How Asantewaa Built Ghana’s Biggest TikTok Following While Working as a Nurse

In 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, a nursing student at Offinso Nursing Training College in Ghana downloaded TikTok because a friend told her to. She uploaded her first video. People liked it. She kept going.

By October 2021, Martina Dwamena, known online as Asantewaa, had 800,000 followers and 19 million likes, and had won TikTok Influencer of the Year at the Pulse Ghana Influencer Awards.

Within two years of downloading the app, she was earning over GH¢10,000 a month from content creation. She was also a certified nurse.

Who She Was Before TikTok

Asantewaa was born on June 1, 1994, in Accra. She went through the Ghanaian school system, including a stretch at Winneba Senior High School where, by her own account years later, she was not the model student her eventual audience might have expected. She admitted publicly that she repeatedly sneaked off campus to visit a boyfriend in Kwashieman, commuting from Winneba to the Accra suburb in a pattern that eventually caught up with her.

Her grades fell. She was hauled before the school assembly, issued a formal warning, and stripped of her boarding house status, spending a period as a day student before she could return.

She made it through, trained in nursing, and arrived at Offinso Nursing Training College as an adult who had already learned, expensively, that certain decisions have academic consequences.

The Lockdown and the App

TikTok’s growth in Ghana accelerated during the COVID-19 lockdown for the same reason it accelerated everywhere: people were at home, bored, and looking for short-form entertainment that did not require a budget or a broadcast studio. The app’s algorithm rewarded consistency and personality over production value, which meant that a person with a phone, an instinct for performance, and the willingness to keep posting could build a following that traditional media gatekeepers could not have predicted or controlled.

Asantewaa had all three. Her content combined comedy skits with dancing and relatable scenarios drawn from everyday Ghanaian life. The specificity of the references, the kind of situation that a Ghanaian viewer recognises from their own experience rather than from a generalised African context, is what separated her early videos from the generic content that filled the same space.

The UK-Ghana Pipeline That Helped Build Afrobeats in Britain

Her coursemate introduced her to the app. Her own instincts did everything after that.

The Numbers and What They Represent

800,000 followers and 19 million likes by October 2021 is a significant achievement in any market. In Ghana, where internet penetration and smartphone access constrain the total addressable audience, those numbers represent a density of engagement that most Ghanaian entertainers working in traditional media had not achieved in careers twice as long.

The Pulse Ghana Influencer Awards recognition in 2021 was the first formal institutional acknowledgement of what the platform had already made obvious: she was the biggest name in Ghanaian TikTok.

The Nursing Certificate and What It Signals

Asantewaa has spoken publicly about her nursing qualification and has posted her certified nurse identification on social media. The combination of a professional healthcare credential and a major social media career is unusual in any market, and in the Ghanaian entertainment context, where the path from obscurity to public profile typically runs through music, film, or comedy, it is almost singular.

It matters because it describes someone who built a significant public career not by abandoning a professional track but by running both tracks at the same time, during a global health crisis, starting from a free app on a phone.

The GH¢10,000 monthly earning figure she cited within two years of starting reflects the commercial infrastructure that had already begun to form around Ghana’s influencer economy by 2022. Brand deals, sponsored content, and appearance fees had become a real income stream for a small number of Ghanaian creators. She was at the top of that list before most brands had figured out where to look.