Gender, migration and forced labour: understanding migrant women's work and exploitation in the Ghanaian economy

Women and migrant workers are disproportionately vulnerable to forced labour globally (ILO, 2017; 2018). In sub-Saharan Africa, there are around 12 million migrant workers, of which 3.6 million are women (ILO, 2018:17). Ghana is a lower-middle-income African country with important connections to regional and global supply chains and labour markets. The country faces profound challenges relating to decent work, gender inequality, and poverty, which creates fertile terrain for more severe forms of exploitation and abuse. In development discourse, there is an assumption that women's vulnerability is rooted in unequal microlevel power relations, structures of "African patriarchy", and/or harmful cultural practices. Women and children are typically portrayed as passive "victims" of extreme exploitation--trafficking, sexual slavery, forced marriage--in need to "rescue" (McGrath and Watson, 2018). However, narratives of "victimhood" and "rescue" are insufficient to explain the drivers and facets of labour unfreedom among women and, moreover, obscure the complex, differentiated realities of forced labour for women workers across the Global South, including sub-Saharan Africa. This project will address this by providing robust social scientific evidence on vulnerability to and experiences of forced labour, using a political economy approach.

The principal aim of this project is to generate an in-depth understanding of forced labour among migrant women workers, with a particular focus on Ghana. Through a multi-site case study of three sectors--domestic work, sex work, and cocoa--the study will generate data to: analyse the character and role of forced labour among women migrants in these sectors; to delineate the drivers and mechanisms of vulnerability and exploitation; and to identify policy and practical tools to address this. A single-country case study of Ghana has been selected for two primary reasons: firstly, because this approach will generate a detailed, fine-grained multi-sector comparison, which will move forward understandings of vulnerability and severe labour exploitation among migrant women in Africa; secondly, because I am uniquely positioned to carry out this project, given my extensive experience of conducting ethical and high-impact research amongst vulnerable populations in Ghana.

Since this project looks at migration, gender, and forced labour, it has significant capacity for impact, both at a national and international level. The mixed methods research design will deliver reliable, systematically collected data that will be especially valuable to governments, policymakers, international organisations, civil society actors, and activists in the fields of modern slavery, decent work, and international development. In terms of impact, the outcomes of this project will move forward mainstream understandings of vulnerability to forced labour. Specifically, non-academic outputs will benefit three core impact audiences and policy debates. These are: 1) UK and European policymakers working on supply chain governance legislation and policy initiatives to combat forced labour, such as the UK Modern Slavery Act and the UK Call to Action to End Forced Labour, Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, which continue to adopt a criminal justice-oriented 'slavery and trafficking' approach, rather than one of labour and decent work 2) UN Member States, particularly Ghana and other African states, international organisations such as the ILO, migration bodies such as the International Organization for Migration, and policymakers working on safe migration, namely the 2018 Global Compact for Migration, which aims to "address all aspects of international migration" (UN, 2018), but pays little attention to internal migration 3) Ghanaian policymakers concerned with addressing gender inequality in the informal economy, a live policy area in Ghana that has largely ignored the most severe forms of exploitation faced by women workers.