The woman who held the microphone first

Rosalind Koramah Amoh has spent thirty years being the only woman in the room. She made sure the next generation never has to do that.

There is a photograph that does not exist, but should. Kumasi, 1994. A young intern sits in a stadium that is almost empty of journalists. The Black Queens are about to face Nigeria’s Super Falcons in a Women’s World Cup qualifier. Fewer than six reporters are present. One of them is Rosalind Koramah Amoh. She is about to write her first by-lined story. She does not yet know that this moment, this undercovered, undersold game will define the next thirty years of her life.

“I was disappointed,” she says, with the calm of someone who converted that disappointment into a career. The problem was not the crowd. It was the absence of chroniclers. Women’s football was happening. Nobody was writing it down. She decided, there and then, to be the person who did.

That decision has shaped Ghanaian sports journalism in ways still being counted. Rosalind Amoh, currently Sub-editor of the Daily Graphic and Vice Chairperson of the Women’s FA Cup Committee-Ghana Football Association, is one of the founding figures of a tradition that barely existed when she entered it. She did not walk into a profession. She helped invent one.

When she arrived as a National Service person at Graphic Sports in 1995, she had been hoping to learn from Ms. Perpetual Crentsil – then the country’s only female sports journalist. She arrived to find that Crentsil had left for further studies earlier that year. The shoes she had hoped to observe were suddenly hers to fill.

Rather than shrinking from the weight of it, she apprenticed herself to the best people in the room: Editor Joe Aggrey, Sam Okaitey, Samuel Kissiedu and Ekow Asmah, who became like a big brother and would proof-read her stories before submission. On the field, Isaac Ofori of the Ghanaian Times walked her through the maze. No technology meant everything was manual, starting before dawn at the stadium, moving from federation to federation, filing late. “I was never made to pick and choose,” she says. “It was true apprenticeship.”

Three years in, something shifted. “I realised that being in that space was my own way of being an advocate, because I became exposed to how the narrative of reporting on sportswomen was so minimal and skewed.” She had not noticed it entering the profession. She then could not stop noticing it.

“I had to ignore all those things and pour my frustrations into working hard every time so the results, very good exclusive stories, would do the talking.”

The atmosphere presented what she calls, with characteristic understatement, “both sides of the coin”. The kindness was real: Aggrey ran interference for her more than once and it mattered. But so was the bullying – on the field and in the office. When she gathered scoops consistently, the explanations her colleagues reached for had nothing to do with skill: she was a woman, she could not really be that good; there had to be another reason.

Her response was the same every time. Work harder. Let the story answer.

Early in her career she was assigned to interview one of Ghana’s most influential sports administrators. He refused: she was too inexperienced. Aggrey, Big Joe, did not negotiate. Talk to her or there is no story. The interview happened. When it was published, the administrator came to the office to commend her. They became friends. Whenever he wanted a story out, she was among the first he called.

On the pitch, the restrictions were physical too. “Those times we had to go on to the pitch for interviews, I was often not allowed in because I was a woman.” Not a misunderstanding. Policy, enforced informally, understood by everyone.

In 1996 she was assigned to the World Table Tennis Championships in Manchester, her first international competition. She arrived with a notepad, a recorder and a camera too small to shoot from distance. Around her, journalists from Europe and Asia filed on laptops, photographing and reporting simultaneously. African journalists queued for the fax machine or waited their turn at a shared computer, if they knew how to use one.

That same year, the late Joe Tetteh Cofie gave her an opportunity that opened an entirely different door: a role as match summariser on radio. It was the beginning, she says, of her love affair with both radio and television commentary – a dimension of her career which ran alongside the print work that she still speaks about with visible affection. Cofie, whose name she offers with reverence reserved for those who saw something in you before you saw it yourself, understood that she had more than one kind of voice worth developing.

Back in Accra after Manchester, she saved until she could afford her first laptop…being among the first sports journalists in Ghana to own one. The lesson she draws from that period is part of what she now passes on: know what you lack, close the gap fast and network before you need to. The friendships she made in Manchester during 1996 led directly to work with foreign media outlets years later. “Like sports,” she says, “journalism is a universal language and how you prepare will determine your success.”

Ghana’s media only shows up for women’s football when the Black Queens hit a tournament or there is drama. The rest of the year? Silence. The 14-year-old Women’s Premier League still does not get consistent coverage and the regional leagues might as well not exist as far as most newsrooms are concerned. For context: women’s sports coverage globally sat at just 5% of total sports media for three decades before beginning to climb. It has reached roughly 20% in recent years. In Ghana, the gap is wider still.

Rosalind’s assessment of the league itself is measured. Player development has improved. Age-group competitions, from Under-15 upward, mean talent no longer has to wait to be seen. But grassroots development remains a fundamental challenge and age-cheating, she names it plainly, has become a growing problem that nobody in football administration wants to discuss at full volume.

This is also why her seat on the Women’s FA Cup Committee matters beyond paperwork. Visibility at the governance level changes what girls believe is possible. “The same way we have seen the number of female footballers increase because the girls see more players now,” she says, “it is important for more women to be seen in decision-making roles so it will inspire others to dream of being there.” It is the same logic that drew her to a sparsely attended qualifier in 1994. She could see what was being missed.

“It was like helping to plant and nurture the seed for an oak tree, which would grow and provide shade for everyone.”

Most people who know the journalist do not know she is also a Children’s Service teacher, or that she advocates for sickle-cell disease awareness alongside her work in women’s empowerment. She is a wife and a mother of three and she has no interest in pretending the balance comes easily. What she describes instead is a system: communicate, plan, delegate to people you trust and choose your partner wisely. “If you are alienated from your family,” she says, “you have lost everything.” She took her children on travels when they were young. When she could not, she built a support structure so her absence was physical, not emotional.

The women she credits as formative tell you something: Margaret Thatcher, Maya Angelou, Joyce Rosalind Aryee, Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings and Jenny Horrocks, the BBC sports producer whose personal mentorship she still speaks about with warmth. In Abuja during 2003, she watched a female team doctor with a travelling squad prove her worth in a medical emergency to athletes who had spent the whole tournament refusing to see her. “Professionalism must always take precedence,” Rosalind says. “And lead.”

As Morocco prepares to host the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations this June, the tournament that will determine Africa’s representatives for the 2027 Women’s World Cup in Brazil, Rosalind finds herself watching with the particular attention of someone who has seen this story from the beginning. She covered the Black Queens’ first Women’s World Cup qualification in 1999. She knows exactly what these moments of continental reckoning mean for the women who play them and the journalists who have to show up properly to tell the story.

When she looks back, what she is proudest of is not an award. It is the path and the people on it. Naa Bardina, Akosua Adjei, Abigail Sena Sosu, Nana Akua Amankwaa, Ayishatu Ali-Zakaria. She says their names without fanfare. To the young women she mentors now, her message is consistent: hold your integrity, stay curious and do not wait to be invited. “Work with integrity, respect the newsmakers, build relationships you do not have to compromise. And network before you need to. The people in the room today are the opportunities of tomorrow.”

She did not walk into a profession. She helped invent one. The next generation is already building on what she laid down.

She still wants to write two books. For the girl in Kumasi or Tamale who loves football and loves telling stories and is being told it is not a path for women, her advice is clear: stay in school. The path will find you. Education makes it possible.

Bridget Mensah believes the right story, told well, can change everything. A communications strategist and gender equity advocate with 10 years in Ghana’s media industry, she uses words as tools for accountability and amplification – particularly for women. She leads communications for the Network of Women in Broadcasting (NOWIB) and is the Head of Corporate Affairs at Ghana Digital Centres Ltd. (GDCL)

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