Producing life on the streets of Accra, Ghana: Young women, urban space and agency

In many countries there is a broad discourse at the policy level that portrays youth who live on the streets of cities as victims or criminals who need immediate rehabilitation (Hecht, 1998; Kovats-Bernat, 2006; Rurevo, 2003; Scheper-Hughes, 1998). This study challenges this widely held understanding and examines the ways in which young women living on the urban street space in Accra, Ghana\u27s capital city, produce and create life in this space. I draw on anthropological and sociological conceptualizations of agency and also of space, power, gender and youth to provide an account of these young women\u27s lives.^ Drawing on 20 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the study explores the question: How are young women producing life on the streets of Accra, Ghana\u27s capital city? I begin the study on the premise that the urban space in which these young women find themselves is not some inert physical space and should be taken seriously as a unit of analysis. In investigating the ways in which they produce life on the street, I look critically at the street space — as a space of work, as a space of violence, as a space of motherhood and finally as a space of transition. Throughout the chapters, I show that the structure of the street space influences the ways in which young women act, and young women\u27s actions are also based on present survival on the street and their narrations of their future. I show how through work, motherhood and violence these women actively work to create and produce life in spite of the constraints they face on a daily basis.^ This study makes theoretical contributions to the way in which young women on the street are studied by providing a more complicated analysis of their lives, which is situated at the intersection of agency, power, space, gender and youth. An understanding of the complexity of young women\u27s lives on the street provides stakeholders interested in intervening in the lives of street girls a framework which offers insights for designing effective programs that will pay particular attention to these complex lives.