2026 Theses Doctoral

Decolonizing Ghana’s Higher Education: The Role of Women in Activism Toward Gender Equality

Cann, Theresa E.

As a post-colonial country, Ghana’s higher education bears a colonial legacy in the form of gender disparity, which is reinforced by the country’s patriarchal cultural norms. Scholars have engaged in a plethora of research on decolonization of higher education to investigate manifestations of gender disparities in higher education. Yet, such works have not sought the views of women on what decolonization of higher education means to them. The limited research on women’s experiences in Ghana’s higher education has explored discrimination against women faculty and the limited leadership positions for female students, but less so on women’s resistance to such marginality. On both counts, the narrative skews toward the impression that women are passive recipients of discrimination and marginality, who express no agency to change or ameliorate their lived reality within Ghana’s higher education.

I undertook this research for four related goals: 1) to counter the narrative about women as passive recipients of discrimination and marginality; 2) provide insight into women leaders’ views on decolonization of higher education; 3) highlight women’s active roles to advance structural changes in gender inequality in Ghana’s higher education, and; 4) to etch women’s contribution to gender and decolonization in Ghana’s higher education. First, I investigate women’s views on decolonization of higher education along gender dimensions; I identify the strategy they adopt for their activism within the socio-cultural contexts of Ghana and describe how they perform those strategies toward gender equality. I argue that by gathering critical information from Ghanaian women leaders’ perspectives on gender and decolonization in higher education, we can understand the ways that women aim to accomplish institutional change in the Ghanaian context. Such data can inspire the adoption of specific policies that can support women to thrive in higher education.

I used a Qualitative Exploratory Multiple Case Design and a snowball sampling approach for the study. My data collection involved document analysis, observations, and 48 semi-structured interviews that gathered the perspectives of women leaders in two public higher education institutions, University of Ghana (UG) and Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). I adopted a feminist decolonial lens, specifically postcolonial feminism, as the overall conceptual framework for the study. This lens enabled the study to construct and account for women’s activism in Ghana’s patriarchal, postcolonial educational system. The conceptual framework was supplemented by two additional lenses, namely: Activist Leadership Model, and Critical Social Movement. Together, the frameworks account for a more critical approach relevant for the study of activism by a population that is historically marginalized, women in this case. At the intersection of decolonization of higher education, activism, and gender, I put the different strands into conversation to aid in my inductive analysis of the data. I did so through a decolonial lens because each framework’s strength counters the weakness in another for a deeper analysis of women leaders’ activism in a postcolonial context.

My research has established three findings: 1) Women view decolonization of higher education as synonymous with gender parity or equal representation of men and women; 2) Women adopt quiet activism, a form of activism without dramatic fanfare as the guiding principle of their activism aimed at advancing gender parity at their institutions, and; 3) women engage in quiet activism using unconventional strategies and concepts such as “Self-Activist”, Mentoring, Provision of Material Goods through Care, and “Making Noise” to make incremental inroads toward gender equality and broader structural change within their institutions. Conceptualizing decolonization as gender parity and engaging in quiet activism through unconventional strategies, the women achieved successes and contributed to the development and growth of Ghana’s education, broadly conceived. Their contributions to the country’s higher education, in particular, could be seen in the areas of curriculum reform, equal pay for teachers, introduction of digital literacy as an educational policy, and reinstatement of student stipend.

My study contributes to discourses on decolonization of higher education and gender by exploring the views of women on the subject, a perspective that has been ignored for far too long in the Global South, especially in the context of Ghana. In so doing, it adds knowledge to a relevant and contemporary area of research on quiet activism in social science, focusing on women in leadership positions in higher education in Ghana.