Accra, Feb. 28, GNA – Mrs Levinia Addae-Mensah, Deputy Executive Director, West African Network for Peace building (WANEP) has stressed the need to engage and build the capacities of women in Ghana to identify indicators of violent extremism.
She said though Ghana was not faced with issues of violent extremism, it was important that women were engaged in line with the country’s preparedness against such occurrences.
Mrs Addae-Mensah said this at a two-day lesson learnt workshop on successful implementation of the first and second phase of the “Building an inclusive post COVID-19 recovery, crises transition and governance reforms in the Sahel and Côte d’Ivoire.”
The project, organised by WANEP in collaboration with ECOWAS and the UNDP Regional Program for Africa, was part of efforts by the three institutions in the Sahel towards the consolidation of Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda anchored on the UNSCR 1325, the SDGs, the African Union Agenda 2063 and the ECOWAS Conflict Prevention Framework (ECPF).
She said the workshop was to gather lessons from the two phased projects implemented over the past two years and that the project was situated within the context of the challenges of peace and security in the region coupled with the issues of COVID 19 and its inherent effects.
Mrs Addae-Mensah said the project was designed in 2020 to build inclusive governance systems, inclusive political transitions as well as a post COVID-19 era where women issues were addressed in different ways.
She said it had been building coalitions of women to increase the potential roles of women in the issues of governance in the post COVID reconstruction era, in Mali, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso.
Mrs Addae-Mensah said the project sought to bring together various government machineries that worked with women in the four countries to amplify the voices of women, build a stronger force and ensure a collective understanding of the issues facing women that needed to be confronted to ensure sustainable peace and security.
The Deputy Executive Director said findings from the project indicated that even in the COVID and post COVID era when women suffered a lot, there had been little state support for them.
“It is important for the socio-economic development that women are well taken care of, yet we continue to see that despite commitment to various international protocols, on the ground, we are not seeing that commitment demonstrated or translated into concrete action to support women.”
She said: “West Africa seems to be leading when it comes to developing national action plans for women peace and security and yet some of these plans continue to have serious gabs. It is our hope that with this project we can unearth some other needs that women have that have not been part of the plan.”
Mr Vincent Azumah, Regional Coordinator, Research, WANEP, said the findings identified that though women were given opportunities to access the security agencies in terms of employment, recruitment and access to funding were inadequate.
He said in Burkina Faso and Mali, in 2008, only nine per cent of women were in the Prison Service, with the figure going up to 15 per cent in 2017.
Mr Azumah said after COVID-19, a lot more women cooperatives and micro credit businesses were affected with many not having access to financial facilities.
Also, the women groups themselves were unaware of government facilities, with those who got some supports unable to use it to grow their businesses.
Mr Azumah urged the governments to do more to ensure that women were given supports from micro credit schemes at low interest to facilitate their businesses.
“Although the assessment happened in four countries due to their security challenges, based on the lessons learnt, the project will be extended to cover all countries in the West African region,” he said.
GNA