Ghana commits to enhance women’s access to economic opportunities
Ghana has made a commitment to enhance women’s access to economic opportunities and their active involvement in economic growth and development. The Minister for Gender, Children and Social Protection, Nana Oye Lithur made the commitment at a side event of the UN General Assembly meeting in New York.
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The event, Transforming Economies: Empowering Women and Girls Special Event, was hosted by the UK Secretary of State for International Development, Justine Greening and the Executive Director for UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka.
According to Nana Oye, enhancing women’s access to economic opportunities and their active involvement in economic growth and development could be done by providing access to finance and ensuring gender equality in employment.
Legal and policy framework
Nana Oye said Ghana was doing this “through strengthening the legal and policy framework to ensure gender empowerment and gender mainstreaming”.
She said the country was currently considering seven bills related to gender equality and child rights, including the Affirmative Action Bill, the Property Rights of Spouses Bill and the Intestate Succession Bill.
Two policies have been adopted on child rights and gender, she said, while the third on social protection was under consideration.”
Nana Oye Lithur expressed the government’s commitment to empower women through social protection, especially female food crop growers who were the poorest of the poor.
She also expressed her passion for young women’s empowerment, saying “what I am most passionate about is empowering young rural girls.”
She expressed her commitment “to creating a safe learning environment for rural girls in school to enable them complete their education, and start self-sustaining economic ventures,” and also “to protect rural girls from child marriages, abduction and child trafficking”.
Smart investment
The UK Secretary of State for International Development, Justine Greening said “girls and women are one of the best and smartest development investments” that can be made.
She pointed out that “when girls stay in school for just one extra year of primary school, that can boost their eventual wages by 10 to 20 per cent”, and when “women get extra earnings, they will then reinvest that back in their families and back in their communities”.
Ms Greening referred to a World Bank research which showed that “half of women’s productive potential globally is completely underutilised”, and for men, it was just a fifth.
She said there was the urgent need to leverage more finances to invest on gender equality more broadly, not just in terms of international development investment, but financing from the private sector, philanthropists and from domestic resource mobilisation to make sure that the level of investment that was needed to get the change required is there.
Discussants at the forum called on global leaders from government, the private sector, civil society and development institutions to make commitments that will deliver transformative change on the new SDG targets on women’s economic empowerment.
The meeting also secured concrete commitments for transforming women and girls’ economic opportunities under the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.