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.