More needed to be done to promote women leadership in Ghana – Africa Women Rising

The Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Africa Women Rising (AWR), formally known as Crown Women Rising (CWR), Rev. Mrs Nana Sekyere, has encouraged present and future governments in the country to show more commitment to their gender policies, particularly in giving women key leadership roles.

She said although the country has made some efforts in pushing women-leadership agenda over the years, more needed to be done in order to close the gender gap in terms of leadership roles in the country. 

She noted with concern that the ratio of women leaders in the country was far below what the various political administrations that had governed the country before had promised in their manifestos.

Women leadership

Speaking with the Graphic Online, Mrs Sekyere said, “Most governments have always had the will to push the agenda of women by promising to allocate a certain percentage of roles to women in their manifestos but unfortunately they have fallen short of this very important agenda.”

For her, women representation in leadership was key to the development of any country, saying “there still remains a huge gender gap that needs to be narrowed in a conscious manner to enable governments to achieve their set goals as far as women representation is concerned.”

She was of the view more education and sensitisation about women-leadership needed to be organised at the community level by civil society organisations in order to drum home the need for people to support women leadership and also see women as equally competent at their male counterpart.

She also encouraged women to take up more leadership responsibilities wherever they may find themselves. 

Mrs Sekyere noted that the United Nations Sustainable Developement Goal 5 of achieving gender equality can be fully realised if all stakeholders played their roles well by prioritising women issues in their agenda.

“This is extremely important in our view as more women will graduate into the talent pool available for the future leadership of our dear country,” she observed.

Africa Women Rising

Touching on the change of name of her organisation, she explained that “This change is in line with our vision of impacting not only Ghanaian women but African women as a whole.”

For her, Africa Women Rising will be operating under the same management, vision, mission and place of business and that all other policies and procedures remain unchanged.

Africa Women Rising is a training, networking, and empowerment organisation that identifies, nurtures, supports and honours high achieving women globally to promote business growth and community transformation.

This is achieved with the objective of developing strategic relationships through entrepreneurship, business-to-business (B2B) network outreach, training and empowerment as well as facilitating impactful engagement and providing technical assistance in their relevant sectors.