The creation of kayayoo rising
The project follows the findings of the academic work presented by Rose Aba Dodd at the University of Cape Town Nelson Mandela School of Public Policy and Practice in 2021. Dodd’s work used a phenomenological approach to draw out the factors of consideration necessary for sustainable program and policy design that impact the livelihoods of the Kayayoo urban immigrant for a more positive response to programs.
It provided an in-depth view of the study population’s interior experiences and actions. It brings meaning and additional insight to the partial overview presented in current studies, which is more representative of their exterior lives. Kayayoo rising adds “nuanced research sensibility” to this scholarly work and uniquely extends Dodd, 2021.
Download the original work: a phenomenological approach to profiling the life experiences of Kayayoo in Ghana by Dodd, 2021.
Kaya ChildCare (KCC) was established in 2017 as a registered non-profit in Madina in Accra. The organization provides quality early childhood education to the children of Kayayoo in Accra under the age of 6. KCC believes that every child, regardless of background, deserves a good foundation for education. For the over half-century in which the Kayayoo profession has existed, no intervention in child development has targeted their 1 to 6-year-old child caught up in the mother’s urban-migratory lifestyle.
This leaves their early development and school readiness to chance. Considering the profile of the urban-poor Kayayoo woman, KCC has developed an intervention to supplement the mother’s effort in childcare to ensure that the struggle of urban poverty and frequent migration does not adversely affect the child’s later education.
The model uniquely meets the lifestyle and working conditions of the Kayayoo mother whiles ensuring quality early childhood play and learning content is available for their children. It gets the child out of the busy market while the mother works gives the mother the peace of mind to grow her business, and provides adequate early childhood development to make the child school-ready using the learn-through-play method.
This project about Kayayoo (head porters in Ghana) complements prior works surrounding the lives of this population by providing a social anthropological visual narrative about these urban workers. In social research in general and social anthropology in particular, photography plays a useful role as both sources of information and objects of research. […] Photographs as a form of visual narrative, can become audible taking into account when and where they were taken and by whom.” (P. Sasanka, 2019).
Our goal was to present scholarly work through documentary photography and creative writing in a photobook. And to do it in a way that challenges the “expected” narration of the Kayayoo’s life.
Sakogu
Savelugu
Madina
Janga
Behind the scenes shots
