Advocate more on gender mainstreaming

Saturday, November 1, 2008 (The Mirror Pg 42)

By Rebecca Kwei
A Gender and Development Consultant, Mrs Joana Opare,has said it is important for more advocacy on gender mainstreaming in order to get more women to participate in decision-making process.
She noted that women in Ghana were still under represented in institutions at the local and national level.
She expressed concern about the low number of aspiring women parliamentarians in this year's elections, saying as of September only 66 females had been selected.
Mrs Opare said in 2004, 100 female contested for parliament and 25 got elected to parliament and that there was the need for more support for women aspirants so that the numbers do not reduce further in this year's elections.
She was making a presentation at a two-day workshop for selected journalists on increasing women’s participation in politics.
The workshop, which brought together journalists from the Greater Accra, Eastern, Central and Western regions, was aimed, among other things, at building the capacity of the participants to be more gender sensitive in their reportage before, during and after the elections.
It was also to sensitise the journalists to give adequate coverage to all the female candidates vying for various parliamentary seats, as well as also use the media as an effective tool to solicit votes for them.
The workshop was organised by Women Media and Change (WOMEC) in colloraboration with ABANTU for Development, Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the Women's Manifesto Coalition.
Giving a 2007 statistics of appointments to key positions in Ghana, she said out of the 19 cabinet ministers, four were women.
Three women are ministers of state as against seven men while there are six female chief directors of ministries as compared to 29 males.
There is also no female regional minister in the country, while there are only three deputy ministers.
For the Council of State, there are 22 males and three females and 44 male ambassadors/high commissioners to four females. There are also 12 female district chief executives to 126 males.
Enumerating barriers to women's participation in governance, Mrs Opare said women were generally less interested in politics and that both women and men often saw politics as a man’s affair; women lack political capacities; lack confidence in their own political capabilities and have lower level of education, professional experience, income and available time as compared to men; and often lack support from their husbands or family.
Therefore, she said, "in order to actualise the principles of good governance that takes all humankind into account, with the objective of eradicating gender inequalities, the process of governance will have to secure the inclusion of those who are now marginalised."
However, she noted institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women have improved since 1994.
These include the formulation of legislation and policies that are relevant to women’s empowerment and gender equality; quotas are now used in local government, education and services to promote women’s participation and women’s policy and development issues have been brought more to the fore.
She appealed to senior management of institutions to ensure that gender was included as a substantive area in all policies and programmes.
Mrs Opare said women could not be left out of decision-making and implementation of development interventions, and that every effort must, therefore, be made to bring on board their valuable contributions towards sustainable development at all levels.
The Executive Director of WOMEC, Mrs Charity Binka, said it was important for a media strategy to be adopted to ensure that all women standing for election as members of parliament got elected to improve the female representation.
To achieve this, she said, it was necessary for a critical mass of media professionals to be created and cultivated to promote and give greater visibility to all female parliamentary candidates, irrespective of the political party they represented.