ICSA

The pace of increase in Sub-Saharan Africa’s (SSA) older population by 2050 is expected to outstrip growth rates of any other world region. As the prospect of functional (post-colonial) welfare states is fading away, the nuances of care for and by olderAfricans remain overlooked. There is an urgent need to understand the infrastructures that exist and are being developed and utilised to support older persons living in SSA. 

The project mobilises the notion of infrastructures of care to study the agency and mobility of older persons and how their diasporic connections, technology and collective action feed into wider city dynamics. The project aim is to unravel how infrastructures of care for and by older people in SSA are entangled with diverse layers of support, vulnerability, control and sometimes coercion. How can we understand the infrastructures of care for older people across scales (from the local to the transnational) and spatial forms (urban, peri-urban)?

The project will serve as a starting point and platform for future research on the infrastructures of care for and by older persons in urban SSA.

ICSA is funded by MICRA (Manchester Institute for Collaborative Research on Ageing) and an Research Excellence Award (Oxford Brookes). It is a collaboration between Dr Deljana Iossifova (University of Manchester), Dr Chiko Ncube (Oxford Brookes) and Drs Tanja Bastia and Nan Zhang (University of Manchester). It runs between January and July 2022.