IMPROVING the lives of women and other members of society require a balanced gender representation in governance structures by promoting greater responsiveness to women in politics and decision-making.
The involvement of more women in politics and decision-making is expected to meet their interests and basic needs and enable them to continue to influence policies from a gender perspective and address inequalities and injustices in social relationships.
One of the key concerns at the fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, in 1995, was women-in-decision-making. To that effect, the conference made a declaration that “Women's empowerment and their full participation on the basis of equality in all spheres of society, including participation in the decision-making process and access to power, are fundamental for the achievement of equality, development and peace”.
Gender equality in Africa in general, and Ghana in particular, is yet to be achieved. Despite numerous interventions, only South Africa, Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya are on record to have fulfilled the requirement that 50 per cent of representation in high-level decision-making must be women.
The Affirmative Action policy adopted in Ghana in 1998, set a target to ensure that women constituted at least 40 per cent of elected assembly members. However, progress in increasing women's participation and representation in politics in Ghana has been slow.
Indeed, statistics indicate that more than 30 per cent of all the assemblies in the country, from 1994 to 2002, did not meet the United Nation’s Beijing Platform for Action on gender equality of ensuring that, at least, 30 per cent of all assembly members were women.
The DAILY GRAPHIC is amazed that although an administrative instruction stipulates that 30 per cent of the membership of district assemblies in the country should be made up of women, nearly 40 per cent of the 230 assemblies in the 1994 to 1998 assemblies did not have any female representation.
The statistics showed that 61 per cent of district assemblies in the three northern regions of the country did not have women, 25 per cent of the assemblies in the southern part of the country did not have any female representation and 41 per cent of assemblies in the middle zone did not have women representation.
Today, although there are various interventions, including the government’s efforts to ensure that 50 per cent of appointees to the various assemblies are women, the situation has still not changed much. Only six districts in 2002 met the requirement of ensuring that women formed 50 per cent of the assemblies.
It is for this reason that the DAILY GRAPHIC sees the initiative by the Community Driven Gender Advocacy Movement (CODRIGAM), a coalition of communities in the Upper East Region, which has nominated 63 women to contest in this year’s district level elections, as laudable.
The women were organised in 30 communities in the Bolgatanga Municipality, Talensi-Nabdam District, Bawku Municipality, and Kassena-Nankana East District assemblies and they will be given the necessary support to contest in the forthcoming elections.
This is a positive step to sustain the momentum and build initiatives on what has been done to enable more women to occupy decision-making positions as administrators, assembly members, counsellors, among others. And it is our wish that the CODRIGAM initiative be replicated in other districts in the country.
The DAILY GRAPHIC agrees with CODRIGAM that this increase in women’s participation in local governance will contribute immensely to reduce the canker of poverty and stunted development of the region and in other parts of the country.
We, therefore, encourage all Ghanaians, irrespective of their background, status, tribe and religion, to stand united in the fight for gender equality in all social and national development endeavours.
This will not be achieved on a silver platter but with hard work, determination, and dedication we will surely get somewhere.
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