Maxima Missodey is a third year Ghanaian PhD candidate on the Globalmed project.

Prior to working on the project, she has been involved in both academic and consultancy qualitative research which include Plan International’s flagship project and report series Because I am Girl, McGill University’s World Platform for Health and Economic Convergence Ghana Nutrition Project and a Camfed instituted project on the educational aspirations of girls in the Junior High School.

Her work on the Globalmed project has mainly been collecting ethnographic data on pharmaceutical distribution at the retail level in Breman Asikuma in the Central Region of Ghana. Within a six-month period of fieldwork she had been engaged in ethnographic observations in two over-the counter-medicine shops in two uniquely different locations of fairly urban and rural settings. These observations focused on what people bought, the mode of request, the frequency of purchase, the purpose of their purchases and the interactions between the sellers and the buyers. This served as the basis for exploring the concept of commodification of healthcare vis a vis the ‘business’ of pharmaceutical distribution and the logic underpinning medicine distribution at the retail level from the angles of supply and demand as well as the practices surrounding the distribution of pharmaceuticals.

Currently, she is engaged in fieldwork for her thesis, “herbal medicines: commodities in the pharmaceuticalization of health in Ghana” which is aimed at exploring the ‘social lives’ of manufactured herbal medicines, from the point of manufacture through to distribution and consumption. She is particularly excited to be researching on this phenomenon because it is an ongoing issue and the research findings will add on to the body of knowledge in pharmaceutical anthropology.

Email address:  maxima_missodey@yahoo.com