Northern Of Ghana Research Articles

The Long‐Term Fertility Impact of the Navrongo Project in Northern Ghana

This study assesses the long-term fertility impact of the Community Health and Family Planning Project of the Navrongo Health Research Centre in Ghana and addresses policy debates concerning the role of family planning programs in rural Africa. Conducted in a remote traditional area on Ghana's northern border, the study tests the hypothesis that convenient family planning service delivery can induce and sustain reproductive change in a societal context that would not be expected to foster demographic transition. By 1999, results indicated that significant fertility decline arose in the early years of the project, associated with the combination of services provided by community nurses and social mobilization activities focused on men. When project strategies were scaled up, social mobilization components were neglected. As a consequence, the long-term impact of scaled-up operations was negligible. Results suggest that initial effects met the need for child spacing without introducing a sustained demographic transition.

Internal transmigrants: A Dagomba diaspora

ABSTRACTIn this article, I focus on a tiny elite community of Dagomba from Ghana's Northern Region. These men (and a handful of women) were among the first to attend secondary school once it was established in the North. Highly visible professionals, these Dagomba are internal migrants, whose new world in Accra is socially and spatially vastly different from the old in the hometown area of Dagbon. Members of this diaspora are cosmopolitans, intermingling with new kinds of people and transforming ideas and practices, but, at the same time, they maintain complex social relationships with their home communities, serving as a bridge between home and host societies.

The overwhelming minority: Inter‐ethnic conflict in Ghana's Northern Region

AbstractIn Ghana historical and modern legal and political circumstances have contributed to violent conflicts being structured around chiefs and tradition. Horizontal inequalities and local rivalries provide material for conflict narratives which in turn interact with national party politics, giving rise to the threat of inter and intra‐ethnic violence being triggered by contentious events. By analysing the background to the series of inter‐ethnic conflicts in the Northern Region which culminated in the 1994–1995 ‘Guinea Fowl War’ this paper examines how traditional and modern politics interact in Ghana and how they generate the categories and dynamics that fuel conflict. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.