SEMINAR: NCCE round-up seminar on women's participation in governance

Mrs Charlotte Osei, Chairman, National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) on Wednesday stressed the need to build capacities at the technical domain and develop tools to ensure effective implementation of programmes towards gender equality.

She said as the country sought engender the decision making processes for equal access to power and control over resources, it was equally important to build capacities at the cultural domain where most the advocacy efforts came into play to negotiate the gap between policy and practice.

Mrs Osei was speaking at the National Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) on increasing women's participation in development and achieving 30 per cent representation of women in politics by 2016.

The national FGD was the final of the series of discussions that were planned as part of a research the NCCE was conducting on issues affecting women's participation in the country's governance.

“Questionnaires were used to collect quantitative data from over 3000 respondents across all the 10 regions and 10 FGDs, one in each region, were carried out to obtain more qualitative data on key aspects of the research,” she said.

Mrs Osei said today's discussions was to further deepen the quality of data and broaden the representativeness of the research findings and expressed the hope that the findings from the research, to be conducted soon, would serve as a bench mark for making recommendations towards improvements in the situation of women and beyond.

“Global trends indicate that female leadership in the two areas of politics and business would increase appreciably if the right actions are taken in good time. We need to take deliberate and necessary actions to ensure effective female participation in our governance and economy.

“We are all aware that the Women's Manifesto for Ghana provides a comprehensive analysis of the situation of women in Ghana and makes some demands for improving their participation in development.

“Nine years on, many of the demands have not been met. To make progress, the demands have to be translated into actions for implementation and some targets in the manifesto need to be renewed,” she added.

The Chairman therefore said the NCCE hoped to use the research as a good entry point for renewal to implement concrete measures towards women's increased participation in political and socio-economic life in Ghana. GNA