The Defence Minister-designate, Dominic Nitiwul says the Ghana Armed Forces is making every effort possible to encourage female participation in the Forces.

According to him, though female participation is being encouraged, to maintain the quality of personnel in the service, recruitment of females is solely done on merit bases rather than favouritism or just because they are women.

“It’s a field that you don’t want to do favouritism, you want to make sure that people qualify on merit. So all the women you see today they qualify on merit.

“But there’s a gender desk that we have set up at the Ghana Armed forces; but like I said the females there are not recruited just because they are females, no, they are recruited based on the fact that they are qualified , they are exceptional and they’ve done well,” he said.

He added that recruitment of women into the Ghana Armed Forces surpasses the United Nations target of 15% women serving in military contingents.

“Ghana has one of the highest in terms of numbers. I’ll not give because there’s a sensitivity of that question. In fact we have actually passed the UN threshold of the ration when it comes to both peacekeeping and people within the military.”

He stated that the Forces will continue to give females the due recognition percentages they deserve in the recruitment process in order to keep their numbers at an acceptable standard.

“They do a lot of work and they do very, very well when it comes to work of being a soldier and I want to encourage them to continue to avail themselves for the service,” he concluded.