ActionAid Ghana builds capacity of rural women
Twenty-eight women selected from seven communities in the Lawra Municipality of the Upper West Region have benefited from start-up packages aimed at reducing household poverty.
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The start-up materials were distributed to the beneficiaries who had undergone capacity building to assist them to engage in income-generating activities such as soap making, rabbit rearing and catering services.
They were selected from Bagri, Naburenye, Berwong, Methor-Buo, Konukuo, Baapari and Chaar communities.
The training was organised by the ActionAid Ghana (AAG) with funding from the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) under a three-year project, dubbed “Combating Modern Slavery in Ghana”.
The three-year project has been designed to complement government’s efforts “to eradicate forced labour, end modern slavery and human trafficking to secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour in all its forms by 2025”.
Making the presentation, the Head of Programmes, Campaign and Innovation of AAG, Justin Naah Bayor, said the organisation was engaged in empowering rural women in a holistic manner to live descent lives.
Problem of human trafficking
That, according to him, was based on their observation that young women and children were the vulnerable groups being trafficked by close relatives, a friend or acquaintance of the victim’s family into modern slavery such as sex trade and forced labour which degraded them.
He referred to human trafficking as the recruitment, transportation, harbouring or receipt of people for the purposes of slavery, forced labour and servitude which had become one of the largest and most lucrative illegal businesses in the world.
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So to assist rural women from being lured by false promises of employment in the urban centres, AAG proposed to build their capacities to resist the tendencies to be forced into slavery.
Laws and regulations
The Lawra Municipal Chief Executive (MCE), Jacob Dery, commended the AAG for their various activities in the area over the years and said the event was another manifestation of the government’s plan to move with the private sector to make the youth self-employable.
Mr Dery noted that Ghana over the years had had a lot of laws and regulations to combat modern slavery and the municipal/ district assemblies were required to mainstream to that effect.
The Coordinator in charge of Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning and Research of AA Uganda, Michael Fredrick Ssenoga, said young women and girls had been found to be the most vulnerable to this modern slavery syndrome in the world.
He commended the government for providing avenues to combat the operations.
Welcoming the participants, the Regional Programme Manager, Terence Tienaah, said upon research, the organisation had realised that family heads or close relatives were also part of the recruitments so they approached them to release the female beneficiaries for training and the packages.