Day’s learning cafe to empower women held

The Network for Women's Right (NETRIGHT) has organised a one-day learning cafe in Accra as part of a project to empower women for the development of the country.

Under the Empowering Women for Change Advocating for gender transformative social policies through feminist mobilising in Ghana (We Transform) project, the learning cafe brought together 30 stakeholders from diverse backgrounds.

It was aimed at bringing together beneficiaries of the project to assess its impact, including its influence on gender transformative social policies and feminist mobilisation.

Stakeholders

The stakeholders were beneficiaries who have participated in activities of the "We Transform" project where they shared their experiences and the impact of the project in their line of work.

The cafe also afforded the beneficiaries the opportunity to discuss the areas where more work was needed to sustain the impact of the project and also highlighted emerging opportunities for further advocacy and create space to learn from similar initiatives led by other organisations.

The Project Coordinator, Cynthia Sunu, who gave an update and review of the 'We Transform" project said it recognised the vital role of diverse constituencies of women in driving a sustainable shift towards gender transformative social policies.

The project, she said, mobilised broad sections of women across the country and empowered them to drive systemic change by demanding for gender transformative social policymaking.

She added that the project, which was a two-year advocacy intervention, was hinged on the notion that if women across Ghana were mobilised and empowered, then a strong foundation for sustainable change could be established.

She said the goal of the project was to reshape the discourse on social policy making to prioritise gender tansformative approaches and address the needs of women, youth and the marginalised.

Ms Sunu said the “We Transform” project had become necessary because  in spite of the discovery of oil in 2007 and the designation of Ghana as a middle-income country, no significant transformation of the economy had taken place in the lives of people, especially women.

She said the fallouts of the first decade of neoliberal reforms persisted to this day, and gave the example of caps on public sector recruitment, which meant that trained health personnel went for years without jobs in government hospitals in spite of the high nurse/doctor:patient ratio in the country.

Social consequences

She said four decades of aggressive market liberalisation had essentially led to negative social consequences, including widespread poverty and insecure livelihoods, especially among certain social groups such as women, persons with disability and other marginalised groups.

Call for action

She added that the conditions of Ghanaian citizens, both vulnerable and non-vulnerable, should not be made even worse before efforts were made to provide social relief as was done in the 1980s.

The Head of NETRIGHT Secretariat, Patricia Akakpo Blankson, for her part said the project over the past year had successfully contributed to critical conversations around gender equality and advocated the inclusion of women's perspectives in policy formulation and implementation.

She said as the project neared the completion of its first year, it was essential to reflect on its achievements, challenges and lessons learned, saying the Learning Café was to serve as a platform to engage key stakeholders in assessing the impact of the project, evaluating its progress, and exploring ways to sustain and amplify these efforts moving forward.

Writer's email-rebecca.quaicoe-duho@graphic.com.gh