WOMEN across the globe early last week observed the International Women’s Day (IWD), a day set aside to reflect on, celebrate and deliberate on issues affecting the female fraternity.
This year’s event, the 100th of its kind since it started in 1911 was on the theme: “Equal access to education, training and science and technology; Pathway to decent work for women”.
Though celebration of the day started way back in 1911, it was not until 1975 that women of the world – including Ghana - managed to convince the UN to accept to officially use that day to deliberate on issues concerning women; their rights, responsibilities and personal development .
And since then, March 8, 2011 has always witnessed women groups world-wide deliberating on the challenges that confront the female and calling for wider recognition of their role and position in all facets of life.
Here in Ghana, the just ended event was marked by some women-based groups on bridges as they sought to symbolise a pressuring need for society, dominated in voice and positions by the male, to link up with them, the female.
Women groups in the country and gender based advocates thus used the opportunity to call as usual call for the implementation of various measures necessary to bridge the women-men inequality gap which seem to widen as the years go by.
Since 1975 when the UN endorsed the day as IWD, various themes have been used by the UN for the day's celebrations; most of them calling for wider recognition of the woman in society, an end to gender based violence against women and the likes.
It is however interesting to note that non of those themes has ever openly called for women’s economic empowerment.
But the president of the Ghana Association of Women Entrepreneurs (GAWE), Mrs Lucia Quachey thinks the panacea to the numerous global and nation-wide calls for the need to bridge the gender inequality gap lies in the economic empowerment of the female.
“Without economic empowerment, you can’t talk of equality”, she noted.
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| Lucia Quachey, Prez, GAWE |
Mrs Quachey, also the vice president of the ECOWAS Federation of Women Entrepreneurs insists that those much talks about the need to erase the male-female inequality in the country can only be built when women are empowered economically.
Speaking to the GRAPHIC BUSINESS on ways of accelerating the economic upliftmnent of women in the country, Mrs Quachey observed that “an economically empowered woman is an asset to everyone; her children, family, community and the nation as a whole”.
The GAWE, formed in 1993 is an association of women entrepreneurs in business and service delivery networked across the country. It is an affiliate of the ECOWAS Federation of Women Entrepreneurs as well as its sister continental body.
The GAWE currently has over 2,500 membership nation-wide who engage in self-employed businesses across all sectors of economic activities in their respective geographical areas.
Mrs Quachey said the GAWE has since its 18 years of existence focused attention solely on the economic side of women’s issues because "if the woman is empowered economically, she would have the ability to help herself, the family and her community and even contribute effectively to her country."
GAWE, she said has been trying "to give women an economic voice to as a way of helping bridge that gender inequality gap that we all talk about."
Provisional results from the 2010 census puts women at 51.3 per cent, giving them a 2.6 per cent numerical advantage over their male counterparts.
This numerical advantage is however not replicated in the economic, social political and business realms in the country.
In Ghana, women have until recently been relegated to petty trading and other menial economic activities which comes with less incentives yet high risks.
Though lack of verifiable data on the country’s employment situation makes categorisation of jobs on gender bases difficult, ample evidence suggest that about 80 per cent of Ghanaian women are currently engaged in the country’s informal sector. The sector by coincidence also continue to receive lip-service from policy makers and political administrations as women issues do.
Political authorities have over the years promised fat policies for women and their activities as a way of bridging the male-female gap. These policies, normally impressive and mouth watering to women and their pro-groups, little success is however yet to come from most of these paper works.
And that is not news to Mrs Quachey too. “The policies of governments towards women issues in this country are always fantastic on paper. But when it comes to practical terms, they end up paying lip-services to our activities and issues”.
That, she adds beats her imaginations. “Women in this country, have the zeal and energy to work and improve their own lives as well as their communities. What they always need is just for government and the relevant stakeholders to put in few interventions to help them. And yet these authorities are not prepared to do so. That beats my imaginations”, she noted.
According to her, any government that would sincerely and practically focus on the growth of the informal sector (which continues to harbour a majority of the country’s women), such a government “would from then never borrow monies abroad to balance its budget”.
Women issues, she insisted had over the years been handled in “an adhoc manner; not planned, lacking focus and a targeted approach”.
She further wondered why past and current political administartions would always be prepared to borrow monies on concessionary terms to construct roads but would do same to enable women produce more food for the nation’s food processing industry.
The GAWE has as one of its units of operations, a food production, processing and exporting initiative and president of the association explained that the association has over the years linked up rural women farmers with their colleague food processing and exporting members as a way of increasing production while maximising revenues for all sides.
“The challenge, however, is the weather variance, access to credit, lack of access to markets for our produce and capacity building for our members”, Mrs Quachey bemoaned.
She explained that loans are readily not available to women who needs them adding that the current high lending rates offered by commercial banks only helps “buying and selling but not industry”.
GAWE members in the hinterland she added also face lack of transportation of their produce to the markets thereby hindering their production capacity as well demoralising them in the long run.
On the way forward for economic empowerment of female in the country, Mrs Quachey said “if government really believes in women, industry, and business and across all sectors of the economy, then it should invest in them and reap the promising returns”.
And until that investment is done not again on paper only but in reality, majority of the 51.3 per cent of Ghanaian women would virtually continue to be economically incapacitated and the ripplying effects on poverty reduction and the subsequet attainment of MDG 0ne; eradication of extreme poverty would very much be challenged.
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