By Comfort Sena Fetrie-Akagbor
Tamale, Oct. 20, GNA – Savannah Women Integrated Development Agency – Ghana (SWIDA-GH) has celebrated the International Rural Women’s Day to recognise the critical roles and contributions of rural women, including indigenous women, in enhancing agricultural and rural development, improving food security and eradicating rural poverty.
This year, the Day was marked on the theme: “Rural women confront the global cost-of-living crisis”, which acknowledges the essential roles rural women continue to play in food systems in spite of the multi-faceted manifestations of crisis globally and locally.
Hajia Alima Sagito-Saeed, Executive Director of SWIDA-GH, stated that a UN Women’s latest reports, indicated that the current disruption to the food and energy markets had only intensified gender disparities, causing rates of food insecurity, malnutrition, and energy poverty.
She stated that in the rural areas of Ghana, agriculture was a significant source of income and employment, which women were the key actors in the agricultural sector, where they constituted more than 50 per cent of the labour force and produced 70% of the country’s food stock, and promoted nutrition for healthy families through their subsistence farming.
A press statement issued by SWIDA-GH, signed by Hajia Sagito-Saeed, its Executive Director and copied to Ghana News Agency in Tamale, said the agricultural value chain, women held significant roles as producers, workers, processors, traders, retailers and consumers in food systems, and their efforts were essential to progress towards greater resilience and justice in agri-food systems.
It said, “Despite these key roles, women have less power compared to men and as a result earn less income and experience higher food insecurity. Women face challenges such as limited access to resources such as productive lands, credit, agricultural inputs and information, especially on climate change, which continue to hinder their productivity and economic independence.”
The statement entreated government to invest in climate-smart gender responsive technologies and innovations that supported rural women to be efficient, to deliberately direct policy to pursue the political and socio-economic empowerment of rural women and support their full and equal participation in decision-making at all levels.
It called for strengthening legal frameworks such as the full implementation of the 2020 Land Act as well as enforcing property rights for rural women to go a long way to enhance women’s land ownership, inheritance rights, and protection against gender-based violence.
GNA