HEAD PORTERS EMPOWERED WITH ALTERNATIVE LIVELIHOO

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A total of 50 Head Porters popularly known as ‘Kayaye’ plying their businesses mainly at the Bantama Market in Kumasi have received alternative livelihood empowerment training to enable them not only to venture into more dignifying and sustainable economic activities, but to also serve as agents of change in the practice of child and forced marriage. 

The beneficiary Head Porters, who are first and second cycle school graduates, were trained in self-employable skills such as beads, liquid and bar soap making, as well as chair bags and taken through basics of book keeping.

  Fifteen of them were also trained in integrated legal literacy and adolescent sexual reproductive health and rights services to serve as peer educators and change agents in their respective communities. 

They were each given a set of startup kits to begin their own entrepreneurship.

 The two-week livelihood skills training was organized by the Society of Women and AIDS in Africa, SWAA with funding by the United Nations Population Programme, UNFPA. 

At the passing out ceremony in Kumasi, the Secretary of SWAA and Regional Coordinator, Mrs. Elsie Ayeh, expressed worry about the widespread cases of forced and child marriage in Ghana with the Upper East region with 38 per cent of all such cases in the country as leading in the national league of the problem.

 Mrs. Ayeh attributed the high prevalence of the canker to many reasons such as poverty, low level of the consequences of such problems on the individual, family and society, with the children wives being the worst disadvantaged as they mostly drop out of school and also suffer from morbidity as a result of immature physiology for child bearing. 

She disclosed that the project which is in its pilot stage, has trained 118 Head Porters in the last four months with 68 of them spotted at the Agbogbloshie Market in Accra. 

A facilitator of the alternative livelihood skills training, Esther Naa Ankrah urged the beneficiary Head Porters to practice what they learnt to so as to ensure they have sustainable income to improve on their income. 

They must as well spend their monies judiciously and must also return to their respective hometowns to serve as role models for their peers who are considering migrating to the south to venture into the ‘Kayaye’ business. 

 The Society of Women and AIDS in Africa will scale up the project to train about five thousand Head Porters across the country in alternative livelihood and adolescent sexual reproductive health and rights to enable them to go into decent and sustainable income generation activities.

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