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The article studies Ghana's working girl child. The transport contribution of rural women in Africa has received substantial attention. An important finding of this body of research is that women and girls are used and use themselves as a means of transport. With this finding in mind, and as part of a larger project exploring the travel and transport situation of low-income urban women in Ghana, the social, economic and travel circumstances of head-load carriers or "kayayoos" was identified as a research issue. Pilot research on the topic was undertaken in March/April 1993 and the full-scale research of women and girls as a form of urban human transport has now commenced. In Ghana, women are highly economically active, most particularly in the informal sector. Petty trading is primarily the occupational province of women. The "kaya business," commercial head-load carrying by girls and women, is to be understood within this frame. Head-load carrying is a petty form of trading; head-load carriers are self-employed, informal sector workers. On the evidence collected to date, girls and women frequently enter the "kaya business" as a way of saving the necessary capital to invest in technology and equipment to enter other less arduous and more profitable occupations.