15 Women benefit from leadership training
Fifteen women from the Wenchi Municipality in the Brong Ahafo Region have benefitted from a training programme to enhance their knowledge and understanding to take up leadership positions.
Advertisement
The five-day programme, held in Accra, was organised by the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre (GSHRDC) and funded by Star Ghana, as part of the Increasing women’s participation in governance project.
The programme formed part of a one-year project, which is aimed at increasing women’s participation in decision making and also to improve the responsiveness of district assemblies to the needs of women in local governance.
In an interview, the Project Officer of the GSHRDC, Mrs Nicholina Asare, said the training was to build the capacity of women in the rural areas in leadership skills and empower them to take up leadership positions wherever they found themselves.
Currently, she said, women’s participation in decision making, and in other leadership roles, was low, hence the need for more women to be trained to enhance their capacities in that respect.
According to Mrs Asare, the participants were taken through topics like martial laws, Intestate Succession Law, women empowerment and roles and functions of the district assemblies among others.
She added that the training also touched on issues of violence against women and other human rights violations, and the need to report such violence to the right authorities.
She said it was wrong to fail to report violence against women and children and violence in the domestic setting in general, stressing that such behaviour contributed to the perpetuation of negative traditional and socio cultural norms and perceptions that undermined the rights of women and the vulnerable groups.
Mrs Asare urged the participants to impart the knowledge they had acquired on the society to make meaningful contributions to development in their communities and the nation at large.
Sharing her experience, a participant, Mrs Emelia Asante, said she was enlightened on the relevant agencies and organisations that dealt with issues of domestic violence and that had made her to see the need not to solve such problems at the family level.
Madam Salamatu Adams, who intends to contest the 2016 parliamentary elections, said “I have been empowered and encouraged to take part in the elections and I will encourage other women to also aspire to leadership positions”.
