Neighbours as keepers: Informal volunteering in Ghanaian society
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Date
2015-04-17
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Publisher
University of Ghana
Abstract
The article discusses who is volunteering and what they are doing at
the household level in Ghana. By all indications traditions of informal volunteerism continue to survive throughout the country, though this
mode of volunteering has been overlooked by researchers. This is
partly because Western conceptions of organized volunteerism do not
capture adequately the dynamics of informal volunteering. The article
is based on data drawn from the baseline of a panel household survey
on living conditions in Ghana, conducted in 2010 on 5009 households.
Descriptive statistics confirm that about 30% of the sample of 18,889
household members who were interviewed often volunteered to help
others. Volunteering rates are higher among better educated and
working men and women. But nearly all of them practice what is
described as informal affinity-based volunteering, rather than
unobligated civic volunteering. Given that Western research and
publication on volunteering offers little insight into the persistence of
informal volunteering outside industrialized societies, the study on
Ghana brings vital contributions to knowledge in this field
Description
School of social sciences colloquium
Keywords
household, researchers, Volunteering, Western research