Kayaye to receive vocational skills training

Thirty vulnerable girls engaged in head porterage (kayayo) in Accra and Kumasi are to benefit from an integrated vocational and life skills training initiative to empower them to earn a sustainable income and take good care of themselves.

Areas of the training include; dressmaking, hairdressing, soap making, bead making and fabric weaving.

This formed part of the Kaya Girls Project designed by the Ghana Developing Communities Association (GDCA), an NGO, to provide livelihood support for kayaye to empower them to break the poverty cycle in their families as well as have a healthy lifestyle.

However, an amount of $20,000 is needed to undertake the project, a situation, which has compelled the GDCA to resort to raising funds from well-meaning individuals, and institutions to enable it to undertake the project to take the girls off the streets.

Alhaji Osman Abdel-Rahman, Executive Director of GDCA, who briefed Ghana News Agency on the project in Tamale, said kayaye in Accra and Kumasi would be brought back home to Tamale to undergo the training and receive start-up capital to start their own businesses to be able to manage themselves.

Alhaji Abdel-Rahman said they would also learn packaging, marketing, customer relations, basic literacy and financial management to help sustain their business after the training.

High incidence of poverty in the northern part of the country has compelled many young girls to migrate to the southern part of the country to become head porters for a living.

Most of them have either not been to school or dropped out of school, and therefore, lack employable skills that can get them decent jobs in the cities.

They, therefore, fall victims to social vices while many of them lived on the streets.

Alhaji Abdel-Rahman said the Porters would also learn good practices such as personal and menstrual hygiene, good nutrition, family planning, and home management to promote their personal development.

He, therefore, appealed to all to support the GDCA in its attempt to secure the needed funds to undertake the project to bring relief to them.