Current Projects
The Social Networks and Job Quality of Self-Employed Young People in Ghana and Nigeria
One of the critical issues facing Africa today is getting young people into good quality employment. This project examines the working lives of self-employed young people in order to enable the better design of employment interventions. Specifically, this research project investigates the social networks of self-employed young people in Ghana and Nigeria and answers the questions: How do the social networks of self-employed young people shape their transition into self-employment and their working lives? What is the relationship between the social support, job quality and wellbeing of self-employed young people?
Past Projects
An Anthropology of the SERVICOM Policy
This project focused on exploring the SERVICOM reform, which was instituted in 2004 to fight the corruption and inefficiency considered to plague the Nigerian Civil Service. Based on fieldwork between January and August 2015, this project adopted the method of “following the policy” to explore how various stakeholders were making sense of the SERVICOM reform including: Department for International Development, United Kingdom (DFID) bureaucrats, Nigerian bureaucrats, SERVICOM officers and citizens. By adopting this approach, this study was able to provide an ethnographic critique of the implementation of transnational ‘good governance’ initiatives on the ground in Africa.
Outcomes
Omigbodun, I. 2021. Fighting corruption in Nigeria: excessive rhetoric and indeterminate bureaucratic practices in the implementation of SERVICOM. Journal of Contemporary African Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/02589001.2020.1867311
