NGO calls for male crusade to promote female leadership

Wa (UW/R)-Ghana, April 9, GNA – The Community Aid for Rural Deve lopment (CARD)-Ghana, has called on males to lead the campaign for female leadership in their communities as females have the potential to contribute meaningfully to community and national development.
It said some girls and young women shunned leadership roles both in institutions and in the communities due to some social and cultural norms and values that discouraged female leadership.
Miss Leenat Abdul-Rahaman, the Executive Director of CARD-Ghana, made the call during a training workshop for She-Leads Male Champions in Wa organised by CARD-Ghana as part of the She-Leads project implementation.
She-Leads is a five-year project (2021-2025) that seeks to increase the sustained influence of girls young women on decision-making and the transformation of gender norms in formal and informal institutions that hinders female leadership.
The project is being implemented in the Upper West Region by CARD-Ghana in partnership with Plan International Ghana to advocate for increased acceptance of girls and young women leadership and their inclusion in decision-making processes at all levels.
Miss Abdul-Rahaman said as part of efforts to encourage girls and young women to take up leadership roles, CARD-Ghana was supporting instrumental females who had expressed interest in taking up leadership positions in both mainstream and students’ politics saying, “that does not mean we are supporting any political party.”
She urged participants to share the knowledge gained at the workshop with other members of the team in their communities to help ensure the success of the project.
Participants were educated on the provisions of some legal frameworks that protected the rights of women and girls.
They were the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), and the Children’s Act of Ghana.
In her presentation on the legal frameworks, Madam Charity Batuure, the Upper West Regional Director of the Department of Gender, noted that it was against the law for any woman or girl to be taken through any form of degrading treatment and discrimination.
She urged parents to take interest in the welfare of their children and to listen to their concerns saying, “if you don’t listen to them, they will do things in their own ways and the results will not be good.”
She stressed the need for issues of concern to children’s development to be included in policy formulations adding that, “the healthy development of the child is crucial to the future well-being of every society.”
On her part, Pognaa Amaamata, Mumuni, the Queen Mother of Duori, a suburb of Wa, who made a presentation on gender, urged the participants to put in conscious efforts to ensure women stood par with their men counterparts.
She said this could be achieved through ensuring women’s accessed resources such as land, and involvement in decision-making among others since the absence of that led to discrimination against women and widened inequalities between men and women.
The participants expressed commitment to ensure that barriers against women leadership at the community level were removed.