In Ghana, ideas and dreams of development, modernization, and economic growth are often closely linked to infrastructure construction. The phenomenon is not new. However, it has increased significantly in recent years, reflecting contemporary Africa’s re-enchantment with big infrastructure (Nugent, 2018). Although development through infrastructure construction and the involvement of countries like China in African infrastructure expansion are topics that have generated much debate within and outside of academia, the issue of labour has received much less attention. However, construction mostly depends on labour. Without construction workers, infrastructure development is unthinkable. Nevertheless, the increase in public and private investments in infrastructure development in Ghana over the past few years, along with the growing number of workers employed in the construction sector, has been coupled in many cases with job insecurity and poor working conditions. In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic, followed by the current economic crisis, with the consequent temporary interruption of projects due to cash flow disruptions, has made the lives and work of construction workers even more vulnerable and uncertain. Based on fieldwork research conducted between October 2021 and December 2022 on Chinese construction projects, this paper focuses on the working and living conditions of both local and Chinese workers employed by Chinese state-owned construction companies in Ghana. In particular, through the ethnographic narration of the employment dynamics and the everyday relations inside and outside the Chinese construction sites, the paper explores how systems of inequality and exclusion shape the lives and work of both Chinese and Ghanaian construction workers. From an anthropological perspective, the paper illustrates how global phenomena like contemporary capitalism, finance, and the international work market operate on the local level, and how they interact locally with pre-existing conditions of marginality, thereby shaping individual trajectories of lives and future imaginations.
