The enchantment of neoliberal education: a healthcare certificate, elusive Adulthoods, and a new middle class in Ghana

ABSTRACT

It is well-known that contemporary African youth struggle to attain adulthood, associated with a middle-class status. A healthcare certificate offered by private schools in Accra, Ghana provides an example of how youth marginality is produced. Two models of middle classness co-exist in Ghana: a developmentalist one, linked to the state bureaucracy, education, and national progress; and a neoliberal one, associated with entrepreneurship, global capitalism, and the state’s promotion of private markets. The certificate program reveals the contradictory, confusing role that education plays in the current context, in which the neoliberal middle class relies on the infrastructure and dreams developed by a developmentalist state. In the process, students are enchanted by a new form of cultural capital which has little exchange value in local labor markets.

KEYWORDS:

• Health care
• middle class
• neoliberalism
• vocational education
• youth

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 I conducted fieldwork during twenty-five weeks over five years (2013–2018). In addition to speaking to government officials, nursing school heads, managers of home care agencies, and home care workers, I followed fifteen students in one school offering the HAT certificate. I was present at the beginning and end of their course and followed up with seven of them twice – six months and two years after they had passed the examination. The students ranged in age from 23 to 38 years of age. All were women, except for one man. Two were from the more economically deprived North, and the rest came from the South. Four were married (two with a husband abroad), and three had children. Some students had worked in the informal sector since completing senior high school two to five years before; others had worked as a ward assistant or office secretary for several years before deciding to pursue a new occupation. One was a domestic servant, whose employer was paying for HAT tuition. Most had graduated from senior high school. The students’ class positions thus varied a great deal, from working class to middle class.

2 As of 2010, there were almost 25,000 nurses in Ghana, with a nurse to patient ratio of 1:971 (Ghana Health Service 2010, 19).

3 Although a year might seem a long time given the six-to-fifteen week training for certified nursing assistants in the United States, it is similar to Denmark’s social and healthcare helper course of a year and two months.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Research Council, Rutgers University.