Ghanaians urged to break the glass ceiling for female participation in leadership

Ghanaians are being encouraged to explore avenues that can ensure women get into positions of leadership after the 2008 general elections.

Currently in Ghana's legislature, only 25 out of 130 parliamentarians are women.

The National Programme Coordinator of Women in Law and Development in Africa (WiLDAF-Ghana), Mrs. Bernice Sam noted that although it is necessary to ensure gender equality in education, Ghana must move beyond that arena to that of decision-making.

She said the country needs to have more women in decision-making so that they can address issues of concern that greatly impact on them.

"When you look at the political parties, CPP has only six women who have gone through primaries and NDC 11. When you add up the rest, looking at the trend, can anyone assure me that come 2009 we will have 10% women in our legislature? Yet we have not began debating the numbers to look at how these various concerns affect us and impact our lives."

Mrs. Sam was speaking at the launch of the Global Monitoring report, 2008 in Accra.
The report, published by the World Bank and the IMF, warns that many countries in Africa will fall short on meeting most of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a set of eight globally agreed development targets with a due date of 2015.

While there has been strong growth in many countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Ghana, and there could yet be significant progress in poverty reduction in the next decade, Africa is still likely to fall short of the first goal of halving extreme poverty by 2015, with countries in fragile situations lagging the most, says the report.

According Mrs. Sam media images puts a question mark on whether Ghana is indeed eradicating poverty and stressed that it behooves on all Ghanaians to work to ensure that Ghana reduces poverty.

Touching on theme of the report, "MDGs and the Environment-Agenda for Inclusive and Sustainable Development", she said it is unfortunate that Ghanaians continue to use plastic bags for everything in spite of the fact that it generates filth and takes a longer time to decompose.

Madam Eunice Dapaah, a senior education specialist at the World Bank spoke about the need to simplify the MDGs for easy understanding by all.

She said education should be the only denominator to achieve MDGs as there would be no basis for food and water without environmental sustainability.

"Ghana needs to work harder on monitoring environmental sustainability because whatever we are not measuring, we can be sure that we are not doing well."

Ms Dapaah said Ghanaians can and must do more if they are to make gains to safeguard their existence.