THE European Union (EU) is supporting female aspirants who are contesting this year’s assembly elections in the Northern Region.
The EU is funding a project known as the Support for Women to Participate in Elections (SWOPE), which is being implemented by the Ghana Developing Communities Association (GDCA), a network of organisations working in Northern Ghana.
Under the project, community durbars are organised in the various districts to create a platform for the female aspirants to convince the people about their ability to represent them at the assembly.
The project also organises training programmes to build the capacity of the women assembly hopefuls in the areas of leadership, accountability, advocacy and campaign development.
At one of the community durbars at Kulinkpegu, a community in the Yendi municipality, the Field Facilitator for the SWOPE project, Ms Alhassan Faidatu, noted that the aim of the project was to increase women’s participation in local and national governance.
He said the community durbars were used to solicit support for the female aspirants by educating the people to appreciate the role that women play in governance.
“Female candidates are mostly hindered in their desire to contest elections due to lack of finance and the negative perception about females in leadership,” the co-ordinator explained.
She said organising such community durbars, therefore, helps the aspirants to reach their target audience, which includes chiefs, opinion leaders and the youth.
Ms Faidatu mentioned that aside from the community durbars and workshops, the GDCA also acquired airtime on radio for female candidates to hold discussions and get their messages to reach a wider audience.
“We want our people to understand that the current political climate, both local and international, favours women empowerment and, therefore, our women should not be left out,” she explained.
Mr Faidatu further noted that increasing women’s involvement in governance would be to the benefit of the communities because women are more purposeful and aggressive pursuers of development, just as they do with home management.
“If a woman has the ability to organise the home, take care of the children and her husband and make critical decisions, then she has the ability to seek solutions to the problems confronting her community,” she stated, adding that current women leaders have demonstrated this ability.
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