Pages
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
Topic Discussion III
Participation in
Democratic Decision-Making:
The Vital Voices of Women, Civil Society and
Pluralism
Room 4
(3 of 20 pages)
When we came to parliament in 1996, we realized how small we are, and therefore
we realized how small our voice is also going to be. From that time we have held a series of meeting as a caucus
and we have taken many decisions and some of the decisions that we made on our own try to promote the welfare and
to make sure that they understand that it is only when you are part of the decision making that decisions will
be made to favor you or to take care of your rights. And for that reason, we need as many people as possible in
parliament, and to do that, people have to give themselves up and to stand for elections. This depends upon a lot
of things which I can't enumerate here, but I can say this depends primarily on the capacity of the person coming
to stand for election. There may be many, many women who are interested in standing for election in Ghana, but
they are worried that they will not have the capacity to stand before parliament and to deliver speeches and so
on. So what do we do? We need the people. What my caucus has done is this. My caucus has decided to first of all
concentrate on the people who have the capacity, the universities, the polytechnics. We need to contact the women
in these areas and make them feel there are some who have the capacities but do not have the will to go to parliament,
because they are afraid of, maybe, male chauvinism.
One of my Ministers is here and I know he's going to fight me, but that is the truth. They are afraid they wouldn't
be able to meet the standards that parliament has set and our own rule in parliament is to try to encourage these
women. They must see that we are together. As a matter of fact we have decided, we've made a program, to go to
constituency by constituency, all 19 constituencies of women so that they will see women as women and not as politicians.
They see us as people fighting one cause, so as far as we are concerned, inside the caucus there is no party. There
is no MPP, there is no PCP, there is no NDC or whatever. We are women and that I think is a basic decision we have
taken that we are sure will, in the long run, help us do things. I was the one to stress that doing things together
will also encourage people who are contemplating, or the people we are going to encourage, that once you step inside
parliament you are not alone. You have other women to support you. You just have to come out with your ideas and
we are there to push you up. What we have tried also to avoid is to make it seem like this fight is only from women.
This is a fight for society. It is a fight for development and I think our men should see this. We have advised
ourselves not to use the kind of language that will make them feel that we are attacking them and that we are fighting
the cause of women. We are fighting the cause of humanity. We are fighting the cause for development and we are
fighting the cause for democracy and this, I think, is important, that we make them know that.
Now, our government has come out with something very interesting that is also helping us as women. The government,
like Canada, has brought up decentralization. We think this is a perfect idea and we should take advantage of it.
The decentralization in our country has been done in such a way that the whole economy of the nation has been divided
into 110 districts and we are trying to make decision making go down the district and to be able to do that, we
have a series of structures. We have the district assembly and we have the local government district assembly,
the area councils and so on, right down to what we call the Unit Council. This Unit Council is the nucleus of all
the work that is done. It is the institution that takes care of their concerns and the will of the people at the
grass roots, and this means that we women can take advantage of this. This is a place where you don't have to speak
big English; you don't have to stand there and express yourself in economic and political terms. It is a place
where you talk to the people in a language they can understand and therefore we have decided to take advantage
of this unit and try to contact people at the very grass roots. Let them know what the government is doing, in
their own language. Let them understand that we are fighting their cause. Let them know that they have to take
their girls to school because one day they can also bring this girl up to stand in front of people to speak big
language. Meanwhile, they do not have to speak that big English. We can work with them. This has encouraged us
to work with issues like poverty alleviation, which without this organization we could never have had because it's
very difficult approaching people when we don't have the institution. Now that we have the institution, we can
go to them, talk to them, we can encourage them, we can explain what will come easily now. I can go to my grandmother
in the village and explain to her how she could get a loan for her small palm oil business, which before was very
difficult. We think this is helping us to a very great extent and we recommend it, because these small groups are
really, in the long run, the voice of the people. It is not the people, only the people in Accra who speak the
big language and do the big business. We want to get it down that every member of society counts, and in that regard
we think that our own experience needs a little bit of push also by the government. Because I am sure, they have
said it already, that the government supports affirmative action, they support mainstreaming and so on. They have
said they are doing all this, but it has all been on paper and in practice very little has been seen.
|
[ Introduction ] [ Worldwide Activities ] [ What We Do ] |