Reflections on Ghana’s Informal Economy at Fifty Years

Keith Hart

Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism,

and Development, Volume 7, Number 1, Spring 2016, pp. 123-124 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/hum.2016.0002

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/612754

Access provided at 12 Sep 2019 16:51 GMT from The University Of Texas at Austin, General Libraries
 Keith Hart

Reflections on Ghana’s Informal Economy at Fifty Years

It is exactly half a century since I first entered Ghana. I was twenty-two years old, and
I stayed there for over two years, mostly in Nima, a sprawling slum on Accra’s
outskirts. My research project was initially political: how would the newly inde-
pendent country absorb a flood of migrants from the interior as citizens—through
party politics, voluntary associations, and public education? Unfortunately, Ghana
was then a police state and no one wanted to talk about politics, least of all to me. I
rented rooms in Nima and pondered what to do next. I could hardly miss the vitality
of the street economy and so I decided to study that instead of politics.
I didn’t classify the bulk of economic activity as ‘‘informal’’ then. Rather, I was
impressed by the enterprise of individuals and collected some seventy case studies that
became the basis for a doctoral thesis on entrepreneurship. Joining a group of devel-
opment economists led me to see the problem through their eyes. It was 1970 and the
world was turning. Third World cities were filling up fast, but there appeared to be
few real jobs for their inhabitants. The specter of mass unemployment, even of revo-
lution, loomed.
It took me some time to work out that the people I knew in Accra were not
unemployed—they were working, but for erratic and often low pay. At that time there
were few liberal economists; most economists, Keynesians and Marxists, saw the state
as the engine of development. I wanted to draw attention to what people were doing
beyond the state’s reach. The formal/informal distinction sought to make the invisible
visible and it succeeded in doing so. The mass of fragmented economic activities now
had a name. But ‘‘informal’’ tells us only what they are not—not subject to
regulation—rather than what they are.
The images from Suame Magazine in this photo essay bring home vividly how
varied the informal economy is and why we need to know more about its own forms
of social organization. The whole set could not be further removed from my expe-
rience in Accra fifty years ago. Nima’s street economy was based almost entirely on
trade, on buying and selling for a livelihood. The majority of its active participants
were women with very little large-scale organization to support them. Suame
Magazine has a very different history—a colonial armory in the 1930s, large corpora-
tions who went under around 1970, 200,000 skilled manufacturing workers now,
almost all men, factories, a daily turnover of $1 million, Kumasi, not Accra.
I spent some time in Kumasi in the 1960s. My host was Ayimbasia, a brewer of
millet beer (pito). She was thought to be the richest Frafra woman around, but
actually she sold most of her beer on credit and sometimes barely had the cash in
hand to brew again. She was rich in young male clients who owed her money and did

123

................. 18866$ $CH8 02-25-16 09:29:14 PS PAGE 123

 small jobs for her. Kumasi was then a green, open place and still is apparently (figs. 2
and 6), not that most of these photos show it. When I lived in Nima, there were still
open spaces with trees. But the last time I visited, all the room had been swallowed
up by houses built within touching distance of each other.
One feature of Yepoka Yeebo’s ‘‘Suame Magazine’’ is that we often learn the names
of the people in the photos. There is something homogenizing and anonymous in
lumping people together as ‘‘the informal economy.’’ If I have one regret, it is that I
sacrificed the individuality of my doctoral thesis for a general abstraction. It is striking
that the one happy Ghanaian personality here, a sunny disposition that is known all
over Africa, is a woman trader, Joyce Darko (fig. 4). For the men who work with
metal, life seems to be solitary and grim—with one or two exceptions like the fuel-
pump fixing trio (fig. 6) whose working conditions couldn’t be more cramped. Mean-
while a girl strides purposefully through the clutter (fig. 10), balancing her head pan
and ignoring the camera.
Yeebo situates this remarkable concentration of manufacturing know-how in the
conditions of contemporary Ghana, where costs of production are still high and much
is imported, not least from Chinese factories. Yet Ghana is one of the fastest-growing
economies in the world—seven out of the top ten are in Africa, the others being
China, India, and Vietnam. I don’t know how all the industry on display here could
be said to be ‘‘informal’’ or how useful it is to call it that. But there is a palpable
dynamism on a considerable scale; and I was left wondering, as the author was,
whether Suame Magazine could be a significant growth point in a brighter economic
future for Ghana. To answer that question we need to know more about the social
forms organizing the informal economy, here and elsewhere.

124 Humanity Spring 2016

................. 18866$ $CH8 02-25-16 09:29:15 PS PAGE 124