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Africa | Ghana | Business

Ghana’s market women were once so powerful they were targeted by the military

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There are corporate-feeling malls and glossy supermarkets popping up all over the West African country. Still, more than 90 percent of people here still do their almost all their shopping at open-air markets, where the stalls are dominated by women, each running a small business. It’s an encouraging trend, but behind this bright statistic is a dark history: during Ghana’s military coups of the 1970s and 1980s, market women became the target of government terror, blamed for an economic crisis gripping the country. To understand why that could have happened, you have to first see the marke
Africa | Ghana | Activism

Helping Girls Go To School. Period.

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Each year, millions of girls all over the world experience their first period. For some, it is minimally disruptive or even a proud coming of age moment. For others, including thousands of school-aged girls in Ghana, it means beginning to miss 30-50 days of school each year. And this means falling behind in their education. When she was 15 years-old, Winnifred Selby learned that many girls in her native Ghana cannot afford sanitary supplies. Some girls improvise, using anything from dirty scraps of fabric to newspaper to mud. Some are at risk for being exploited in their desperation to obta
Africa | Ghana | Culture

GHANA: 7,256 Girls Drop Out of School in Region

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Information reaching The Chronicle the indicates that 7,256 girls, representing 33.69 percent from six districts in the Eastern Region, dropped out of basic school between the 2010 and 2012 academic years. The districts are Ayensuano, Upper Manya, Birim North, Upper West Akim, and Kwahu Afram Plains North and South. According to statistics available, of the 21,537 girls who enrolled in Junior High School 1 (JHS) in 2010, only 14,281 sat for the Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) in 2012, with the 7,256 becoming dropouts in the six districts. Though the Regional Coordinator
Africa | Ghana | Education

teen girls code their way to a brighter future

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Every week in the heart of Nima, a slum in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, families congregate at a local mosque. When the time comes, young girls say goodbye to their loved ones and part ways, filing up concrete steps leading up to the floor above. There, inside a large room dotted with brown tables, rows of flashing computer screens await for them. "When the parents are praying [downstairs], we are teaching the girls upstairs," explains tech entrepreneur Regina Agyare, who comes here every week to teach local teens how to code. I decided to set up a coding club and started having reg
Africa | Ghana | Arts

In Ghana, movies project fierce female leads

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Ghanaian filmmaker Shirley Frimpong-Manso was on an international flight when she struck up a conversation with the passenger beside her. The man asked “Why is it that every time you watch an African movie, you see a woman crying?” For Frimpong-Manso, the question struck a nerve. Growing up in Accra, the capital of Ghana, she was always bothered by the way women were portrayed in African films as weak, passive, nothing like the bold American stars she saw who smart-talked their way through leading roles. They were also nothing like the women she saw around her. “I grew up in a tota

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