International Women's Day 2010
From Ghana to Beijing and New York and Back Again
Photo/CEGENSA
Over 50 representatives from Ghanaian government and civil society organisations are currently in New York to attend the annual CSW meetings and the Beijing + 15 Review. The official delegation, led by the new Minister for Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC), includes veteran femo/bureaucrats from the National Council on Women and Development (NCWD), the erstwhile national machinery for women, who are now working in the Department of Women of MOWAC or the Ministry itself, some of who attended the Beijing Women’s Conference. Among the civil society participants are young women many of who had barely started school at the time of the Beijing conference, some of who have worked for their organisations for less than a year, as well as two young women selected by NETRIGHT (the Network of Women’s Rights in Ghana) to represent women from Ghana’s marginalised 3 Northern Regions, as a way of ensuring representation to diverse voices and regions. The NGO delegation is organising a side event assessing the implementation of the BPfA in Ghana, with three presentations on economic justice, access to justice and political participation for Ghanaian women.
As argued by Manuh and Anyidoho*, ‘Beijing’ entered the public domain in Ghana in 1995 and indelibly imprinted the collective demand for women’s rights and empowerment. And despite some mockery and name-calling by anxious males, there is now widespread familiarity with the idea of women’s empowerment and a realisation that it has come to stay, however slow its progress may be. The core message of using a gender lens to interrogate all state policies, actions and budgets, as well as so-called private acts emanating in the family and personal relationships, to ensure conformity with agreed international and continental resolutions, conventions and treaties that Ghana has signed and/or ratified, has been resolutely taken up by women’s rights organisations. This has been embodied in the work of the Women’s Manifesto Coalition, and the organisations have continued to hold the state to account and to expand the space for women’s citizenship and gender justice. Recent debates around the passage of domestic violence legislation in Ghana (2002-2007) and the activism of women’s rights organisations and individuals animated the public space and also helped to forge their coherence and actions.
The Alternative Report for the Review prepared by a coalition of over 40 NGOs in Ghana notes that ‘women NGOs in Ghana in particular and civil society in general, have continued to make strategic efforts at the community and national levels to influence policy and legal reforms to ensure that the BPfA informs the political, social and economic development processes in Ghana.’ To be sure, progress on all these levels is uneven, reflecting the gaps in knowledge and expertise, lack of financial resources, communication and networking skills as well as the differing interests of the organisations and individuals involved and resistances from conservative forces in society. At the level of the state, there is often a lack of commitment to women’s rights/empowerment issues, instrumentalisation of women’s lives and needs, poor or incoherent policies, inadequate budgetary appropriations to support gender work, and dependence on donor funds or interest to show any forward movement.
The participants from Ghana will celebrate March 8th in New York together with other several delegations. It is to be hoped that the women’s organisations will return reinvigorated to work to demand fulfilment from Ghanaian policy-makers of the commitments they have endorsed under the Beijing + 15 review.
Takyiwaa Manuh
2 March 2010, Kumasi, Ghana
* Takyiwaa Manuh and Nana Akua Anyidoho 2010 ‘‘To Beijing and Back’- Women’s
Empowerment in the Public Domain in Ghana.’ Special issue of Development: Dialogues on
Empowerment.
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