Risk Management and Social Visibility in Ghana*

Abstract :  In this paper we test for risk pooling within and among social networks to see if the extent of informal insurance available to individuals in rural Ghana varies with their social visibility. We identify a distinct subpopulation of socially invisible individuals who tend to be younger, poorer, engaged in farming, recent arrivals into the village who have been fostered and are not members of a major clan. While we cannot reject the null hypothesis that individual shocks do not affect individual consumption and that individual consumption tracks network and village consumption one‐for‐one among the socially visible, risk pooling fails for the socially invisible subpopulation. These results have important implications for the design of social protection policy.