Dissolving Inequality? Changing Cultural Models, Education and Social Mobility in Ghana

In northern Ghana, cultural models of how to get on have changed drastically within the last generation. Coming from a part of the country that has been economically and politically marginalized throughout the colonial and post-colonial periods, people belief that formal education and modern professional careers - instead of traditional livelihoods centered around subsistence agriculture, labor migration and reciprocity within extended families - provide the only way to be successful and to achieve life chances comparable to those people in the southern part of the country have. Changing cultural models are the result of a decline of rural livelihoods that is caused environmental changes but equally rooted in internationally promoted structural adjustment policies that have disadvantaged local smallholders and led to the influx of highly subsidized cheap agricultural imports.  But despite serious investment in education by both parents and students, poor educational quality of public schools and the lack of a conducive extra-scholar environment lead to prolonged educational careers and educational malperformance. High cost of secondary and tertiary education further reduces the number of students actually able to achieve meaningful educational outcomes and social mobility. Long-term qualitative and quantitative research shows that education, despite of its potential to promote equity, in the absence of specific public programs addressing the education of deprived members of the Ghanaian society, rather leads to personal frustration, as shifting cultural models of success cannot be met, and societal marginalization, as social mobility is not achieved. This situation has the potential to create social unrest and destabilize the Ghanaian society as adequate employment for the poorly educated youth is increasingly difficult to get by. On the general level research shows that education on the societal level can only contribute to equality, if it is paralleled by policies that specifically target the needs of those marginalized.