Obaatanpa Adwoa Amponsah seated middle, with some of the head porters
The Ambassador Pamela Bridgewater Project has provided residential accommodation in Mamobi, a suburb of Accra, to 40 head porters, commonly known as kayayei.
The mostly teenage girls would be superintended by a foster mother, Obaatanpa Adwoa Amponsah who is also tasked to school them on the consequences of teenage pregnancies and early pre-marital sex.
The residential accommodation is part of the core objectives of the Bridgewater Project to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the head porters. The Mamobi facility, dubbed C377/13, will also serve as a hostel for many other head porters who will be passing through Accra.
Prior to this initiative by the Project, the head porters largely slept in very inhuman environments, where they expose themselves to all manner of dangers such as rape and defilement by some unscrupulous men.
The project director of the Bridgewater group, Mr. Yahaya Alhassan, in an interview appealed for support from well-meaning Ghanaians to provide descent living conditions to the unfortunate girls who are equally hardworking.
“It is a sin to watch our precious girls sleep on the street and exposed to very dangerous conditions” he said.
He urged other non-governmental organisations and civil society groups to make the resettlement of the children and wards of head porters a priority. “These children need to be in school to avoid the cycle of poverty and ignorance as a way of solving this national phenomenon” he said.
Mr. Alhassan advised some sections of the Ghanaian public to desist from sitting in the luxury of their offices and professing arm-chair solutions on how the kayayei problem should be handled in the country.
Source: GhanaWeb
