By Patience Tawiah
Nkwanta (O/ R), Oct. 28, GNA- The Volta and Oti Women in Agriculture Network ( VOWAN) and partners have celebrated the International Day of Rural Women in the Nkwanta South Municipality in the Oti Region.
The Day is observed globally to honour and highlight the essential roles that rural women and girls play in the food system.
This year’s celebration is on the theme: “Rural Women Cultivating Good Food For All.”
Madam Janet Adade, Chief Executive Officer of VOWAN, said women played variety of roles in ensuring food security and reduction of poverty in rural communities.
These essential roles, she said, included raising crops and processing harvest, and ensuring that both families and communities were nourished.
Yet, paradoxically, those same women often had less access to land and food, and were at higher risk of hunger, malnutrition, and food insecurity than their male counterparts, she said.
Madam Adade, also the owner of ELSJYNE Enterprise, said for the past three years, the enterprise had collaborated with other women groups in the two regions to observe the Day.
It was set aside by the United Nations to celebrate and recognise the critical role and contributions of rural women to ensure food security for humanity.
Despite the planet’s capacity to provide enough food for everyone, an increasing number of people were not able to meet their food and nutritional needs.
Madam Adade said this year’s celebration was to discuss challenges rural women face in ensuring food security and to create the needed awareness on the various international platforms.
She called on the Government, non governmental organisations, philanthropists and individuals to support women in agriculture by providing them with farm inputs.
Madam Millicent Kabuki Carboo, District Chief Executive (DCE) for Biakoye District in Oti, urged the women to embrace government interventions in the agricultural sector to improve their standard of living.
She appealed to landowners to release lands to women groups to cultivate crops in large quantities for food sufficiency in the country.
Some of the women who exhibited their farm produce at the event, commended their leaders for the various intervention, which had yielded good results.
Mrs Yiwani Obour and Madam Bertha Edubia from Nkwanta South and Biakoye districts, respectively, called on the Government to provide women give financial support to boost agriculture.
GNA