Please join IGHC on March 16 for a lecture by Dr. Cati Coe
Dr. Cati Coe is a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University and IGHC Visiting Fulbright Scholar. Dr. Coe's research focuses on transnational migration, specifically intergenerational relations, and the distribution of care labor in transnational families.
Mar 11, 2022
March 16, 2022 | 3:30 PM | Via Zoom: join here.
A New Care Market in Ghana: Does Transnational Migration Generate Changes in Care?
A new commercial elder care market of home nursing agencies and care or nursing homes is growing in Accra, Ghana. In this talk I will examine the transnational influences on the growth of this market, from migrants’ financial and social remittances in paying for and making paid caregiving more palatable in a society that prides itself on kin care, and the dreams of international migration on the part of the care workers themselves.
The dynamics of the elder care market in Accra indicate that while migrants generate social change through their ideas and economic power, what they initiate are adapted to what local households find appropriate, both pragmatically and ideologically, in providing care to aging relatives, so that paid caregiving becomes subsumed to the ideal of kin care. Thus, I argue the emphasis on the influence of migrants (particularly in the social remittances and global care chain literatures) needs to be tempered by an attention to the simultaneous changes occurring in the local context.