Traditional Funeral Rites: A Useful Ancient Tradition or a Threat to our Food Security? A Case of the Kandiga Community of Ghana

Abstract

Food insecurity is a major concern to individuals, corporate entities and the society at large. This concern has resulted in much efforts being put in place to overcome food insecurity. Despite the efforts being made, the people of Kandiga community still continue to live in an era where their traditional beliefs and values dictate to them how and why funerals should be performed without considering the consequences these funerals will pose on food security. This called for the assessment of whether a traditional funeral rite is a useful tradition or a threat to food security. Methodologically, non-probability sampling was used to select the category of respondents. Under this sampling, purposive and snowball sampling techniques were used to obtain the respondents. Qualitative data was primarily gathered from these respondents using interview guide, focus group discussion, observation, recording and transcribing. Also, secondary data was obtained through reviewing of various literatures such as journals, articles, reports, text books and the internet. The findings indicated that households spent deficit on traditional funeral rites thereby creating food insecurity in Kandiga community. Unfortunately, any support provided by development agencies end up being used by the people to perform their ancient traditional funeral rites creating a cycle of threat to their food security.