TAKORADI, GHANA - Ladybird Logistics, a women-only trucking company in Ghana, has seen its fleet of trucks quadruple in the past two years and the number of its female drivers triple. The company is succeeding in the face of low expectations.
Eyram Sedor is proud to be one of the first women to join Ladybird Logistics, a trucking firm in Ghana that claims to be the world’s first to hire only female drivers.
She also loves seeing newly recruited ladies get behind the wheel.
“The company is developing. We started with 11 drivers. We are the first bunch, and now everything is improving well. More drivers are coming. More cars are coming," she tells VOA.
Since starting in 2017, the company has grown from five trucks in 2018 to 20 trucks today, with 35 female drivers, and 14 more currently in the intensive training where safety is paramount.
The women deliver fuel to mining sites across the country.
While some of Ghana’s male truckers encourage them, Nelson Fordjour Oppong, the company’s operations manager, says others don’t want to see women in the profession.
“The guys thought this wouldn’t be possible, and they were thinking that the women will be smashing their trucks here and there. But three years down the line, we are still going, and we are still growing," he says.
Ladybird driver Amira Nana Agyeman says the work is empowering and shows the importance of giving women equal opportunities. When she is driving one of the fuel trucks, she says people will wave, sometimes shocked to see a woman behind the wheel.
“You can’t recruit only men. We’ve got families to feed, and what if my husband is the only person who brings income and then he is sick? So, I bring income, he also brings income. It helps the society. It helps the country," she tells VOA.
Esenam Nyador has also been pushing Ghana’s women to get into commercial driving. She started out in Accra as a taxi driver — also a job dominated by men.
Now, she trains women to drive trucks and buses, and has seen increasing support from Ghanaian men.
“When you have fathers, brothers, uncles talking to you and asking how they can get their nieces, daughters and their granddaughters into the profession, it tells you society has been listening," she says.
Nyador and Ladybird Logistics say they will continue steering more women into the profession.
