NALAG rallies electorate to vote for women

The National Association of Local Authorities of Ghana (NALAG) has called on the electorate to use Tuesday’s district-level and unit committee elections as an opportunity to mobilise more women for increased participation and effective discourse in the district assemblies.

Expressing concern about the gender gap in the assemblies, which had been in favour of males, the association, in a statement issued Monday and signed by its General Secretary, Mr Kokro Amankwah, said the time to bridge the gap was now.

It explained that the election of more women into the assemblies would strengthen the decentralisation process.

Activities

The statement said NALAG this year had embarked on a number of activities to improve women’s participation in assemblies. Among the activities were capacity building of female assembly members and those aspiring to contest in today’s elections, supporting some selected female aspirants towards the production of their campaign materials, creating a stronger network of women in local government and creating the platform for shared learning and mentoring for new aspiring contestants.

“We call on the government, educational institutions, industries, professional associations, women’s networks, non-profit bodies and the media to join in raising awareness for the electorate to vote for more women towards achieving the goal of increasing their representation and participation in local governance structures in order to strengthen the decentralisation process in Ghana,” the statement said.

Gender gap

Providing statistics, NALAG said in Ghana, women constituted about 51.2 per cent of the total population (Ghana Statistical Service, 2011). “In spite of their large proportion, women are not well represented when it comes to the issue of governance. The National Council on Women and Development (NCWD) (1998) observed in a survey conducted in Ghana that women were marginalised and remained the minority in politics,” the statement noted.

The statement added: “The data over the years on the representation of women in Ghana at the district level is very abysmal.
“One of the key outcomes of the Beijing Conference of 1995 was the call for equal representation of men and women in politics (Fourth World Conference on Women 1995). In addition to the contributions made by the various conferences, affirmative action policies serve as mechanisms to include women in politics.”

The statement said in spite of the concerted efforts that had been made to empower women, women’s level of political participation and representation at both the local and national levels of governance remained very low.

“Since the inception of district assembly elections in Ghana, women have been unable to attain the 30 per cent UN-recommended minimum threshold in representation in the assemblies, making gender-based inclusion in local governance a major deficit in equality in participation,” it stated.

Furthermore, NALAG said his year, out of the 18,510 nominations received by the Electoral Commission, male nominations were 17,601, representing 95.09 per cent while female nominations were 909, representing 4.91 per cent.

For the Unit Committee, out of a total of 38,520, the male nominations received were 34,769, representing 90.26 per cent with the female nomination being 3,751 (9.74 per cent).