaptation strategy rather than a tool for changing the circumstances of those without power. Scott (1985) and Yitah’s (2009) work analyse how the oppressed use a war of words to adapt to their circumstances. In the matrilineal society under study however, employing the war of words or speaking up changed circumstances in their favor only if they followed it up with other resistance activities. Adwoa’s situation illustrates this clearly:

My husband inherited his diseased sister’s farm. For him, monies accrued from the farm should be used to sponsor the education of his sister’s daughter. Our own daughter was not enrolled in school. I spoke up strongly against this. This angered him because I always deferred important decisions to him in the past…

It is important to note that, questioning their husband’s decision or voicing up as a resistance strategy may require the use of their own personal funds to enable the education of their daughters. Adwoa had to earn money to pay for her daughter’s education:

Whenever my husband realizes that I am making more than enough money from my sale of farm produce, he will try to stop me by demanding that I go to the farm with him instead of going to the market to sell. I chose to sell because that is the only way I could earn money to support my daughter’s education. I knew I could lose my marriage with such turf-keeping and my mother advised me to mute this power struggle or be prepared to face the consequences, but I was willing to lose everything to prove a point.

Speaking up as a standalone approach rarely works unless mothers were willing to work and earn money to sponsor their daughter’s education. Every resistance as seen above is geared toward change, but some resistance context reflects people’s determination to cope rather than transform (Scott, 1976). The determination to cope rather than total subversion of the norms is based on how resisters interpret the kind of power that is wielded over them. According to Lukes (1974/2005), power and control can be applied through bullying. This could also involve eliminating choices for resisters. Adwoa’s situation depicts this clearly as she says her husband tries to stop her whenever she was making money. More money could mean creating more choices which can enable those with power-to, to successfully negotiate their desires during decision-making. Therefore, questioning husbands’ decisions could be an acceptable resistance strategy but earning money independently of husbands was unacceptable and was resisted by husbands. This leads us to the situation where resistance becomes a strategy for not only those with less power, power-to but for those with more power or power-over.

The everyday resistance approach to non-enrolment decisions is mostly covert but could also transform to become overt where subtle ways of resisting become ineffective. In some instances, a few of the participants have acknowledged that challenging their husbands’ decisions concerning their daughter’s education became a recipe for chaos in their marriages. In this context, resistance was no longer a war of words it was being willing to lose a marriage to prove a point. This cannot be described as subtle resistance or silent non-compliance but an ongoing confrontation in which those with the power-to (mothers) openly defies those with power-over (husbands).

Overt compliance and covert disobedience

Paramount among other resistance approaches was disobeying their husbands. Resistance in this way involved overt compliance with husbands’ decisions but covert disobedience to the exact details of the decisions. Scott describes such covert resistance as a common resistance strategy, or a weapon employed by the weak (1985). It is hidden, subtle and escape the view of the powerful (Scott, 1990, pp. 2–4). The women covertly disobeyed their husbands’ decisions and made it look as if it was unintentional when they were questioned. Others pretended to be sorry in very cunning ways when their husbands questioned them and in most instances their husbands believed them. Below, Maame Boa, a mother of a FGEW in a polygamous marriage recounted:

Hmm, one lesson that a married woman must learn is how to be skilful. My husband made my daughter drop out of school for some time because of money. Surprisingly, he paid my stepdaughter’s fees, well my rival had just one child and I had three and his reason was he cannot pay for all three of my children. …I complained to my brother, but he could not help. I confided in my friend, and she gave me insight and I became skilful. I took his money at every given opportunity, and this was effective. You know how careless men can be. On few occasions when he brought home his salary, I took everything from where he puts it. When he asks me, I would tell him that I had no idea, it was stolen at his workplace… We would all start searching everywhere and when he told me about the new employees in the workplace, I would say they may be the thieves we have been looking for. I inflated the prices of commodities when he sends me to the market and when he gave me money with specific instructions, I would do otherwise and come back to plead when he got angry. That was how Pomaa went to school. A married woman must always be skilful.

Although power-to is the most basic of the ways power can be applied, the conceptual interrelatedness comes out clearly in these accounts of contentions. We can detect that power-over, power-to, and power-with are not just types or forms of power, they are just used to represent situations. As seen above one case of resistance involved power-with, which presupposes power-to, and used to achieve power-over the situations that threatened the education of their daughters. Employing false compliance as resistance strategy was common and it is important to note that mothers in this context who employed these kinds of infractions risk getting divorced

Apart from mothers’ infractions of the four types of rules of subordinations discussed above, there were other actors who also took part in the everyday resistance of non-enrolment decisions as allies or supporters. There were two types of allies, those who are family members and those who are just friends. I discuss them under covert diplomacy.

Covert diplomacy: allies in support of insubordination

The preceding discussions make us understand that mothers and their daughters resisted when they were confronted with non-enrolment decisions. They did not do this in isolation; they formed alliances to be able to turn their situations around. These allies were usually the reason the use of power-with (Lukes, 1974/2005) was possible for the women and their daughters. It explains how power is used in solidarity with others. They also resisted in unusual ways, and these included first, giving advice that did not conform to traditional expectations of a woman and interfering in the affairs of others invited or uninvited.

Giving advice that does not conform to the traditional expectations of women

Allies as seen here gave advice that challenged the traditional gender expectations of women within the structural distribution of norms and responsibilities. They did this through the application of their power-to change. Applying power-to as collective agency produces power-with and resisting non-enrolment decisions this way as a collective have impact. Their modus operandi was also covert and subtle. Maame Yaa, a friend of Maame Boa, recalls the advice she gave Maame Boa whenever Maame Boa came running to her with her daughter’s education access issues in the extract below:

She is my friend, and we converse. She told me when the whole thing started, and we kept talking about it throughout. I told her to be skilful. Anything like when you are washing your husband’s cloth and you see money in his pocket you take it. When he gives you money to purchase something, you buy it and quote your price or the money should even get missing on the way, you know what I mean? In desperate times, you take his money which he is saving and if he does not notice fine, however, if he does, just concoct something. You can even help him to search for it. So, this is quite simple you just must have a very sharp eye to see when and if he has money so that you can take it and be skilful and just apologize if you are caught with ready excuses. Some of these excuses are inexcusable because you may not always be logical and coherent in your explanation of why monies entrusted under your care continue to get missing but you know what, there is always a way, when you show your husband that you feel very disrespected by his constant confrontations about missing moneys because you will never take or hide his money, you can indirectly force him to let the issue slide. That is how we do it, and as women we must do what must be done to get what we want otherwise our daughters will not have gone to school.

From the extract above we get a sense of how covert their resistance was. It was difficult or almost impossible for anybody who was not in their camp to figure out what was happening. It is also interesting to note how the ally in the quote above encourages her friend to use guilty trips as a resistance strategy to keep the peace with her husband. Consistent with Scott theory as conceptualized in “Domination and the Arts of Resistance” (Scott, 1990), people employ resistance strategies that enables them to maintain their social standing in society. In a similar vein, the resistance strategy which happens beyond the view of the powerful is geared towards achieving the intended purpose whilst maintaining their social standing as a good mother and a wife.

Interfering in the affairs of others, invited

Allies could come in to intervene invited or uninvited when non-enrolment decisions bring about misunderstanding within the family. Those who came in uninvited were usually family members. Friends on the other hand rarely come in to intervene uninvited. The ally below was a family member and in this case the issue was informally referred to her because the FGEW run away from home to her. This is what the FGEW said about her grandmother:

I wanted to go to school unimpeded, but I could not do that living with my parents. I run away to my grandmother, but my parents came for me. I was made to stay with my uncle, but he had no plans for my education at all. This was my life until I run away again, back to my grandmother and this time around my grandmother said enough was enough, she would take care of me.

The grandmother we see in the FGEW’s narration was an ally in her granddaughter’s quest for education. When children are caught up in the decision-making power struggle around their education access, they are not able to stand up for themselves, however, the FGEW we see in this extract resisted overtly when she run to her grandmother.

The above extracts from the data are situations where allies intervened invited. It is important to note that those who come in invited are usually those who have power-over. This is because those with power-over depending on their position in the family’s structural distribution of power can influence decisions. This is further influenced by a resister’s interpretation of the power that the invited possess to help in the access situation. Sometimes a family member or an ally can intervene uninvited.

Interfering in the affairs of others, uninvited

Sometimes, someone can intervene uninvited. Angela is a tax officer. She shared this with me:

My father did not want me to be too educated. After I completed standard seven, he decided that enough was enough. My mother initially did not support this, but she later came to agree with my father, she was tired of fighting him. My father tells me that I am the one who did not want to go to school but that is not true. In Ghana, and in those times, how many children had a say in whether they went to school or not. I am happy my Aunty came through for me. My Aunty was a teacher, I think untrained teacher. She came to our house to tell my mother that my grandmother has passed on. She spent about a week, and she insisted that my parents allow me to go to school. My situation was not about money, and nobody reported to my Aunty, my father just did not want me to go to school beyond standard seven. I am a tax officer today and I owe it all to my Aunty who intervened.

Those who intervene invited or uninvited could also be explored under the application of power-with because they are using power in solidarity with others (Lukes, 1974/2005). The above has been about mothers’ infractions as a form of everyday resistance and how allies can also make those infractions possible. These mothers are pro-educators but with little power (only power-to) because they were not responsible for taking major decisions such as education access decisions. To get their daughters in school despite non-enrolment decisions, they broke conventional gender norms structuring decision-making to make that possible. Children also took part in the resistance against non-enrolment decisions. I discuss this under fleeing the site of persecution.

Fleeing the site of persecution

What do children do when they are caught up in the education access decision-making power struggle? Little attention is paid to the involvement of children in family contentions around micro-level education access studies. I capture the involvement of the first generation educated women (FGEW) in this study who took part in the resistance politics and contentions around non-enrolment decisions. Children do not have power-over anybody in the family, if power-over is explained as the ability to strategically constrains another as seen in Lukes first phase of power (Lukes, 1974). If we explore the ability to apply power in terms of age, and birth order, where older siblings may have responsibility over younger ones, then power-over may apply. However, in the context of the exploration of education access decisions, children and their responsibility or power-over other children is not the focus of the study. Children could not apply power-over, but mothers sometimes co-opted them into their camps and thus took part in the contentions and resistance against non-enrolment decisions as passive participants. Their approach to resistance took two different forms: playing truancy and running away from home.

Playing truancy

Because FGEW only had their power-to, which was not empowering enough, this type of power was applied in solidarity with others as power-with. It is therefore not surprising that these children, now FGEW were usually co-opted into their mothers’ camps. A few children were an integral part of the struggle, and they took part in the resistance strategies to ensure that formal education did not elude them. Akosua, an 85 year old FGEW speaks of her childhood experiences:

[…] when my mother had made money, she told my father who collected the money with the assurance that I would go to school, but I had turned 11 years […] but my father never took me to school. I was supposed to sell with my mother at the market, but guess what, she took me to school. She secretly enrolled me in school and instructed my sister and I not to tell my father. It is quite surprising that my father only found out after I had already completed one term.

The quote above demonstrate how Akosua participated in the contentions through the solidarity formed with her mother and sister. Akosua’s resistance is covert because she did not openly confront her father who exercised power-over her. Like Akosua, some of the FGEW became aware of the politicking and power play surrounding their education and sided with pro-educators.

Running away from home

In addition to playing truancy, running away from home was an option. The experience of Akua, now a journalist, speaks to this eloquently.

When my father died, I was 7years, but I could not stay with my mother and stepfather because of the frequent beatings. …I had nine siblings in all because my mother married twice after my father’s death. As the eldest girl I was taught to do household chores incredibly early… I always got to school late and, in those days, going to school late meant that you were caned. The use of corporal punishment was encouraged at school. I run away from most morning household duties so that I could arrive in school on time. I had older brothers who were not expected to do much house chores because they are boys. My stepfather would beat me when I came back from school. I run away to my grandmother who supported me through school. Today, I have only one daughter and taking care of her education was my top priority until she completed her undergraduate studies.

The type of resistance described above is overt. Considering her attempt at resistance involved running away from home before she could apply power-with by securing the alliance of her grandmother. This type of power application is rarely explored in the literature on the application of power and resistance by children.

Discussion

The findings in this paper concurs with earlier findings by Lloyd and Blanc (1996) that extended family’s networks or kin in Sub Sahara Africa is important in enabling education access to children other than their biological parents. The point of departure however is that access needed to be negotiated in this context, and such negotiations involved subverting the norms, covert diplomacy, and infractions of gendered rules in decision-making.

Resistance to non-enrolment decisions differed among women based on their interpretation of the power wielded over them. A few resisted within the power structures of their families, and some resisted openly. The purpose of subtle and covert forms of resistances was to maintain a good standing with the family based on the social construction of gendered distribution of roles and responsibility, whilst all the same resisting non-enrolment decisions. These approaches to resistance that conformed to gendered constructions included, total obedience or unflinching support of husband’s non-enrolment decisions. Women employed this approach in the hopes their husbands would consider their position against non-enrolment or non-access decisions in subsequent access decisions. It also included employing coded language when women explain non-access issues to friends and the advises that their friends proffer. Speaking up as a resistance strategy also occurs within the acceptable structures of family power. Women’s use of proverbs, adages, and backtalking their husbands reinforce their points without directly usurping their husbands’ power-over them.

Other resistance occurred outside the family approved structures of power. These kinds of resistance are deemed unacceptable. This includes breadwinning and overseeing family finances. This kind of resistance also occurred in response to a particular expression of power-over employed by men. For example, power-over can be applied in a manner that is negative or creates a zero-sum situation, strategically constraining others from having options. Pro-educators employ drastic forms of resistance to deal with the situation. Exercising power-over by applying methods such as bullying, putting inhibitions on women’s ability to earn income, and emotional abuse, evoked women’s use of resistance strategies like gaining financial independence.

Breadwinning is a key disruptive mechanism of the power structure and it occurs within the context of family earning. Whilst family earnings or investments influence access, gender and quitting school as revealed by earlier scholarships, those who earn incomes and provide for the family are the key actors in decision making (Ackers et al., 2001, p. 369; Birdsall et al., 2005; Boyle et al., 2002; Brown & Park, 2002; Bruneforth, 2006; Cardoso & Verner, 2007; Dachi & Garrett, 2003; Hunter & May, 2003; Porteus et al., 2000; Ranasinghe & Hartog, 2002; UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS)/UNICEF, 2005; Vavrus, 2002). Traditionally, a man is expected to provide for the family financially. The expectation that a man would earn more than a woman is what enables men to control the family finances even if both husband and wife contribute to the family resources. Atkinson et al. (2005, pp. 1138–1139) relative resource theory argues that apart from gender, the primary predictor of power is the income a couple earns relative to one another. Improving the earning ability of women can, therefore, be disruptive to gendered hierarchy of power. When a woman earns enough money or an equal amount of money, her actions affect the family power structure during decision-making. Her social status as a bread winner, thus, contradicts the societal approved power structure within the family and consequently, a threat to a male-led hierarchy. Thus, a woman’s resistance this way creates other resistance from those with power-over.

Sometimes, the resistance involves using extended family members as weapons to get other parties to conform. This approach is employed by both those who wield power-over and those who are resisting the power-over them. Whilst this approach is employed by those with power over and those resisting power over them, the women employed this approach to resist non-enrolment decisions. This concurs with the World Bank’s finding that women were more likely to provide better access to education than men (World Bank, 2008).

It is also important to note that resisting non-enrolment education decisions sometimes involved forming alliances. Allyship explains the operationalization of power with. The distinct kinds of allyship that were identified were family allyship which involved family members only and non-family allyship. Non-family allyship however, has to do with allyship with friends. It may involve a family member and a friend who is not a family member but act in ways that support the resistance against non-enrolment decisions. Children also initiate allyship with adult members of their family.

In line with Scott’s (1985, 1987) conceptualization of hidden and public transcript, we can classify the subtle resistance such as receiving advice that did not conform to the traditionally approved behaviours of women as hidden. Furthermore, I refer to speaking up, the use of silence, employing coded language and any other resistance that do not openly subvert the norms as hidden transcript. These approaches to resistance are subtle.

This type of resistance is different from what Scott’s denotes as public transcripts. Public transcript may involve open confrontation like demonstrations and other organized forms of public resistance. Importantly, the resistance I discuss in this paper are private resistance to non-enrolment education decisions that happens within the context of families. Such individual resistance does not necessarily lead to organized or public resistance or transcript in the strict sense as Scott used it. However, there are elements of resistance that are overt and has the characteristics of public transcripts. For instance, when women garner the support of other family members to resist power holders in a manner that is directly observable to power holders, they are engaged in public transcripts. Any type of resistance that happens outside the gender and socially constructed approved behaviour of women including overseeing family finance and making important decisions can be discussed as overt resistance. Therefore, instead of using public and private transcripts, I use overt and covert resistance to differentiate the resistance that occurs within the approved power structures of the family and overt to denote the resistance that were open and occurred outside of the approved family power structures.

The application of one type of power could create other types of power. Similarly, I observed that resistance could create a chain of other resistance through power-with. Even though those who dominate important decisions such as that of access to education are those with power-over, they also employ power-with when women and their allies resist their decisions. Power-with was, however, a tool mostly employed by women as part of their resistance strategy. Whether resistance was acceptable or unacceptable, women’s experience of power-over them and their interpretation of the exercise of such in their families during education access decision-making shaped the kind of resistance they enacted.

Conclusion

The paper broached the micro-politics of access to education subject for the first generation of educated women (FGEW) in Ghana, a previously excluded group whose education access were rarely a welcome news because of the traditional role relations that this might threaten and how they achieved access with significant family negotiations where acquiring education was seen as rebellious. The paper employed the Ghana case to complement other studies on micro-level determinants of education access specifically, the resistance activities that underlay the everyday non-enrolment decisions as aspect of micro-level household politics. This is against the backdrop that the concentration on macro-level arguments oversimplifies the considerable variation of how different girls go to school. The question is, how do girls manage to access education after decision-makers make non-enrolment decisions? From the foregoing, we understand that girls who become casualties of non-enrolment decisions go to school. However, they go to school when women successfully resist such non-enrolment decisions. Such resistance strategies that the mothers of the FGEW in a typical matrilineal community in Ghana undertook, enabled their daughters to access education.

The empirical findings suggest that beyond the conventional research that concentrates on macro-level arguments on interventions, there is a dark underbelly of access within households that resisters must successfully negotiate before girls who become casualties of non-enrolment decisions can go to school.

Importantly, gender relationship dynamics, structural distribution of norms, resources and responsibilities within the family, and context is key in determining who gets to go to school in Ghana.

The provisions of macro-interventions such as fee-free policies, scholarships, school construction or upgrading, teacher capacity, class size reduction and teacher incentives does not necessarily improve girls’ ability to access and fully participate across all levels of education, without needed attention to household level practices and discrimination. Gender-based distribution of power, responsibility, norms, and resources can hinder governments efforts at providing equal education opportunities for all. Girls are usually the ones negatively affected unless pro-educators can resist non-enrolment education decisions successfully. In this study, conventional gender norms that structure roles, access and distribution of resources are broken amidst tensions, contentions and resistance before girls can go to school.

Resistance activities that were employed included subverting the norms, the distribution of which were unfair to women. Women’s infractions of unfair distribution of norms including bread winning, a role that has been traditionally appropriated for men. Second, women’s subordinate positions within their families made resisting alone difficult, consequently they employed covert diplomacy by forming alliances with other women and drawing support from likeminded friends. The paper identified three diverse kinds of allyship including family allyship, non-family allyship and children initiating allyship. Further, whilst both mothers and daughters resisted non-enrolment decisions, I describe the resistance of daughters as limited resistance. This is because the mothers of the FGEW led the resistance. When daughters got involved, they were co-opted into their mothers’ constituency. This also explain the concept of power with and how they cooperated to enable access for daughters who faced non-enrolment decisions.

This study has wider implication in Ghana and other global south context even though I dwell on the Akyem ethnic group. First, while this case exhibits specific features that are particular to Ghanaian matrilineal society and context, it highlights how the power over decision-making around access to education and the resistance activities against non-enrolment decisions intersects with broader kinship and socio-cultural dynamics to structure (non)access or enrolment outcomes for girls. It adds to the paucity of empirical or theoretical studies of education access and its relation to kinship.

Societies that practice the matrilineal kinship systems in the global south context, such as the Ovambo of Namibia, the Bemba of Zambi, the Yao of Malawi and the Cewa of Malawi, exhibit considerable degrees of cultural homogeneity to that of the matrilineal society in Ghana. I make a cautious reference to these other matrilineal groups by saying that the type of matrilineal kinship practice just like the findings reveal in Ghana can structure decision-making around access to education, gendered non-enrolment and resistance strategies. Differences may however exist in their detailed distribution of power, norms, and how allyships are formed. Further research is needed to underscore how this happens elsewhere in other descent and kinship groups. Therefore, this is not about generalizing the findings to other contexts but more about transferability in a similar scenario, where we are likely to see similar findings.

Additionally, eventhough this research focuses on education access for women born between 1917-1957, the call to emphasize micro-level household gender dynamics in access to education today is relevant. I make this call against the backdrop of recent contradictory eveidence on whether macro interventions such as fee-free policies are access oriented. Whilst some scholars argue that such interventions improve access indicators (Asante, 2022; Blimpo et al., 2019; Duflo et al., 2017), others provide a scathing critique about the access oriented ability of these interventions (Branson & Lam, 2017; Ponce & Loaysa, 2012).

Theoretically, studies on resistance in Ghana have rarely considered the mediating role of gender norms in shaping resistance within the family. This Ghanaian case therefore provides an example of how resistance happens within households around access to education.

On methods, this provides an in-depth qualitatively and context specific account of access, quite apart from the disproportionate concentration of explaining access to education quantitatively which involves mapping patterns of enrolment and other access indicators. We need to embrace other qualitative research approaches that can speak to the stories behind the numbers that education institutions and governments serve us such as access indicator averages on enrolment, transition, repetition, and completion. Employing qualitative data collection instruments has been useful in exploring the context-specific issues of education access for girls in this context.

The paper may also have important policy implications. The findings reveal that macro-level government education interventions alone are not sufficient to guarantee access outcomes for girls in Ghana and other Global South countries. Policy makers must match these interventions with efforts that encourages families to allow their children access to education irrespective of their gender. Such efforts should target attitudinal changes, shift gendered and unfair cultural norms and challenge gendered structures of constraints at the micro-level households. Researching the micro politics of girls’ education in Ghana such as the resistant strategies that women and their allies employ to get their daughters through school when faced with non-enrolment decisions is an attempt to enable policymakers and education practitioners to deepen their understanding of access to education for girls.

Acknowledgements

I am heartily thankful to Prof. Akosua Darkwah for her initial comments on the paper.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aboabea Gertrude Akuffo

Aboabea Gertrude Akuffo is a final year doctoral candidate at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford, UK. Her primary research interests include Gender inequalities in access to education, Gender and micro-politics in the home, Gender ideologies and cultural identities, and Feminist methodology. Her secondary research interest is broadly around Political economy critique, Global economic politics, and the place of women. Aboabea uses emergent qualitative approaches, grounded theory research, and feminist methodologies to investigate these themes.