Gender, households and reintegration: everyday lives of returned migrant women in rural northern Ghana

Since the late 1990s, migration of single women from the rural north to the urban south in Ghana has been making up a growing share of migrant streams. While the livelihood strategies of these migrant women in their southern destinations have been recently examined, the experience of reintegration for those who return to their place of origin has rarely been studied. Drawing on qualitative research with migrant women, returned migrant women (RMW) and their family members, this study examines everyday reintegration experiences of RMW within their households in a rural Dagomba community in Northern Region, Ghana. We conceptualise the household as an arena of everyday life wherein RMW exercise agency to learn to generate livelihoods that support their own as well as household members’ joint well-being. We combine this conceptualisation of household with feminist scholars’ recognition of gender as situated process. Our conceptualisation makes it possible to illuminate gender dynamics around the everyday repetitive decision-making acts that constitute livelihood generation as performed by RMW within specific intra-household dynamics in the context of reintegration in the situated community. Through the examination of the diverse and contradictory ways in which RMW exercise agency in making decisions about livelihood strategies within their households in the studied community, we show how the everyday repetitive acts of RMW contribute to micro-transformations of a situated gender ideology.