Ghana, which is producing women entrepreneurs at a more rapid pace than any other country and has the highest percentage of women business owners worldwide, hasn’t offered an easy path to women in business. Violence and disenfranchisement have often been the norm. Still, amazing things happen when women organize. The Christian Science Monitor has the story of women leaders coming together to advocate for themselves and one another—making their voices, and their business, impossible to ignore.
By Nellie Peyton, Thomson Reuters Foundation
In a junk-strewn lot on the outskirts of Ghana’s capital, weary-looking street vendors gathered to hear their leader Vida Tangwam passionately protest their impending eviction.
The women – among them high school drop-outs and single mothers – were usually treated like “nobody” by city authorities, Ms. Tangwam said.
For decades street vendors have been forcibly, and sometimes violently, cleared off the streets of Accra, say civil society groups.
But when some 2,000 vendors in Madina, an Accra suburb, heard they would be evicted in June, something unexpected happened. The women refused to leave without a new, safer working space, and the city council gave them one.
“It’s because of the togetherness in the market, that made them to have one voice. And I think that voice was heard,” said Tangwam, who is vice president of the Informal Hawkers and Vendors Association of Ghana.It was the first time vendors had pushed back with such success – normally if they are given an alternate marketplace at all, it is unusable, said the advocacy group Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO).
Image credit: Melanie Stetson Freeman | Christian Science Monitor
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