ULRIK JENNISCHE: "Realizing Dreams in the Outskirts of Time, Street Trade, Finance and Development in Ghana"

ABSTRACT:

The street and market trade in Ghana is characterized by normative notions of gradual progress, of slow and steady expansion enabling self-realization for oneself and one's family. But tough competition, lack of capital, low turnover, and constant demands from friends, family members, neighbors, and market peers, make the market for most a site of stagnation rather than growth.

The notion that the market is a place for the realization of dreams and hopes also applies to the government, which seeks to fulfill its ambitions of a modernized, technologically advanced Ghana with a well-functioning welfare system, free from poverty, by developing and strengthening the country's financial market.

While these spaces and groups of people through political strategies of financial inclusion are already heading towards a common future, I aim in this seminar also to bring them together into a shared narrative of anticipation, aspiration and realization.

By reflecting on existing material collected during extensive fieldwork among street and market traders in northern and Southern Ghana, as well as material yet to be collected from the country's financial market, I will argue how the dreams and hopes often associated with markets are in this context rarely realized for neither individuals, nor countries, and perhaps not even for research projects.