‘Old timers who still keep going’: retirement in Ghana?

This article looks at the retirement experience of Ghanaian employees of the United Africa Company (UAC), from the 1940s until the present day. Retirement was a new concept in Ghana, and UAC employees were among the first who were expected to retire by a specific age, and for whom pension provision was made. Their experience took place against the background of an incomplete introduction of legislation aimed at providing financial security in old age. The article explores this background, the views of UAC management on the retirement of African staff, and UAC’s strategies to ensure that employees were prepared for retirement. It also examines the views of the people about to be retired and the rituals that marked retirement. This is followed by an exploration of the post-retirement activities of UAC pensioners. Throughout the period under examination, former UAC employees did not regard retirement as the transition to a period of ‘well earned rest’, but rather as a transition to new economic activities, alongside a continuation of social activities and perhaps the gaining of the status of an elder or a Chief in the community. The failure to implement a comprehensive pension scheme in Ghana largely reflects the impact of economic and political crises, and also the difficulty of including a large informal sector in such a scheme. However, this article also highlights the existence of cultural factors that made the concept of leisurely retirement unattractive in the Ghanaian context.This article looks at the retirement experience of Ghanaian employees of the United Africa Company (UAC), from the 1940s until the present day. Retirement was a new concept in Ghana, and UAC employees were among the first who were expected to retire by a specific age, and for whom pension provision was made. Their experience took place against the background of an incomplete introduction of legislation aimed at providing financial security in old age. The article explores this background, the views of UAC management on the retirement of African staff, and UAC’s strategies to ensure that employees were prepared for retirement. It also examines the views of the people about to be retired and the rituals that marked retirement. This is followed by an exploration of the post-retirement activities of UAC pensioners. Throughout the period under examination, former UAC employees did not regard retirement as the transition to a period of ‘well earned rest’, but rather as a transition to new economic activities, alongside a continuation of social activities and perhaps the gaining of the status of an elder or a Chief in the community. The failure to implement a comprehensive pension scheme in Ghana largely reflects the impact of economic and political crises, and also the difficulty of including a large informal sector in such a scheme. However, this article also highlights the existence of cultural factors that made the concept of leisurely retirement unattractive in the Ghanaian context

"No longer at ease":corruption as an institution in West Africa

This article traces the historical genesis of corruption in two West African countries: Ghana and Nigeria. It argues that corruption in Africa is an institution that emerged in direct response to colonial systems of rule which super-imposed an imported institutional system with different norms and values on an existing institutional landscape, despite the fact that both deeply conflicted and contradicted each other. During decolonization and after independence, corruption, although dysfunctional, fully evolved into an institution that allowed an uneasy cohabitation of colonial and domestic African institutions to grow into a composite, syncretic system facilitated by generalized corruption

Global community effect: large-scale cooperation yields collective survival of differentiating embryonic stem cells [preprint]

“Community effect” conventionally describes differentiation occurring only when enough cells help their local (micrometers-scale) neighbors differentiate. Although new community effects are being uncovered for myriad differentiations, macroscopic-scale community effects - fates of millions of cells all entangled across centimeters - remain elusive. We found that differentiating mouse Embryonic Stem (ES) cells that are scattered as individuals over many centimeters form one macroscopic entity via long-range communications. The macroscopic population avoids extinction only if its centimeter-scale density is above a threshold value. Single-cell-level measurements, transcriptomics, and mathematical modeling revealed that this “global community effect” occurs because differentiating ES-cell populations secrete, accumulate, and sense survival-promoting factors, including FGF4, that diffuse over many millimeters and activate Yap1-induced survival mechanisms. Only above-threshold-density populations accumulate above-threshold-concentrations of factors required to survive. We thus uncovered a previously overlooked, large-scale cooperation that underlies ES-cell differentiation. Tuning such large-scale cooperation may enable constructions of macroscopic, synthetic multicellular structures

Editors' Introduction

Global Challenges (FSW

Archives and Material Culture:Critiques and Reviews - Editors’ Introduction

Global Challenges (FSW

A Journal of Debates, Methods, and Source Analysis – Editors’ Introduction

Global Challenges (FSW