Mar 08, 2013 at 4:36pm

CeDI-Africa has appealed to government “to explore the possibility of introducing partial to full scholarships to all Ghanaian female children of school-going age up to the first degree level.”

This was contained in statement signed by the Policy Director of the group, Francis-Xavier Kojo Sosu (Esq) further stated that the appeal when heeded to will be a “show of commitment to Affirmative Action and Women Empowerment and would catapult Ghana towards the attainment of most of the Millennium Development Goals.”


Below is the full statement

CeDI-Africa would like to draw the nation’s attention to some fundamental issues on the occasion of International Women’s Day today.

Physical assault on any human being is a crime under our criminal code. It does not become any less criminal if the assault is on a woman. Any attempt to make it less offensive and customarily accepted for a man to physically assault a woman, whether she be his wife or in any other relationship, breaches women’s fundamental right to equal humanity and treatment under Article 17(1) and (2) of our 1992 Fourth Republican Constitution and various other international treaties on the equal rights of women which Ghana subscribes to.

The various spousal murders that the country is awakened to regularly build up from cases of continual unpunished spousal abuses that go on all around us in Ghana every day. It is in this light that we strongly condemn CharterHouse and rLG Communications for paying huge sums of money to bring Chris Brown, an American musician who is notoriously remembered the world over for the physical assault on his girl friend.

We call on President John Dramani to show he cares for the women of Ghana by paying priority attention to the issue of violence against women and to cause the necessary legislative amendments to be made for the highest form of punishment for any man who abuses any woman on the soil of Ghana.

Again, we take this opportunity to recommend to government to explore the possibility of introducing partial to full scholarships to all Ghanaian female children of school-going age up to the first degree level. This, we believe, would be the strongest show of commitment to Affirmative Action and Women Empowerment and would catapult Ghana towards the attainment of most of the Millennium Development Goals. The benefits to Ghana in the long term in terms of the ability of women who form the majority of our population to contribute meaningfully to the development of Ghana would be immense.

Statistics show that there are over 7,170 street ‘mothers’ under the age of 20. These Street mothers who are porters popularly known as “kayayei” live on the streets in major cities, including Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi. Most of these girls are among the most vulnerable child laborers, as many engaged in prostitution and are sexually exploited in exchange for protection while living on the streets. We call on government to come up with pragmatic initiatives to arrest the problem.

We call on all men on the occasion of International Women’s Day to Stand UP For Women in their daily lives and see Women Empowerment as a shared responsibility. We also call on all of society to get on board with CeDI-Africa in our project named 50 WOMEN MPs IN GHANA’S PARLIAMENT 2017.

God Bless Women

Francis-Xavier Kojo Sosu (Esq)
Policy Director, Human Rights & Social Justice, CeDI-Africa.



By: citifmonline.com/Ghana