GHANA: Ghana Commended for Promoting Gender Parity

The World Bank has commended the government for its efforts at creating an enabling environment for women to participate actively in socio-economic development.

According to a report published by the bank on its website, Ghana was one of the seven countries in the Sub-Saharan Africa to have made reforms aimed at gender parity in the past one year and added that the decisions had affected the development of women, businesses and the law in general.

The other economies, it said, included Botswana, Kenya, Mauritania, Rwanda, South Africa, and Uganda.

The report, which was a research conducted between June 2009 to March 2011 in 141 economies around the world, was titled “Women, Business and the Law: Creating economic opportunity for women”.

According to the reports, only 36 governments, including that of Ghana, had made efforts aimed at reforming their legislations towards gender parity.

“Since June 2009, the report identified 41 changes in laws and regulations that could enhance economic opportunities for women in 36 economies out of the 141 surveyed,” it said.

Globally, it said women represented 49.6 per cent of the world's population but only 40.8 per cent of them work in the formal sector and attributed the gap to the legal differences between men and women.

According to the bank, the report indicated that economies with greater legal differentiation between men and women had, on the average, lower female participation in the formal labour force.

The report measured things like women's ability to sign contracts, travel abroad, manage properties, and interact with public authorities and the private sector.

“In 23 economies, married women cannot legally choose where to live, and in 29, they cannot be legally recognised as head of households,” it stated.