This article examines current discourses on the role of the bridewealth in subordinating women and the implications of gender justice advocacy that privilege the undoing of this practice. In northern Ghana, to liberate women from oppression, some women’s rights activists advocate the abolition of the marriage payment. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in north-western Ghana, we argue that dismantling the institution of the bridewealth risks worsening women’s subordination. Gender activism needs to be sensitive to contextual norms and respectful of the ‘oppressed’ subjects of ‘liberation’. We propose a return to the traditional court as a site for negotiating women’s emancipation.

This article provides evidence of horizontal inequity in the distribution of the burden and benefits of healthcare in north‐western Ghana. A qualitative approach was used to collect and analyse the data on variation in perceptions of affordability of health services to rural and urban populations in the Jirapa Municipality of Ghana. The article argues that costs of transportation, food and lodging associated with seeking healthcare at the municipal referral hospital are disproportionately higher for rural residents. This leads to delayed medical treatment, self‐medication or reliance on traditional medicines, all of which can come with harmful consequences. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This article examines ongoing discourses on the importance of the marriage payment and its role in constraining women's autonomy across societies in Africa. First, we review how bridewealth has been conceptualized across multiple disciplines, including the work on evolutionary human scientists. We then summarize our research grounded in residential ethnographic fieldwork data collected over a period of a year in a rural settlement in north-western Ghana. Feminist accounts on women's lived experiences throughout bridewealth practicing societies point to their subordination. In some contexts, including northern Ghana, bridewealth is perceived to engender women's oppression. To liberate women from patriarchal norms, some gender advocates call for undoing the institution of the marriage payment. Nonetheless, the women who bear the brunt of gendered oppression and the men who derive patriarchal dividends from it are averse to this undoing discourse as the bridewealth normatively secures legitimacy for women. Undoing bridewealth may mean further rendering precarious women's status in the marital family. We conclude that rather than undoing the revered institution of bridewealth, there is need to build on culturally appropriate notions of communitarianism as encapsulated by the Ubuntu philosophy and indigenous systems such as the traditional courts for negotiating the rights of women.

This article builds on recent accounts of diffuse and complex agentic practices in the global South by drawing on ethnographic data gathered in northwestern Ghana among the Dagaaba. Contemporary feminist discourses and theories, particularly in contexts in the global South, have sought to draw attention to the multifaceted ways in which women exercise agency in these contexts. Practices that in the past were perceived as instruments of women's subordination or as re-inscribing their oppression have been re/interpreted as agentic. Agentic practices are theorized in more fluid terms than the binary pairing of agent/victim debates permit. Dagaaba contexts are deeply pervaded by beliefs in supernatural power forms, and these forces dis/empower certain forms of agentic acts. This article demonstrates that key factors combining with male power to regulate women's exercise of agency are perceived mystical forces. I argue that, in order not to risk missing agency—or rather “misdescribing” it—in the context of Dagaaba and most parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where the belief in mystical forces is profoundly pervasive, the role of these power forms as important determinants of the form that agentic practices assume—and more broadly, the way power works—needs critical attention in feminist theorizing.

Given concerns about the spiralling cost of health services in low and middle-income countries (LMICs), this study draws on a framework for assessing poverty and access to health services to ascertain progress towards achieving vertical equity in the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) in a rural setting in northern Ghana. Rural-urban disparities in financial access to NHIS services are seldom explored in equity-related studies although there is a knowledge gap of progress and challenges of implementing the scheme’s vertical equity objectives to inform social health protection planning and implementation. A qualitative approach was used to collect and analyse the data. Specifically, in-depth interviews and observation were deployed to explore participants’ lived experiences, the relationship between location, livelihoods and ability to pay for health insurance services. The article found that flat rate contributions for populations in the informal sector of the economy and lack of flexibility and adaptability of timing premium collections to the needs of rural residents make the cost of membership disproportionately higher for them, and this situation contradicts the vertical equity objectives of the NHIS. The study concludes that the current payment regimes serve as important deterrence to poor rural residents enrolling in the scheme. Based on this, we advocate strict adherence and implementation of the scheme’s vertical equity measures through the adoption of the Ghana National Household Register (GNHR) as a tool for ensuring that contributions are based on income, and collection is well-timed