Executive Director of the Gender Centre for Empowering Development (GenCED), Esther Tawiah, has appealed for conversation on gender to be expanded beyond the Gender Committee of Parliament to include other Committees.
This, she said, is imperative because issues affecting the welfare of women are multi-dimensional and need the contribution of not only the Committee on Gender to address.
Addressing a Gender Advocacy to Parliament (GAP) inception meeting in Parliament on Thursday, July 28, Ms Tawiah stressed gender issues go beyond just ‘a woman’ and also cover those living with disabilities and looking out for other social issues not necessarily affecting women but both sexes.
She was speaking on the theme, ‘Strengthening relations between Gender-based CSOs and Female MPs for an increase in gender equality policies and legislation.’
The programme was organized by Parliamentary Network Africa (PNA), a parliamentary monitoring civil society organisation working to ensure Open Parliaments across Africa.
The GAP Project seeks to strengthen gender-based CSOs for sustained engagements with women Members of Parliament (MPs) and for better parliamentary advocacy towards the adoption of laws and policies that guarantee equality, non-discrimination, gender equity, and the promotion of economic, social, political, reproductive and sexual rights of women and girls.
It aims to achieve this through regular townhall engagements between gender-based CSOs and women MPs in six regions of Ghana where women have been elected as MPs, with the aim of ensuring that the parliamentary agenda is considered through gender lenses.
The Project will facilitate follow-on actions that ensure the outcomes of these engagements are raised on the floor of Parliament.
According to Ms. Tawiah, it is important for gender-based CSOs to form relationships with all the parliamentary caucuses and argued stakeholders in the gender space are good when it comes to technical issues but lacking in technical knowledge.
“So both CSOs and the caucuses need to strengthen understanding of each other’s process to make things happen,” she said.
In his opening remarks Executive Director of PNA, Sammy Obeng, questioned how gender-based CSOs can be connected to female MPs and to the Gender Committee of Parliament so that conversations and exchanges can be smoother so the engagements can be better.
According to him, women MPs who are expected to promote women’s rights in gender equality are themselves targeted by colleague MPs and disclosed most Parliaments do not also have mechanisms to enable women to safely speak out.
“It is on this premise that we have met here this morning so that we can be able to discuss among ourselves how to weather the storm in the midst of very bleak statistics,” he said.
In order to build the capacity of CSOs on happenings in Parliament to ensure they undertake evidence-based advocacy, daily sittings of Parliament will be monitored and summary reports covering all issues of interest to women, children and groups advocating for such courses will be published to keep parliamentary information readily available.
A parliamentary advocacy handbook and other publications to serve as legacy knowledge products will also be published as part of the Project.