Age enterprising: “Old” age on the make in Ghana

Abstract

The Aging Enterprise was first coined by Carol Estes to critique the hegemony of a gerontological discourse and policy in the United States in the 1970s. These policy interventions seemed to be serving the needs of policy-makers and aging professionals, rather than those of older adults. More recently she wrote on how these interventions limited the possibilities of the gerontological imagination and focused attention on “old age” as a social problem. This paper builds on her work and that of Lawrence Cohen to examine the reach of the Aging Enterprise in Ghana, a country with limited state investments in aging. Bringing together two research projects, we are able to make our argument through an examination of aging policy and interventions in the public and private sectors, including across academic institutions, NGOs, churches, and markets. In our analysis, we propose the term age enterprising instead of the Aging Enterprise for three reasons. One, the discourse which situates old age as a problem has not been fully imported to Ghana, but instead become adapted to local ways that aging is constructed as a problem. Second, the discourses of aging enterprises should not be taken at face value, as their projects can often fail, especially in the short run. Finally, we see a mix of different aging enterprises which do not concatenate to create a monolithic force, but which diverge in key ways, thus creating a much more contingent and contradictory set of discourses around aging.