Mirroring Gender Discourses: Ghanaian Migrants to Italy as Development Brokers

Exploring Ghanacoop, a co-development project that involved
Ghanaian migrants to Italy, this paper attempts to reveal the gap
between gender narratives and practices that these new brokers
perform within the development arena. Ghanacoop was a cooperative
company trading in fruits and so-called ‘ethnic products’, managed
by Ghanaian transmigrants. The company was also involved in few
sustainable development projects in Ghana, becoming an important
broker of development between Italy and Ghana. Because of its
entrepreneurial features and idiom, it succeeded in opening a new
space of political negotiation with Italian and Ghanaian State
institutions. Based on an ethnographic research, this paper analyses
how Ghanacoop mirrors and translates the development institutions’
discourses on gender equality and women’s empowerment. Inspired
by Stuart Hall, the paper presents the discrepancies and the encoding
and decoding processes that reveal a contradictory space of action for
women.