Transnational migration and the commodification of eldercare in urban Ghana

ABSTRACT

Over the past 20 years, organizations to provide commercial nursing services, mainly to the sick and debilitated elderly, have sprung up in Accra, Ghana. This article assesses the degree to which transnational migration has generated social changes in ageing at the level of everyday practices. It argues that a range of social actors differently involved in transnational migration has created and sustained a market for home nursing agencies in Ghana through diverse processes involving the imagination of care work abroad, complex negotiations between the elderly at home and their anxious children abroad, increased financial resources among the middle class and the evaluations of western eldercare services by return and current migrants. These dynamics illustrate the complexity of the role of transnational migration in generating social change and highlight the significance of the needs of local families and the role of the imagination in shaping social remittances from abroad.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational migration
• Ghana
• eldercare
• markets
• social remittances

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the families and carers in Ghana who spoke to me about care work and to the agencies and school for giving me access. This work was supported by Rutgers University, through the Research Council and the Center for Historical Analysis project on Networks of Exchange. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a workshop on Transnational Ageing, organized by Lena Näre, at the Ethnicity, Transnationalism and Migration conference held in Helsinki, Finland in October 2014. Three anonymous reviewers and the editor gave excellent suggestions for the article’s improvement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Some of the agencies sent carers outside of Accra to the towns of Begoro in the Eastern Region and Kpando in the Volta Region and to the cities of Cape Coast in the Central Region, Kumasi in the Ashanti Region and Sunyani in the Brong-Ahafo Region.

2. Ghana has a relatively high rate of international migration within Africa (International Organization of Migration 2009). It is estimated that between 3% and 7% of Ghana’s population has migrated abroad (Twum-Baah 2005; World Bank 2011). Middle-class urban households, and many households in smaller towns in southern Ghana, have at least one family member abroad.

3. At the most, the number of clients served by agencies and in residential facilities at any one time was approximately 174 people, out of a total population of just less than 127,000 people older than age 65 in urban areas in the Greater Accra region (Ghana Statistical Service 2012).

4. All names are pseudonyms.

5. However, they remain out of reach for poorer elderly without international connections, as in a study of childless elderly women in Teshie (Dsane 2013).

6. For a longer history of this phenomenon, see Coe (2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Rutgers University.