A Medium-Term development plan has been drawn by the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC) to improve the socio-economic status of women and children over the next four years. Taking her turn at the meet-the-press series in Accra, Mrs Juliana Azumah-Mensah, Minister of Women and Children’s Affairs, said notwithstanding the fact that they dominated both the informal productive and the business sectors, women, compared to their male counterparts, continued to encounter difficulties in accessing credit. Statistics at MOWAC indicate that women constitute about 80 per cent of the informal productive sector of the economy and controlled more than 50 per cent of informal sector businesses. Mrs Azumah-Mensah noted that the lack of access to finance for women engaged in micro and small-scale enterprises mostly in rural communities was, therefore, a major impediment to the country’s efforts at reducing poverty by half by 2015. She said the ministry had carried out training workshops for women’s groups in the formal sector throughout the country, benefiting 23,187 individuals from 464 communities. The minister indicated that a one-day validation workshop to finalise Ghana’s National Plan of Action for United Nations Security Council Resolution 1,325 on Women, Peace and Security had been organised for all stakeholders in women’s issues. She said the ministry was also in the process of establishing a network of women on peace and security in Ghana. She said in Ghana, as in most African countries, violence tended to be condoned under certain cultural practices and religious beliefs, particularly when it took place within the home, a situation which had made domestic violence (DV) the most hidden form of violence in Ghana and elsewhere. Mrs Azumah-Mensah mentioned the enactment of the Domestic Violence Act (2007) Act 732 which, among other things, proscribed violence in all forms, punished perpetrators and provided interventions to rescue and rehabilitate victims as some of the actions to address domestic violence in the country. According to her, Ghana was noted as a destination, transit and origin of human trafficking (HT), saying research indicated that about 70 per cent of HT cases were internal, with about 78 per cent of victims being children between six and 15. To address that canker, she said the ministry, with support from the UN systems and the Danish Embassy in Ghana, had adopted interventions such as the establishment of a human trafficking secretariat to co-ordinate activities of the management board and other related issues on human trafficking. The minister mentioned the Gender Responsive Skills and Community Development Project (GRSCDP) designed to promote gender equitable socio-economic development through institutional capacity building and improvement in women’s gainful employment and enterpreneurship as one of the key accomplishments of the ministry. Mrs Azumah-Mensah said key challenges and constraints facing the ministry included the low participation of women in decision-making levels, harmful socio-cultural practices, violence against women and children, increasing number of kayayei/streetism in urban areas and inadequate desegregated data (gender, sex and age). On the way forward, she stated that despite the numerous challenges, the ministry intended to intensify advocacy and awareness creation on the mission and mandate of MOWAC and facilitate the re-engineering process of MOWAC to enable it to effectively and efficiently undertake its mandate. She said the ministry would also establish two shelters in Accra and Kumasi this year to promote victim protection and facilitate the prosecution of offenders and the development of a Legislative Instrument on the Human Trafficking and the Domestic Violence acts. Source: Daily Graphic/Ghana