WiLDAF discusses gender, women empowerment
The Women in Law and Development (WiLDAF) has held a stakeholders meeting to gather women’s concern on gender and women empowerment in Accra.
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The meeting, funded by IBIS and Oxfam, brought together women in the academia, civil society organisations (CSOs), women groups, as well as stakeholders and covered areas such as women in agriculture, women in fisheries, women’s land rights, women access to health, women access to justice among other areas.
Making a case for women
Speaking on ‘women in agriculture’, Mr Bismark Owusu Nortey of the Peasant farmers Association of Ghana said although smallscale farmers formed 44.7 per cent of total employment in the country, they were the least recognised in the economic development of the country.
He enumerated constraints which affected women in agriculture to include access to land, access to appropriate technology, access to social services including water, electricity and transport, exploitation by middlemen, unpredictable rain patterns.
He said although some of these constraints were not only peculiar to women, they tended to feel the impact more than male farmers.
Ms Lois Adumoah-Addo of WiLDAF, who spoke on ‘women’s land right’, said although it was possible for women, especially in rural areas, to own land through outright purchases, inheritance, marriage, leasing or as a gift, women in most rural communities did not own land, due to cultural and traditional practices.
She enumerated challenges which made it impossible for women to own land to include the lack of a national data, research or evidence to establish a major case for rural women’s access to land, and also mentioned women’s weak access to justice, especially in rural communities, as one of the major constraints facing women’s access to land.
Women in fisheries
A Technical Advisor on the West African Regional Fisheries programme, Dr Apostle Queronica Quartey, who spoke on ‘women in fisheries’ said the lack of gender mainstreaming in the fisheries sector made it difficult to design appropriate interventions to improve on women’s economic growth in the fishery industry.
On women’s participation in politics and leadership, Ms Franklina Lamptey from the Institute of Local Government, in a presentation, said women continued to be under-represented in the decision-making of the country.
She said women lacked the motivation, be it financial or encouragement, to enter into politics and they tended to face a number of roadblocks such as the high amount involved in the filing of nomination to contest elections in the country.
The Governance Programme Manager of WiLDAF, Mr Frank Bodze, who spoke on
Women’s Economic Empowerment, said about 90 per cent of women were in the informal sector where most of them were into unpaid jobs.