By Anthony Adongo Apubeo
Sirigu (U/E), Oct 19, GNA – A project aimed at modifying harmful societal norms and empowering women and girls to accelerate community development has begun in the Kassena-Nankana West District of the Upper East Region.
Dubbed “Repositioning Values for Development”, the project seeks to engage key stakeholders in the community, including traditional authorities, to modify norms detrimental to the rights of women and create a platform to involve them in decision making.
It is being implemented by Vision Map Ghana, a gender advocacy focused organisation with funding from Norsaac, an advocacy organisation and would benefit three communities-Sirigu, Mirigu and Kandiga.
Speaking at a two-day training workshop for community change agents and key opinion leaders, Ms Martha Atule, the Project Manager, Vision Map Ghana, noted that social norms and values in many communities especially in Northern Ghana continued to discriminate against women and girls and was a bane to their development.
She said some of the practices including forced and early marriage, widowhood rites and female genital mutilation (FGM) were outmoded and continued to create extreme poverty among women and needed to be abolished or modified.
Ms Atule said the objective of the project was to sensitise, train women leaders and engage opinion leaders as community change agents with strategic advocacy and campaign skills to ensure that major stakeholders were informed about the need to abolish some of the outmoded norms.
“Vision Map Ghana is a pro-woman, pro-girl-child social protection organisation that seeks a world in which all women and youth exercise their human rights without impediments.
“The mission is to provide an all-round guidance and support to women and youth to access decision making platforms and build their self-worth,” she said.
As part of the implementation process, community durbars would be held to drum home the campaign with a view to help women and girls live dignified lives.
Ms Elizabeth Anafu, the Project Officer, Widows and Orphans Movement (WOM), who was the facilitator of the training, said forced widow remarriage was one of the widowhood rites that had discriminated against women over the years and needed to be abolished.
She said in many societies in Northern Ghana especially in the Upper East Region, the practice of widows being compelled to remarry relatives of their late husbands was still worrying and needed stakeholder approach to curb it.
The Project Officer explained that the practice was not only a violation of the fundamental human rights of vulnerable widows as enshrined in 1992 Constitution and other regulations, but a bane to achieving gender equality and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
Ms Freda Tumbakorah, the Gender Desk Officer, Kassena-Nankana West District, indicated that some of the practices including widowhood rites and FGM were not only harmful, but considered as sexual and gender-based violence.
She called for intensified education, especially among traditional authorities, in the ills of those practices.
Ms Hilda Akabure, a participant, applauded Vision Map Ghana, for the effort to change some of the social norms that were affecting the growth and development of women and noted that many women were trapped into forced remarriage and the situation needed to change.
GNA