ABSTRACT
Much of the writing on African women’s economic activity focuses on the traditional economic endeavors associated with African women such as farming and trade in local foodstuffs or manufactured cloth (Gladwin 1991). For Ghanaian women especially, their trading activities have been documented since the mid-1800s (Cruickshank 1853; Daniell 1856; Robertson 1983; Clark 1994; Chamlee-Wright 1997). Informal sector activities such as farming and trade have been seen as the preserve of the uneducated African woman (Robertson 1995). Educated African women took advantage of the opportunity that education provided them to work in the formal sector where jobs were more befitting of women with such skills and paid more. With the adoption of structural adjustment programs in many parts of Africa that have shrunk the public sector, and the generally low wages available to workers in both the existing public sector jobs and the now burgeoning private sector jobs, some educated African women are parlaying the trading skills they acquired as children or learning to trade as adults to make substantial incomes as traders of global consumer items. However, their lives as transnational traders are not without challenges of their own. The life histories of two such women are presented below.
