Journalists Urged To Support Women Empowerment

Widespread gender inequalities, domestic violence and negative socio-cultural practices that dehumanises women in Northern Ghana could be reduced drastically, if journalists in the area were to consistently report on such issues in the media; a gender advocate has observed.

According to Azumi Mesuna, these negative socio-cultural practices that include widowhood rites, banishment of women into witch-camps, forced marriages and female circumcision among others, denied a lot of women the opportunity to engage in income generation activities and decision-making processes.

She said for instance, a woman who is very assertive and vocal during a decision-making process in her community, could easily be branded a witch by her male counterparts simply because she articulates issues very well and as a result, that attracts a lot of love and admiration to her from most members of the community.

Ms Azumi who is also the Project Manager of Women’s Rights to Sustainable Livelihoods at ActionAid-Ghana, made these observations during a workshop organized by the organization to sensitise journalists and local government staff in Tamale.

The workshop was part of strategies earmarked by ActionAid towards the implementation of its three and half years project dubbed “Women Rights to Sustainable Livelihoods” that started in 2012 and was expected to end by 2015.

With funding support from the Dutch government, the project had so far trained 115 community facilitators from four districts in the Northern and Upper East Regions in unpaid care work and time diaries.

Unpaid care work is imbued in the African and for that matter the Ghanaian society, since the creation of man but usually seen as women’s work. It is defined as work such as caring for mother, father and siblings; working for the community; cooking and fetching water for the family; cleaning and sweeping the home; feeding and bathing children among others. All of these are often done by women.

Azumi Mesuna

Research by ActionAid revealed that, most women could engage in other things in order to earn extra or more income to further support the upkeep of their families if men shared in their responsibilities in order to ease the burden on them. For instance, the average Northern woman spends about 70 percent of her time on house chores or unpaid care work daily, thus does not get the time to engage in other work that would earn her income. 

The project was expected to have a trickledown effect on 3000 women smallholder farmers from Talensi, Nabdam, Nanumba North and Nanumba South Districts of the Northern and Upper East Regions by the end of 2015. It aimed at empowering women to demand more public services from local and national authorities to fulfill their basic human rights and support their households to provide better quality care, while saving them time and energy to engage in other activities.

Thus, the workshop in Tamale aimed at urging the media on to support and publish not only political issues but also promote the visibility of women smallholder farmers who contributed more than 50 percent to the food basket of the country without government support in most occasions.

According to Ms Azumi, ActionAid had designed this innovative food security and women rights project to provide practical solutions that would reduce the unpaid care work of women smallholder farmers’ as part of a comprehensive approach to improving women farmers’ productivity and household food security and increasing their ability to engage with duty bearers to provide social services that would reduce, redistribute and recognize their unpaid care work.

She urged District Assemblies to ensure that their budgets were gender responsive to the needs of women smallholder farmers’ to help increase budgetary allocation for them to have access to agricultural inputs and reduce the burden of care work that increased their poverty levels.

Meanwhile, ActionAid is a global non-governmental organization working together with people to further human rights for all and defeat poverty. Its vision is a world without poverty and injustice in which every person enjoys their right to a life of dignity. The NGO focuses on women’s rights, right to education, food rights and climate change, governance and human security in emergencies.