Fatima stands on the backs of other girls at a beach in Ghana's capital Accra, Oct. 12, 2008. A Muslim girl from remote northern Ghana, Fatima had never seen the ocean before coming to Accra. "I like swimming," she said, "but I don't like how boys and girls swim together here." Ghana's Kayayo girls are young women who work as porters in the bustling cities. Their work is hard and the pay is small, but many find the opportunity and independence of the cities better than life in rural areas. (Peter DiCampo/GlobalPost)

Ghana’s Kayayo girls do heavy lifting

Young female porters eke out a living, strive for better lives

By Peter DiCampo - Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting
Published: September 26, 2009 08:30 ET
Updated: September 27, 2009 11:29 ET

ACCRA, Ghana — The Kayayo are young women, sometimes girls, who work as porters, carrying heavy loads on their heads. At times, their words and their actions tell two different stories.

They come from Ghana's arid rural north to work in the bustling cities of the south. They are paid very little, but nonetheless the work offers them opportunities that they don't get in their rural villages.

At times, their words and their actions tell two different stories.

“I won’t go back to that place. They are suffering there. If you don’t have money, you suffer. You won’t eat. At home, you can always cook and eat,” said Amariya, a woman in her 20s who worked in Ghana’s capital, Accra, until she had enough money to return to her village and marry.

“The work is not good. You carry one load and already you are tired. A whole day and sometimes you get less than 20,000 cedis [$1.36]. And the people insult us. They don’t respect us, even though we’re the ones who carry their heavy things,” said 19-year-old Abiba, who left her village to work in the city of Kumasi. “When you go to bath, you have to pay. When you go to toilet, you have to pay. As for the rooms where we stay, 14 girls in a small room, and every week you each pay 5,000 cedis [$0.34]. At home, you don’t have to pay any money,” said Hommo, a girl in her early teens who worked in Accra until she decided to continue her education.

They are all Kayayo. They make the journey to escape a place where meager subsistence farming is the primary occupation; where it is a normal practice for girls to do housework and raise their male siblings rather than attend school; and where education, infrastructure and health care lag far behind the rest of the country.

The tradition of Kayayo is so common, even expected, that the only statistics are a handful of rough estimates from aid organizations that have only recently become involved with Kayayo girls. Some place their numbers as high as the tens of thousands, and many Ghanaians maintain that nearly every northern woman will travel south at some point in her life.

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Posted by david wayne osedach on September 26, 2009 15:06 ET

If it is the young women and girls that do all of this heavy lifting and drudge work - what do the boys do?

Posted by BBC on September 29, 2009 06:13 ET

Much the same.

Currently living in Ghana I can see every day the struggle for life that people are making.

It is the human spirit in people that makes them strive for betterment. The west is amazed/horrified at the small glimpses they take of what poverty will make people do. Most of the world's population lives in such circumstances and, the developed world does not really want to know about.

Since urbanization commenced man has been departing his longer held traditional existence of being a hunter nomad or, a subsistence agriculturalist, for their perception of a better existence in the city.

C'est la vie for so many on this planet.

Posted by Teddy Fosu on October 1, 2009 03:46 ET

The poverty that cripples my country is terribly vicious. There are a handful of people who control the purse strings of the country and for centuries have neglected my people in "The North". All successive governments have just seen the peoples of northern Ghana as cheap labor and that is troubling to say the least. Rawlings, Kuffuor, Akuffo, Acheampong, Akuffo-Addo, Nkrumah, and the colonialists all neglected northern Ghana and NOW we must do something to change this slavery mentality and put an infrastructure in place that gives equal opportunities to the peoples of the North just as the people of the south. How can we truly be the gateway to Africa when 3 million control and suppress economically 12 million of the population?
We need concentrated development (not development efforts) to aid in reducing and eliminating such poverty that forces young men and women to abandon their lives in Wa, Tamale, Yendi, Navongo, Bolgatanga, Goji to live in such deplorable conditions as no person should, in Accra, Tema and Kumasi. Electricity, clean water and better schools will go a long way to solve the problem and build wealth. Industrial development within the regions to support the people in the regions is what is sorely needed. I have not all the answers and please when you read this pass it on so we can change the lives of the people who have fo centuries been without'
The development projects must include education, healthcare, water, roadways and diversity training. Diversity training? Yes, my country suffers trabalism and 'religiousism'fargreater than America's 'subtle racism'. We need the world to help us help ourselves.

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