Pass Affirmative Action Bill "2 Entities urge Parliament"
Parliament must speedily pass the Affirmative Action Bill into law to promote women's equal participation, representation in politics and decision-making, a Global Pluralism Monitoring report has advised.
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The report equally recommended that the government and policymakers need to improve on five key indicators to ensure the inclusiveness of various marginalised groups, including women and girls in all sectors of society.
The 55-page document is a measuring tool to assess and address the root causes of the exclusion of marginalised groups such as women and girls from key sectors in society.
At a short ceremony to launch the report in Accra, the Programme Officer of the Global Centre for Pluralism, Rajvir Gill, said there was a need to ensure that marginalised and vulnerable groups were not excluded from the key sectors of society, including politics.
The report
The report assessed 20 countries, including Ghana, on 20 indicators and scored the nation low on pointers such as shared ownership of society, trust in public institutions, intergroup trust, social, economic and policy implementation.
It gave the country an average score of five out of 10 for only the policy implementation indicator while the rest of the four low-rated benchmarks for the country had an average score of four out of ten.
The nation scored nine out of ten on both the International and national commitments to ratifying treaties and formulating legal frameworks.
The other indicators in the report are inclusion and acceptance, intergroup violence, access to justice, cultural, political, private sector, civil society, news media and political parties.
The rest are claims-making and contestation, data collection, inclusive citizenship; international and national commitments.
The report was put together by the Global Centre for Pluralism, a Canadian-based independent charitable institution, in collaboration with the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana) and funded by the Global Affairs Canada (GAC), as well as the International Development Research Centre, Canada.
It covered Canada, the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, Bosnia, Jordan, Sudan, Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria.
The rest are Tunisia, Columbia, Bolivia, Mexico, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Ireland and Australia.
Ms Gill explained that the report identified the feeling of belongingness was undermined by the highly divisive and “winner-takes-all” character of politics in which state resources were captured by political elites and their supporters.
Recommendations
She said the report recommended, among others, the need for public institutions such as the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) and the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) to be well funded.
That was because they were responsible for promoting civic values.
The Secretary-General of the Global Centre for Pluralism, Meredith Preston McGhie, for her part, encouraged stakeholders to discuss and implement the recommendations of the report.
Panellists
The Head of the Political Science Department of the University of Ghana (UG), Legon, Professor Seidu Alidu, and a Lecturer at the African and Gender Studies (UG), Prof. Akosua Adomako, both agreed with the recommendations of the report to increase women's participation in politics and decision-making.