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    Ghanaian Women's Role in Development Since Independence

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    Akinwumi Akintayo
    Ghana has made efforts since independence to increase women's participation in governance and politics by establishing affirmative action programs and reserved parliamentary seats. However, women remain underrepresented in decision making positions. While the constitution enshrines gender equality and Ghana has signed international agreements supporting women's rights, obstacles like socio-cultural factors and lack of political experience still limit women's participation. Recent appointments of women to high-level roles like Chief Justice and Attorney General represent progress, but more reform is still needed to address barriers and achieve equal representation.

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    Ghanaian Women's Role in Development Since Independence

    Uploaded by

    Akinwumi Akintayo
    76 views4 pages
    Ghana has made efforts since independence to increase women's participation in governance and politics by establishing affirmative action programs and reserved parliamentary seats. However, women remain underrepresented in decision making positions. While the constitution enshrines gender equality and Ghana has signed international agreements supporting women's rights, obstacles like socio-cultural factors and lack of political experience still limit women's participation. Recent appointments of women to high-level roles like Chief Justice and Attorney General represent progress, but more reform is still needed to address barriers and achieve equal representation.

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    Ghana has made efforts since independence to increase women's participation in governance and politics by establishing affirmative action programs and reserved parliamentary seats. However, women remain underrepresented in decision making positions. While the constitution enshrines gender equality and Ghana has signed international agreements supporting women's rights, obstacles like socio-cultural factors and lack of political experience still limit women's participation. Recent appointments of women to high-level roles like Chief Justice and Attorney General represent progress, but more reform is still needed to address barriers and achieve equal representation.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    76 views4 pages

    Ghanaian Women's Role in Development Since Independence

    Uploaded by

    Akinwumi Akintayo
    Ghana has made efforts since independence to increase women's participation in governance and politics by establishing affirmative action programs and reserved parliamentary seats. However, women remain underrepresented in decision making positions. While the constitution enshrines gender equality and Ghana has signed international agreements supporting women's rights, obstacles like socio-cultural factors and lack of political experience still limit women's participation. Recent appointments of women to high-level roles like Chief Justice and Attorney General represent progress, but more reform is still needed to address barriers and achieve equal representation.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    of 4

    Ghanaian women’s role in development since

    independence
    Daily Graphic
    06 March 2017

    Ghana’s first President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah (right), interacting with Members of
    Parliament at one of the sittings at the first Session of Parliament in Ghana

    Since Ghana’s independence in 1957, the country has been exploring measures to increase
    women’s participation in governance. This is in recognition of the fact that women’s contribution
    to labour, productivity and family sustenance cannot be overemphasised, and these justify
    women's participation in the country’s political process.

    The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report on Gender
    and Human Development maintains that women are a breed of impressively talented and
    remarkably intelligent people with a unique repertoire of experiences and knowledge,
    constituting both a source and signal of social change.
    In 1954, the United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women went into force,
    enshrining women's equal rights to vote, hold office, and access public services as provided for
    male citizens within national laws.

    According to tentative results of the 2010 Ghana population and demographic survey, women
    account for at least 51.2 per cent of the population.

    Consequently, various governments after the country’s independence have committed to


    upholding women’s human rights and ensuring women’s participation in politics and public life
    and developing affirmative action.

    Degrees of success

    Historically, Ghana has had varying degrees of successes in its efforts at effectively ensuring
    women's representation in national decision-making bodies.

    The post-independence regime under Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first Prime
    Minister, who became President in 1960 when Ghana attained a republican status, instituted
    affirmative action programmes that saw women in public offices and other male-dominated
    professions.

    For instance, he created 10 parliamentary seats for women in Ghana's first Parliament, increasing
    the number of women parliamentarians to 18 by 1965, five years after Ghana attained a
    republican status in 1960.

    This became possible when he introduced the Representation of People’s Amendment Bill after
    he realised that the country’s Parliament was made up of only men.

    Role of Ghanaian women

    The Women’s Manifesto for Ghana, a document that sets out critical issues of concern to women
    in Ghana, put together in 2004 by the Coalition of the Women’s Manifesto for Ghana and hosted
    by Abantu for Development, acknowledges that in spite of the pivotal role Ghanaian women play
    within the family, community and society at large, they occupy limited positions of key decision
    making in various sectors of the economic, political and social life.

    This is because though Ghana has ratified major international instruments that call for
    affirmative action policies, created a specific Ministry for Women and Children, now Gender,
    Children and Social Protection, with explicit objectives to improve the socio-economic status of
    women and children; there still exists a disconnect between the existence of these concrete
    policies and the effective creation of avenues for women's participation, both in politics and
    public organisational life.

    Female parliamentarians
    For instance, the number of women in Parliament increased from 15 in the First Parliament of
    the Fourth Republic in 1992 to 19 in the Third Parliament of the Fourth Republic in 2001 and to
    25 in the 230-member Parliament in the 2004 parliamentary election.

    However, this reduced to 20 in the 230-member Fifth Parliament of the Fourth Republic after the
    2008 election, with one of them passing away later.

    Despite gender equality being enshrined in the 1992 Constitution and Ghana signing up to
    several international instruments such as the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of
    Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Protocol to the African Charter on Human
    and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women (AU Optional Protocol on Women), the number of
    women participating in local, district and national governance and decision-making structures is
    very low.

    Ghana currently has an affirmative action directive to ensure that 50 per cent of government
    appointees (with 30 per cent to the district assembly) are women to try to encourage women's
    representation in public life at the local level.

    An Affirmative Action Bill that seeks to increase the number of women in parliament,
    governance and decision-making positions and across the public sector and also to ensure that
    each public sector institution has a gender equality policy, has been approved by Cabinet. Its
    been gazetted and ready to be submitted to Parliament.

    The obvious question being asked by most gender activists is to find out the obstacles to
    women’s participation in decision making. Over the years there has been much debate on this
    issue but factors such as political illiteracy, lack of confidence, low capacities, negative
    stereotyping of women who engage in politics and complicated bureaucracies of political party
    structures all hamper women’s effective participation.

    The United Nations has identified six avenues through which female participation in politics and
    government may be strengthened. These avenues are equalisation of educational opportunities,
    quotas for female participation in governing bodies, legislative reform to increase focus on issues
    concerning women and children, financing gender-responsive budgets to equally take into
    account the needs of men and women, increasing the presence of sex-disaggregated statistics in
    national research/data, and furthering the presence and agency of grass-roots women's
    empowerment movements.

    Laudable achievement

    The country made a laudable achievement for women and the country’s democracy when for the
    first time in the country’s history, Mrs Joyce Bamford Addo, a retired Supreme Court Judge, was
    appointed as Speaker of Parliament and sworn into office in 2009.

    The irony, however, was that the former Speaker, during her tenure, presided over a Parliament
    with one of the least impressive records of women’s parliamentary representation at the time.
    Mention can also be made of Her Ladyship Mrs Georgina Theodora Wood, Chief Justice of
    Ghana since 2007, who is making her mark in the Judicial Service of Ghana, not just as the first
    woman to occupy the position but also as a judicial reformer focused on improving access to
    justice and enhancing the public’s trust in the court system.

    Attorney-General

    Appointed as the Attorney-General in 2013, Mrs Marietta Brew Appiah-Oppong is the second
    woman to hold this office in the country, the first being Mrs Betty Mould-Iddrisu.

    Also, for the first time in the country’s history, women have also been appointed for other crucial
    positions.

    Mention can be made of Mrs Elizabeth Mills-Robertson, a Barrister at Law with extensive
    experience in various fields of policing, appointed as the acting Inspector-General of Police, a
    position she occupied from January to May 2009; Ms Elizabeth Adjei, the first female Director
    of Ghana Immigration Service who was appointed in 2002; and Madam Matilda Baffour-Awuah,
    then the Acting Director General of Prisons, who came into office as the substantive Director-
    General of Prisons, promising to continue with the modernisation of the prison structures and the
    legal framework within which the Prisons Service operated.

    The first female Minister of Foreign Affairs and Regional Integration, Madam Hannah Tetteh,
    who was also the Minister of Trade and Industry, was the National Democratic Congress (NDC)
    Member of Parliament (MP) for Awutu-Senya West.

    As a legal practitioner, she worked as a Legal Officer with the International Federation of
    Women Lawyers (FIDA) and also as a Legal Officer with the Commission on Human Rights and
    Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) from March – August 1995.

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