Strategies to advance Women’s Empowerment

By Lennox Akpetey, a Communication Development

Women are the pivot on which the success of societies revolves. From homes to hamlets, to communities, to countries, and globally, women play critical roles in nation-building. But most times, these roles are often overlooked and undervalued by a patriarchal society. In an African Human Development Report (UNDP, 2016), women’s political voice and leadership have been recognized as key drivers in advancing gender equality. Women are still very much on the periphery of political, economic, and social decision-making and rely most often on decisions made by their male counterparts regarding their lives.  The great Ghanaian scholar, missionary, and educator Dr. James Emmanuel Kwegyir Aggrey once said, “If you educate a man, you educate an individual. If you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” This statement rings true even today, with the often-inhuman treatment meted out to women in our part of the world. Women are believed to be subservient to men. It is commonplace to hear a woman who aspires to climb the progressive ladder being tagged as one who is sleeping her way up.

African women, and for that matter Ghanaian women must be empowered to come out of their shells, overcome stigmatization, and rise to take their place of pride in decision making in their homes, communities, and the nation as well. The religious and sociocultural dogmas play significant roles in muzzling women out of the way. And some believe that women do get to the top only by offering sex for positions and possessions. This is a social scar and put-off that sometimes discourages women from aspiring to greater heights. True empowerment will only be reached when women take part actively in the decision-making process of our country. Some scholars believe that the empowerment of women could only be achieved if their economic and social status is improved.  There must be a conscious effort at making women the center of national development.

One of the ways of empowering women is by increasing stakeholders’ awareness of the need for women to be given opportunities to compete with their male counterparts for position and possession. Despite efforts by women advocacy groups to bridge the gap between men and women, the gap seems to be widening. This has been made possible because Ghanaians are mostly patriarchal, and the women have been culturally programmed to be meanly submissive and subservient to the men. Education is one of the most important means of empowering women with the knowledge, skills, and self-confidence necessary to participate fully in the development process of any given society.   Despite manifest efforts by countries all over the world that have appreciably expanded access to basic education, especially in Ghana over the years, there are approximately 960 million illiterate adults in the world, of whom two-thirds are women.

Scholars posit that more than one-third of the world’s adults, most of them women, have no access to printed knowledge, new skills, or technologies that would improve the quality of their lives and help them shape and adapt to social and economic change. There are 130 million children globally who are not enrolled in primary school and 70 percent of them are girls. This data shows the need for a deliberate effort at empowering women through education. It is one of the ways the gap can be bridged. Ghana should make efforts to eliminate inequalities between men and women as soon as possible by making it possible for women’s equal participation and equitable representation at all levels of the political process and public life in each community and society and by enabling women to articulate their concerns and needs.

Decisions and opinions of women cannot be continued to be ignored in the present circumstances. There should be a strategy for advocacy for eliminating all practices that discriminate against women; assisting women to establish and realize their rights, including those that relate to reproductive and sexual health. The communication strategy should adopt social mobilisation and behaviour change communication to make women adopt appropriate measures to improve their ability to earn income beyond traditional occupations, achieve economic self-reliance, and ensure women’s equal access to the labour market and social security systems. Women organizations should adopt strategies that will assist to minimize or eliminate practices that inhibit the development of women empowerment.

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