A GNA feature by Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Nabdam (U/E), Nov 25, GNA – Cynthia (not real name), a 12-year-old class six pupil in the Nabdam District of the Upper East Region was allegedly defiled by a neighbour.
This resulted in some complications as she bled profusely and could not urinate with ease for days.
The case was reported to the police, a medical report was issued, and the culprit was later arrested.
However, Madam Apogbila (not real name), mother of Cynthia who is a widow could not immediately afford an amount of GHS500 for medical examination at the hospital to facilitate prosecution process.
“It happened five months ago, on a Saturday. I left them in the house and went to the market to engage in my petty trading but in the course of the day one of my neighbours called to inform me of the situation and I had to rush back home.
“When I got home, my daughter was bleeding and wailing on the floor while her younger sister looked on helplessly”, Madam Apogbila tearfully narrated her ordeal to the Ghana News Agency (GNA).
As a beneficiary of the Livelihood Empowerment Against Poverty (LEAP) programme, she said, she received her allowance a week later and quickly used it to take care of the medical examination and facilitated her frequent movements to court.
“When we went to the court, the court said the medical form showed that my daughter was indeed defiled.
“So, it is the LEAP stipend that I have been using for transport to go to the court for hearing,” she added.
Similarly, Akolpoka (not real name), a 65-year-old widow from the same Talensi District of the Upper East moved back to her father’s house five years ago after losing her husband.
After the loss, she was physically and emotionally abused by her husband’s relatives.
Her husband’s brothers had taken the only piece of land her late husband left for her because she did not have a male child, leaving her helpless and unable to feed, a situation which became unbearable, forcing her to move back to her father’s house.
“They say I’m useless,” Akolpoka whispers, staring at the ground. “They say I should go somewhere else, but I have nowhere else to go.”
However, hope found Akolpoka, when one day she shared her story with a social worker within her community who advised and led her to report the case to the Social Welfare Department and the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ).
According to her, she was enrolled onto the LEAP programme and is given monthly stipends.
As a LEAP beneficiary, she has been able to feed well and started a small provision shop where she sells gari, sugar, and other ingredients to support herself.
Apart from that, the LEAP stipend has helped to facilitate Akolpoka’s movement to Bolgatanga to meet with officials of CHRAJ who intervened and got her husband’s land back to her to continue her farming activities.
“We do not have CHRAJ office in our district, so I usually travelled to Bolgatanga whenever there is the need to meet and the LEAP stipend has helped me a lot because it is that money that I used for transport”, she stated.
LEAP empowering vulnerable households
The stories of Apogbila and her 12-year-old daughter (Cynthia) and Akolpoka are clear cases of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) and due to the implementation of LEAP, many vulnerable households like them are empowered to be resilient and seek justice.
The LEAP began in 2008 and is being implemented by the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, it provides cash transfer to extremely poor and vulnerable households across Ghana.
The programme benefits households who must be orphaned and vulnerable children, people with severe disabilities without any productive capacity and elderly people who are 65 years and above.
As part of the country’s social protection mechanisms, the programme is meant to contribute to alleviating short-term poverty by increasing and smoothening consumption and promoting access to services and opportunities among the extremely poor and vulnerable.
According to the Ministry of Finance, by the end of 2022, LEAP had reached 346,019 households throughout the country, resulting in about 1.4 million people out of the 2.4 million extremely poor people in the country.
The government had also invested GH₡298 million under LEAP in 2023 alone.
Madam Mercy Pwara, the Upper East Regional Director of the Department of Social Welfare, said the pro-poor social intervention was significantly empowering communities and lifting poor and vulnerable households out of poverty.
Currently, she said, the programme is disbursing GH₡1,000.00 to each household as part of the “Dry spell emergency cash transfer”, adding “due to the dry spell that affected food production, the money is meant to support them to buy food now that we are harvesting so that during the lean season, they will be able to get food to eat”.
Issue still dire
Despite the significant contribution of the LEAP to helping vulnerable households seek justice, many people particularly women and girls in rural communities continue to face gender-based violence.
According to the United Nations, globally, an estimated 736 million women, almost one in three women aged 15 and older had suffered some form of abuse and about GH₵73.5 million was lost annually to gender-based violence.
The United Nations Women (2022) reported that about one in four Ghanaian women have suffered physical and or sexual violence by an intimate partner.
The Ghana Police Service reported that about 16,000 cases of domestic violence were recorded in 2020 and in the Upper East Region the Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit (DOVVSU) of the Ghana Police Service recorded 123 cases of gender-based violence related cases in 2022.
Similarly, statistics from CHRAJ indicated that the Upper East Region had recorded 1,815 cases of gender-based violence from 2015 to 2021 and 33 cases in the first two months of 2022.
Need for intensified education
Mr. Jaladeen Abdulai, the Upper East Regional Director of CHRAJ, who expressed worry, says the issues of gender-based violence including sexual harassment, physical assault, and psychological abuses keep rising in the region.
Lack of knowledge, inadequate education and interference by family members on behalf of perpetrators and lack of interest of victims are major factors fueling the increasing cases of gender-based violence, he added and called for collective effort to stop the canker.
“Due to lack of offices of human rights institutions in some districts, victims of abuses find it difficult to report cases and due to poverty and high cost of transportation, victims of abuse could not travel to the regional offices,” Mr. Abdulai, said.
Checks by the GNA revealed that CHRAJ does not have offices in six districts in the region namely Bolgatanga Municipal, Bolgatanga East, Binduri, Builsa South, Talensi and Tempane Districts and those districts that have offices have few staff and under resourced.
Similarly, DOVVSU has three functional offices in the region, the Regional Office in Bolgatanga, Navrongo and Paga stations.
Mr. Richard Adazabre, the Upper East Regional Director of Legal Aid Commission, indicated that his outfit deals with the civil matters of gender-based violence which included compensation and maintenance.
He said as at the end of October this year, his office had handled 51 cases related to gender-based violence and noted that many of the victims were very poor people who needed help.
Justice system not friendly
Ms Fati Abigail Abdulai, a Social Protection Advocate, noted that that apart from poverty and lack of knowledge particularly among rural dwellers, one of the major reasons victims of gender-based violence did not report cases was due to the unfriendly nature of the justice system.
“Statistics have shown that the reported cases are coming down and it is not because the cases are reducing in the communities but because the justice system is not friendly especially to the poor and it is not encouraging people to report cases of abuse”, she said.
She said gender-based violence issues were critical with some of them linked to tradition and there was the need for the government to establish special courts that would help to decide cases fast and favourably.
“Most victims of gender-based violence are vulnerable and even though the medical forms are supposed to be free, they are not, but we have the Domestic Violence Fund which is not operational to support these victims”, she added.
Way forward
Ghana and the rest of the world has barely six years to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and ending gender-based violence was one of the surest ways to stimulating that effort.
Goal five of the SDGs emphasises the need to achieve gender parity and empower all women and girls by eliminating all forms of violence against women and girls.
LEAP is one key poverty alleviation and empowerment programme for rural communities and its current reach should be expanded to reach many more rural households to ensure economic independence to strengthen their resilience against abuses.
Apart from increasing education, especially in the rural communities, to break traditional norms and sociocultural barriers that give rise to these abuses, there is urgent need for the government to decentralise human rights institutions such as the CHRAJ, DOVSSU, Legal Aid Commission among others to the districts and resource them to carry out sensitisation programmes that would empower the communities on the issues.
Apart from the need for the court system to be made friendly by hearing cases expeditiously, the government needs to operationalise the domestic violence fund to offer financial support to victims of gender-based violence.
GNA