Every day, young girls generally between 12 and 20 years old migrate from the rural areas of northern Ghana to the urban centres of the south: Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi. There, they work in markets or on the streets as head load carriers (locally known as kayaye), informal petty traders, domestic assistants to traders, and in other menial jobs. In the best of cases, they become domestic workers.

Their goals are as varied as their jobs. Many see the kayaye experience as an opportunity to acquire the items they need to build up their marriage dowry. Others are escaping forced marriage, while still others wish to buy second-hand clothes and start a small business once back home. Some claim they want to collect money to pay school fees for themselves or their brothers and sisters. Yet these girls face much of the worst that urban life can offer, with local people using them for their cheap labour while at the same time stigmatizing them, some are forced into sex trade.

One would argue that these contemporary social and labour dynamics are direct legacies of Ghana’s colonial and slave pasts. We want to suggest that these girls are so easily exploited in part of the country because former slave-holding regions in the south continue to hold strong biases against the regions from which they used to draw slaves in the north because of slave-legacies that continue in the form of structural inequalities between northern and southern regions.

Over the years, successive governments through various interventions and policies have tried to eliminate this growing phenomenon. Nonetheless, some of these young women have made huge strides in changing the narrative. They find themselves in higher institutions of learning and better placed in jobs. However, the numbers are few and many more girls are still on the streets.

In Ghana about 300,000 girls are said to be in the kaya trade for over a decade now. The target is to get as many as possible of the street and give them a well dissevered life through formal education (especially vocational education etc) to acquire skill for the job market all over the world.

The Blessing Api Apum Foundation aim to eradicate illiteracy, provide and develop training facilities in the rural communities especially in northern Ghana where most of these young girls emanate from. We intend to build academic and training facilities, embark on massive reading and writing campaign for children and also give scholarships within our resources.

The Foundation intends to provide proper education in a well secured training environment to make sure no African child studies under tress and unsecured buildings or stay uneducated. Blessing Api Apum Foundation will partner with government, international Organizations and other NGO`s to provide every child in Africa with the necessary basic educational tools for easy learning.