WHEN Abigail Kwartekaa Quartey decided as a teenager to become a professional boxer – an unusual choice for a young woman in a working-class neighbourhood of Ghana’s capital of Accra – her family begged her to stop training.

Boxing is the pride of Jamestown, which is based around the fishing industry and also known for being home to many boxing stars. But like most sports in Ghana, boxing has often been seen as for men only, and women are discouraged from taking part.

But Quartey persisted.

And last year, at age 27, she became Ghana’s first female world boxing champion and the first woman to travel the world as a member of the West African nation’s national team.

“My aunts and siblings didn’t like it when I started boxing. They would come here to beg my coach not to let me become a boxer,” she said at the Jamestown neighbourhood’s Black Panthers Gym where Quartey has been training since her teenage years.

But when last November Quartey defeated British boxer Sangeeta Birdi in Jamestown’s main boxing area, winning the WIBF World Super Bantamweight title, crowds of friends and supporters from the neighbourhood celebrated wildly, seemingly forgetting about the prejudice against female boxers.

Triumph after challenges

Ghanaian media pronounced her win “history,” but Quartey is quick to point out that she is by no means the first female boxer in Ghana.

“There were women in boxing before I ventured into boxing,” she said. But they weren’t allowed to travel outside the country, she added.

Quartey’s long road to this spectacular victory highlights the many challenges that female athletes in African countries face in their careers.

Quartey grew up in Jamestown and, as a teenager, sold rice with her aunt to help the family make ends meet. The only people who supported her boxing dream were her brother, a fellow boxer, and her coach.

In 2017, she stopped boxing and started selling lottery tickets to earn money. It took a lot of convincing from her coach to get her back into the ring in 2021. She could not afford a manager, and feared she would not make it without one.

In Ghana, she said, “female boxers do not receive much support and it is difficult to keep training.”

'Big deal’ for everyone

Sarah Lotus Asare, a boxing coach and the project lead for the Girls Box Tournament, said Quartey’s world title meant a lot for all boxers in Ghana.

“Even for the male boxers, when they fight with non-Africans, it’s very difficult for them to win, because they have a lot more facilities and equipment than we do,” she said.

Quartey’s title is “a big deal for her, the gym, the community, Ghana, Africa and the world at large,” said her coach, Ebenezer “Coach Killer” Adjei, as he watched her train during an afternoon session at the Black Panthers Gym.

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But for Quartey, what counts the most is the impact on young women from her neighbourhood.

She wants more women to become professional athletes.

“I am a world title holder and that confirms that what a man can do, a woman can also do,” she said.

Training next to her was 18-year-old Perpetual Okaijah, who said her family had also tried to dissuade her from going to the gym, arguing that it was for men only. But she has kept on coming anyway.

“I look up to Abigail because she’s a very tough girl,” she said. “She inspires me, shows me the right thing.”