Sports commentary and match-day broadcasting in Ghana, covered in our guide to the country’s sports media landscape, has historically been an overwhelmingly male space. The recognizable radio voices calling Premier League derbies and Black Stars matches, built up over decades of live broadcasting tradition, have been almost entirely men’s voices.
That’s beginning to shift, driven by a small but genuinely significant group of women building careers in a field that offered them few visible role models to follow.
Juliet Bawuah: Interviewing Football’s Most Powerful People
Juliet Bawuah stands as arguably Ghana’s most internationally recognized female sports journalist. She’s interviewed FIFA president Gianni Infantino directly, alongside former World Player of the Year and Liberian president George Weah, building a reputation for securing access to some of football’s most powerful and hard-to-reach figures.
Her interview with Infantino, conducted on the sidelines of a FIFA summit in Mauritania, brought her genuine wider recognition beyond Ghana’s own football media circle. She was subsequently named among the voting panel of 49 African journalists for the inaugural Africa Football Shop Player of the Year Award, a genuine mark of professional standing within continental football journalism specifically.
Recognition That Reflects Real Standing
Bawuah’s professional recognition extends well beyond individual high-profile interviews. She won the 2021 African Woman in Sport award at the GSport Awards, and was named Sports Journalist of the Year at the 26th Ghana Journalists Association Awards, one of the most significant honors available within Ghana’s broader journalism industry, not just its sports desk specifically.
This kind of cross-recognition, winning an award judged against sports journalism specifically alongside a continent-wide honor for women in sport, suggests Bawuah has built credibility that extends across multiple, genuinely different professional communities, rather than being confined to a single niche recognition track.
A Newer Generation Finding Their Way In
Behind established figures like Bawuah, a newer generation of Ghanaian women has started building careers specifically in match commentary, a role that has proven especially resistant to gender diversity even as other areas of sports journalism have opened up somewhat more. Joyce Annoh Yeboah, known on air as Ephiya Empress, offers a genuinely instructive recent example.
Yeboah, working with Angel FM at 21 years old while simultaneously studying at the Ghana Institute of Journalism, described her path into commentary as genuinely unplanned. She had originally hoped to become a footballer herself before illness forced her to abandon that ambition, and her route into broadcasting came through an unexpected connection: winning Woman of the Tournament at a football event she participated in as a university student, which led directly to a relationship with established sports presenter Saddick Adams, known professionally as Sports Obama, who helped guide her toward commentary work.
Why Commentary Specifically Remains So Male-Dominated
Yeboah’s own account of her career highlighted a genuinely important distinction within sports media: reporting and presenting roles, where Bawuah and others have built strong careers, have opened up somewhat more than live match commentary specifically, the role of actually calling play-by-play action during a live broadcast. As of her own 2021 profile, media coverage described her as one of Ghana’s only female sports commentators, a genuinely striking rarity given how many women have built successful careers in adjacent sports media roles.
This gap likely reflects a broader pattern seen in sports broadcasting internationally, where commentary roles carry an assumption of deep, encyclopedic football knowledge that audiences have historically been more readily willing to credit to male voices, regardless of an individual commentator’s actual expertise or preparation.
The Broader Regional Context
Ghana’s experience here mirrors patterns across West Africa and the wider continent. In Nigeria, Janine Anthony built a career spanning Sky Sports, BBC Africa, and StarTimes, becoming the BBC World Service’s first African female commentator at the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations, while also founding LadiesMarch, a dedicated network focused on covering women’s soccer across African communities after noticing how little media coverage women’s football typically received.
In South Africa, a documented cohort of pioneering women, including Cynthia Tshaka in the 1990s and later figures like Kass Naidoo and Carol Tshabalala, gradually built pathways into what had been an overwhelmingly male broadcasting domain, eventually producing figures like Layla Arrison, who became SuperSport’s first female English-language rugby commentator. This regional pattern, slow, individual breakthroughs gradually building toward broader change, gives useful context for understanding Ghana’s own more limited progress specifically within live commentary roles.
What Progress Actually Looks Like
Rather than a single dramatic breakthrough moment, progress for women in Ghanaian sports media has come through individual figures building genuine credibility over years, Bawuah through international access and journalism awards, Yeboah through commentary work built on football knowledge she developed as both a player and a fan before illness redirected her path.
This pattern connects to a broader theme covered throughout this site’s coverage of women in Ghanaian sport: figures like Mercy Tagoe in football administration and Rachel Ankomah in rugby have built their own institutional pathways in male-dominated spaces largely through individual persistence and demonstrated competence, rather than through any single policy change opening doors uniformly across an entire industry.
What Would Accelerate This Change
Given how narrow the commentary pathway specifically remains, structured mentorship connecting established figures like Bawuah with younger women interested in sports journalism, similar to the informal relationship that helped launch Yeboah’s own commentary career, could meaningfully expand the pipeline beyond relying purely on individual, somewhat chance connections.
Sports broadcasters and radio stations actively recruiting and training women specifically for commentary roles, rather than only reporting and presenting positions, would address the specific gap both Yeboah’s experience and the broader regional pattern point toward directly. Ghana’s sports media landscape already includes genuine institutional weight, covered in our companion piece on the country’s sports journalism scene; extending that institutional support specifically toward commentary training represents a concrete, achievable next step.
The Business Case for More Women in the Booth
Beyond fairness, there’s a genuine commercial and editorial argument for broadcasters to invest in more women moving into commentary specifically. Women’s football coverage, expanding steadily in Ghana as covered in our piece on the rise of women’s football, benefits directly from commentators who bring both technical football knowledge and a genuine, lived understanding of the women’s game’s specific storylines and player histories.
Janine Anthony’s founding of LadiesMarch in Nigeria offers a direct example of this dynamic: she built an entire organization specifically because existing sports media wasn’t adequately covering women’s football, filling a genuine gap rather than simply diversifying coverage of the men’s game alone. Ghanaian broadcasters investing in women commentators could similarly strengthen coverage of the Black Queens and the domestic Women’s Premier League, audiences currently underserved relative to their genuine, growing public interest.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who is Ghana’s most recognized female sports journalist? Juliet Bawuah, known for interviewing FIFA president Gianni Infantino and former Liberian president George Weah, and for winning both the 2021 African Woman in Sport award and Ghana’s Sports Journalist of the Year honor.
Are there women working as live football commentators in Ghana? Yes, though the role remains rare. Joyce Annoh Yeboah, working with Angel FM while studying at the Ghana Institute of Journalism, has been described as one of the country’s few female sports commentators.
Why is commentary specifically harder for women to break into than other sports media roles? Commentary carries assumptions about deep football expertise that audiences have historically credited more readily to male voices, a pattern observed across sports broadcasting well beyond Ghana specifically.
Have other African countries seen similar progress for women in sports broadcasting? Yes. Nigeria’s Janine Anthony and a documented cohort of South African broadcasters have followed similarly gradual, individually-driven paths into what had been male-dominated sports media spaces.
Final Word
Progress for women in Ghanaian sports broadcasting has come through individual figures, from Juliet Bawuah’s international journalism career to Joyce Yeboah’s unplanned path into commentary, building genuine credibility in a field that offered them few established role models to follow. Structured mentorship and deliberate commentary training could meaningfully accelerate a shift that has so far depended largely on individual persistence.
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