In Village Work Alice Wiemers examines the now ubiquitous ‘project village’, a regular host to community improvement projects but also a purposefully generic rural unit that is frequently conceptualized by planners as the model of development from the ground up. Often examined as a product of NGO dominated development in the wake of continent-wide structural adjustment programs, Wiemers demonstrates that the project village has a much longer twentieth century history, stretching back to the early colonial era, when the idea centered on local leadership and extractive labor. As Wiemers narrates, project village chiefs attracted first government and later NGO resources and promised to provide workers in turn. In time, chiefs and their villages gained a reputation and officials subsequently returned to the same site. Wiemers's study focuses on Kpasenkpe in northern Ghana, where villagers have witnessed and participated in myriad road building, school construction, agricultural improvement, and other development projects. While government agents and NGO workers have tended to focus on one initiative set in time, Kpasenkpe residents remember a long history of different projects. In fact, as Wiemers states, ‘a lot of people had much to say about previous development projects, both in praise and critique’ (23). More than assessment, Kpasenkpe chiefs and residents — as much as colonial authorities and NGO workers — have shaped the historical emergence of the project village, what Wiemers calls ‘village work’.

The key to the colonial project village was how, by working together with chiefs who were successful at raising labor, district commissioners managed to carry out key infrastructural projects. In Chapter One, Wiemers studies the first iteration of the project village during the interwar years when forced labor for public works projects was rhetorically transformed into ‘local initiative’. In so doing, district commissioners side-stepped forced labor accusations, no matter if the chiefs’ laborers volunteered or not. In return for providing laborers, chiefs claimed influence with the colonial authorities, which often manifested in a favorable hearing when they requested the use of a lorry or other colonial resources. Village work was thus a new and innovative form of statecraft. Chapter Two looks to the overlapping late colonial period and ‘Nkrumah's Time’. Despite some early projects during the colonial years, the north remained marginal to national development plans. After independence, leading chiefs competed for newly available but limited funds for projects. They drew on the tactics of their predecessors, and offered to raise labor, again, now in the name of ‘self-help’. While chiefs shared many of the new resources with select villagers, they also personally benefitted from the labor they raised, blurring the lines between community development and personal accumulation.

In Chapter Three, Wiemers shifts to a close study of the chiefly family in Kpasenkpe, elaborating how Chief Wulugunaba Sebiyam constructed a network of educated family members with ties to development and political circles. Over the years, he drew on this extended network to secure new projects, as well as to build his political influence and the economic standing of the family. Some of these educated family members returned to the village as development workers, including one female relative who worked on an anti-nudity campaign. The case raises several questions about this chiefly family in relation to ‘modernizing’ development work and stereotypes of the north, as well as the gender of village work, themes which would have merited further exploration.

Chapter Four returns to the wider scope of previous chapters and analyzes how project villages were central to the hoped-for African Green Revolution of the 1970s. With the backing of international donors, government projects aimed to create the ‘Granary of Ghana’ in the north. External funds brought cheap seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs to project villages, and chiefs petitioned to set up demonstration farms and distribute resources to agricultural cooperatives. By this time, both the chiefs and participating farmers knew to market their labor as ‘self-help’ to secure foreign assistance. Not surprisingly, when international NGOs entered Ghana in great numbers in the 1980s and 1990s, villagers were well rehearsed in how to attract project funding. As Chapter Five demonstrates, the NGO call for ‘participation’ or ‘partnership’, often framed as a new approach to community development, was only the latest incarnation of longstanding practices of ‘village work’.

To date, the piecemeal nature of village work in Ghana's north has failed to bring about widespread development. However, as Wiemers demonstrates, studying its history allows us to see the innovation of chiefs who attracted scant resources and consolidated their own power and influence. Yet, as much of the book focuses on their key role in creating and maintaining project villages, we learn less about the families who provided the labor for village work. This tension between chiefly power and extractive labor is never quite resolved. Nevertheless, Wiemers attention to the underlying scarcity of resources that gave rise to project villages is significant. As she argues, the competition for funding hinders northern citizens from demanding a new culture of region-wide development. As Wiemers concludes, villagers might call for ‘changes that might not only seek to address ongoing regional inequality but would also recognize the knowledge, expertise, and critical analysis of government that rural people have honed over decades of village work’ (148).