Increase women's participation in governance

Saturday, October 10, 2009 (The Mirror Pg 36)

By Rebecca Kwei
A Governance Programme Officer of the Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF), Ghana, Mr Frank Wilson Bodza, has called on the government to come out with an affirmative action policy for the country to ensure increased women’s participation in political decision-making.
He said analysis of countries that had adopted affirmative action showed increased participation of women in governance in those countries.
Mr Bodza explained that affirmative action was an action by an institution to improve the lot of poorly represented people, adding that it was a temporary measure to address a structural or systemic problem over time.
He made the call at a media seminar on affirmative action policy organised by Wildaf, Ghana, in Accra.
Giving examples of countries that have affirmative action policy , Mr Bodza said Rwanda which practices constitutional quota had 24 seats reserved for women.
He said Rwanda had an 80-member parliament and now had 45 women parliamentarians.
Another country, Sweden, has a 50 per cent quota for women in all the parties and there are 164 women in the 349-member parliament.
The 150-member parliament of The Netherlands has 62 women while in South Africa there are 132 women in the 400-member parliament.
The number of women in Ghana’s 200-member parliament in 1992 was 16 and increased to 18 in 1996 and then to 19 in 2000.
In 2004, the 230-member parliament had 25 women. This number, however, decreased to 20 in 2008. The number has further been reduced to 19 following the death of the MP for Chereponi, Doris Asibi Seidu. The by-election was won by Mr Samuel Abdulai Jabanyite of the National Democratic Congress (NDC).
He said Ghana made bold steps towards affirmative action in the 1960s where 10 women were elected unopposed to represent their regions in 1960 and the number of women parliamentarians increased to 19 in 1965 where 10 went through the special law and nine contested and won on merit.
Mr Bodza said Wildaf was not satisfied with the number of women appointed to political positions, and appealed to government to be committed to its promise of reviewing the 1998 Affirmative Action Policy Guideline.
He said, for instance, the 10-member Government Economic Advisory Council had no woman on the council and queried whether “there was no woman economist in Ghana?”
The 25-member Council of State has only three women while the 10 regional ministers had only one woman.
“There is a need for affirmative action not in all sectors but for political decision making because of the low number of women representation. Both men and women need to represent equally,” he emphasised.
The National Programmes Coordinator of Wildaf, Bernice Sam said Ghana had ratified many international instruments which advocate affirmative action to ensure equal gender participation and representation in political decision making.
For instance, she said the Beijing Platform for Action of 1995 calls on governments to meet a 30 per cent representation of women in political positions.
Ms Sam said Rwanda, Mozambique, South Africa and Uganda had achieved the United Nations threshold of 30 per cent and beyond.
She said women parliamentarians represented 8.7 per cent (20 out of 230) in Ghana which places the country at the 108th position of world classification of women’s representation in parliament.