Aspiring assembly women attend workshop

The Media Foundation for West Africa (MFWA) has organised a day’s workshop for 25 aspiring assembly women from the three regions in the north as part of efforts to increase women’s participation in decision making in local governance in the country.

The workshop, funded by Ibis Ghana, was aimed at educating the aspirants on how to use the media to send out their campaign messages to increase their chances of being elected.
Addressing the participants, a Programme Officer of MFWA, Madam Abigail Larbi, said the workshop formed part of the “Increasing Women’s Voices and Participation in Public Discourse in Ghana” project which was started by the foundation last year.

Effective use of the media

She observed that most women who participated in the local-level elections lost to their male counterparts due to lack of confidence and fear in delivering their campaign messages to the electorate, adding that the project was aimed at assisting women in the local-level elections to effectively use the media, especially radio stations, to get publicity and send out their messages to the populace.
“To make these women confident and visible, MFWA, in partnership with some radio stations in the three regions, Upper East, Upper West and Northern, have supported them with airtime to enable them to send out campaign messages to their various electoral areas through phone-in programmes. This goes a long way to increase their confidence level and to also encourage more women to go into local-level elections,” she said.
Madam Larbi said women could do more when given the opportunity in decision making and urged them not to see politics as a male-dominated area, but a field for both men and women.
For his part, the Governance Programme Director of Ibis Ghana, Mr Emmanuel Abeliwine, said the initiative formed part of a strategy to support women candidates to succeed in local-level elections.

Continued support

He said their organisation would continue to support any institution that was committed to ensuring that women played a part in the country’s decision-making process.
An aspiring assembly woman for the Sanabisi Electoral Area in the Upper East Region, Madam Monica Adongo, said she was contesting the position because she wanted to be seen as a role model in her area where most of the girls were school dropouts.