Gariba Al-Abdul Korah

History
University of Minnesota

Gariba B. Abdul-Korah entered the University of Ghana, Legon in 1987 where he pursued a combined bachelor's degree in History and Archaeology. He graduated in 1990 and served as a Teaching/Research Assistant with the Department of History at Legon for two years. During the period, he pursued a program leading to the award of a Graduate Diploma degree in Library and Archival Studies at the same University. During the course of his academic career, he wrote two dissertations entitled: "The Evolution of Co-operative Credit Unions and their Impact in the Wa District" and "An Evaluation of the Records Management Practices in the University of Ghana: A Case Study of the Department of History".

Gariba is currently a MacArthur Scholar and a Ph.D. candidate in African History at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Campus. While his academic interests focus broadly on issues such as migration, gender and the family economy, identity politics and development in the Third World, he is currently engaged in a research project entitled "Migration, Ethnicity and Uneven-development in Ghana: The Case of the Upper West Region, 1887 to the Present". Gariba is also interested in how women in the Third World survive from day to day, their access to productive resources, opportunities opened to them and the problems they face. He is equally interested in marriage - whether it is an avenue of constraint or one that opens vistas of opportunity, in prostitution, widowhood, trading and farming of motherhood and their social and economic ramifications: how ordinary men and women can earn a living, and what their lives revolve around. Gariba mixes well with people of all social gradations.