Women Empowerment: A Key factor in Economic Growth
The subject of gender equality and women empowerment has become topical in recent times due to its immense socio-economic benefits.
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Mr Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, posits: “Countries with more gender equality have better economic growth. Companies with more women leaders perform better.”
Women constitute a huge human resource that we haven’t fully tapped because we have not empowered them enough. If our nation will see the development we dream of, it must make deliberate efforts to educate the girl child and empower women.
These interventions are central to achieving the millennium development goals and improving overwhelmingly our human development indices. Mr Kofi Annan, a former UN Secretary General, emphatically states, “There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women. No other policy is as likely to raise economic productivity or to reduce infant and maternal mortality.”
On maternal and child health, educated women are able to appreciate reproductive health and family planning. They are more likely to take antenatal care seriously and have successful pregnancy outcomes, thereby reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. Educated women make intelligent choices on nutrition and quality health care that get their babies to survive the first five years of life.
The children are also more likely to be educated up to a similar level or even higher level than their mothers. Researchers from the University College Dublin, led by Professor Tony Fahey, concluded that the mother’s level of education is tied most closely to the well-being of the child in terms of cognitive development, social-emotional adjustment and physical health.
In spite of these benefits, Ghana’s steps towards women empowerment and girl-child education continue to be thwarted by certain cultural practices and injustice against our females. One of such is child marriage. According to the UNFPA, Ghana has one of the highest child marriage prevalence rates in the world. On average, one out of four girls will be married before their 18th birthday. In 2008, about 25 per cent of the women aged 20-24 were married or were in union before age 18. In Upper East, the prevalence was as high as 50 per cent.
Child marriage puts the girl child in constant dependency; it perpetuates poverty and is associated with dangerous health risks.
“Child brides are likely to become pregnant at an early age and there is a strong correlation between the age of a mother and maternal mortality. Girls aged l0-14 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth than women aged 20-24 and girls aged 15-19 are twice as likely to die.”
Another social injustice against women and children is rape and defilement. Hardly a day goes by without a report on defilement in the media. Some estimates by child rights groups working on defilement issues claim at least 10 girls under the age of 16 are defiled every day in the country. In fact, a recent research by the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre established that one out of every three women in Ghana had suffered some form of abuse while up to 50 per cent of sexual assaults were committed against young people under the age of 16.
We must be worried as a nation over such happenings. Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka calls these injustices towards women as a modern day slavery that must be abolished and further states candidly that a society that treats half of its population as sub-human is a backward one. We need to sustain our efforts to stop such injustices. This will entail a multi-faceted approach which tackles the social, cultural, legal and economic dimensions.
Dr Kwegyir Aggrey, one of our foremost statesmen, has these immortal words: “The surest way to keep people down is to educate the men and neglect the women. If you educate a man you simply educate an individual, but if you educate a woman, you educate a nation.” Long before Dr Aggrey, Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his work Emile had argued; “The earliest education is most important and it is woman’s work. If the author of nature had meant to assign it to men, he would have given them milk to feed the child. Address your treatises on education to the women, for not only are they able to watch over it more closely than men, not only is their influence always predominant in education, its success concerns them more nearly.”
Empowering women has become smart economics; its contribution towards sustainable development cannot be overemphasised. Women empowerment must be a concern for us all. Government and policy makers must intensify efforts to help women live their full potential. This is a proven path towards human-centred development.
The writer is a Medical Officer at St John of God Hospital
Duayaw Nkwanta.