Thematic Article
Gender, precarious employment, and coping strategies: lived experiences of domestic workers in urban Nigeria and Ghana
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Abstract
The domestic work industry constitutes a critical segment in the informal sector, providing support to the family as the fundamental unit of society. Yet, the motivations and coping strategies of those who work in this space have received scant attention in socio-economic scholarship. Specifically, literature on decent work reveals that domestic workers, especially females, are under-protected in weak regulatory contexts. This study, conducted in two West African urban cities (Accra, Ghana, and Lagos, Nigeria), explores the lived experiences, motivations, and coping strategies of female domestic workers. Thematically analysed interview data revealed non-decent work; power imbalances; isolative situations; and vulnerabilities that must be addressed for domestic workers to thrive and for the industry to prosper. Researchers also found that domestic work has self-development possibilities—in technical and moral skills—for the workers. Recommendations include improved decency of work through fairer pay, better working conditions, and better governance of the sector. This article is published in the Thematic Collection ‘Decolonising Gender Knowledge in Sub-Saharan Africa: Empirical Insights and Theoretical Innovations from Early Career Researchers’, edited by Alicia Bowman, Evelyn Garwe and Juliet Thondhlana.
Keywords
decent workcoping strategiesdomestic workdomestic workersvulnerabilityCopyright statement
© The author(s) 2025. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Onayemi, O., Ogunyemi, K. & Smith, B. (2025), ‘Gender, precarious employment, and coping strategies: lived experiences of domestic workers in urban Nigeria and Ghana’, Journal of the British Academy, 13(3): a35 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/013.a35crossref
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In the Harvard lectures that became Art as Experience (1934) Dewey developed a democratic account of art that not only expanded the range of creative experience (watching a huge digger, the architectonics of a mutually satisfactory conversation, are included in the reach of art) but developed an account of art that was vitally reciprocal, participatory and social. Maker and perceiver are equally interactive creators as they mutually develop new modes of feeling and thinking. For Dewey this relationship necessarily re-makes the experience of community and, just as important, creates a civic space for interrogation and critique. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
This kaleidoscope of short pieces derives from two Fellows Engagement Week sessions (2022, 2023) in which speakers from across the British Academy—Theatre Studies, Anthropology, Modern History, History of Science, English, Philosophy, Music—gave ten-minute talks on the civic value of the arts and humanities. The British Academy’s SHAPE acronym, answering the Royal Society’s STEM formulation, understandably stresses the economic importance of arts and humanities in today’s challenging technological world (E is for Economy). The remit of this forum, however, was to remake and reclaim arguments for the civic importance of arts and humanities, recognising that accounts of the arts are often based on 19th-century arguments that no longer have force today. Three themes emerge from this forum: the importance of collaboration, the non-instrumental significance of aesthetic experience, and the centrality of language to civic life. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
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