Migrant womens labour: sustaining livelihoods through diverse economic practices in Accra, Ghana

Women and girls currently constitute nearly half of international migrants and more than half of the rural–urban migrants in many parts of the majority world. In Ghana, rural–urban labour migration by women and girls has become increasingly common and they often work in the informal sector. Independent from this shift in labour migration, empowering women via business is now recognized as ‘smart economics’. The research presented in this chapter challenges the stark individualism of this narrative of development and the assumption of a capitalist trajectory of growth. This chapter examines some of the complex interdependencies between different forms of labour that migrant women perform, including wage labour, alternative paid labour and unpaid labour that sustain the livelihoods of migrant women as they are conditioned by intersectional parameters, such as gender ethnicity and place of origin.