DCI-Ghana launches Girls Advocacy Project
The Defence for Children International (DCI-Ghana), a gender-based non-governmental organisation (NGO), has launched the Girls Advocacy Project to promote equal rights and opportunities for girls and young women in the country.
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The project also seeks to prevent and protect girls and young women from gender-based violence, child marriage and commercial sexual exploitation and enhance their economic empowerment.
This comes immediately after the DCI-Ghana Girl Power Project, a five-year project which was undertaken from January 2011 to December 2015.
Beginning from January, 2017, the Girls Advocacy Project will run till December 2020, to address gaps in the child protection systems.
Sustainable child protection
According to the organisation, the gaps included knowledge, capacity, resource and policy in child protection issues that impede progress for effective and sustainable child protection in the country.
DCI-Ghana was formed in 1996 to promote and protect the rights of Ghanaian children as enshrined in the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Ghanaian laws on children.
The organisation became the convenor of the sub-committee of the Ghana NGO Coalition on the Rights of the Child (GNCRC), leading in advocacy for child rights issues in the country.
Addressing a gathering at the launch of the project in Kumasi, the Executive Secretary of DCI-Ghana, Dr Oppong Appiagyei Ampong, said there was the need to find the best possible ways of addressing the identified gap.
He said there was also the need to forget alliance among government, civil society organisations (CSOs), community leaders, traditional authorities, religious authorities, girls and women groups in advocating for the rights of children, especially young women, who were the most vulnerable and disadvantaged in societies.
Sensitivity
Dr Oppong called on girls and young women to be sensitive about their rights and know how to reclaim them when violated.
He also called on policy makers to re-align their focus to include issues on child marriage, gender-based violence and abuse in their agenda and actions, adding that it was incumbent on lawmakers to make laws, including legislative instruments, to back the existing acts on children and women.
For community leaders, he asked them to eschew norms, customs, values, traditions and practices that promoted child marriage, gender-based violence and abuse.
He said key progressive leaders needed to publicly speak against the issues of child marriage and gender-based violence and abuse.
Labour laws
The Ashanti Regional Director of the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), Mrs Mercy Larbi, emphasised that women needed to strengthen their relationship with their partners.
She said CHRAJ was working closely with the Domestic Violence and Victims Support Unit (DOVSSU) of the Ghana Police Service and gender-based NGOs to give equal concern to rape, defilement and other sexual violence-related matters, indicating that the labour law prevented pregnant women from engaging in night duties at their various workplaces.
