Daily Graphic, pg 17, Tues. Dec. 30/08
Story Rebecca Quaicoe Duho
GENDER activists are advocating the empowering of women to be self-sufficient by helping them to acquire skills as one of the ways to curb gender violence.
According to the Programme Co-ordinator of the Women’s Initiative for Self- Empowerment (WISE), Ms Adwoa Bami, economically empowered women were able to assert themselves and depended less on their husbands.
She said violence against women was not confined to a specific culture, region or country, or to particular groups of women within society, explaining that the different manifestations of such violence and women’s personal experience of it were shaped by many factors, including the economic status of a woman, her race, ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, disability, nationality, religion and culture.
In order to prevent violence against women, she said, the root causes of such violence and the effects of the intersection of the subordination of women and other forms of social, cultural, economic and political manipulation needed to be identified and addressed.
She said women bore almost all responsibility for meeting the basic needs of the family, yet they were systematically denied the resources, information and freedom of action they needed to fulfil that responsibility.
Ms Bami said in an interview that most women remained in abusive relationships because they were dependent on the perpetrators and did not have the financial capabilities to take care of themselves and their children.
According to her, when women were economically sound, they would be able to be self-dependent and could, therefore, stay away from abusive relationships since they could work to fend for themselves.
Reports indicate that the vast majority of the world's poor are women, two-thirds of the world's illiterates are females and also of the millions of school-going children not in school, the majority of them are girls.
Studies also show that when women are supported and empowered, the rest of society benefits. Families are healthier, more children go to school, agricultural productivity improves and incomes increase. In short, communities become more resilient.
Ms Bami said it was for that reason that WISE had, for years, been supporting women to be financially capable to take care of themselves and their homes.
In 2004, WISE established a skills training centre known as the Women Economic Empowerment Development (WEED) programme where women who are in abusive relationships are given skills training to ensure that they do not depend on their spouses.
The WEED programme seeks to promote economic independence for survivors of domestic violence through advocacy, counselling and support, group development and micro-enterprise management training, access to credit and business advisory services.
The programme empowers the beneficiaries through capacity building, the provision of micro-credit, monitoring and business advisory services, disbursement of follow-up loans and loan assessment.
To help support the WEED programme, a foreign company, China 99 Limited, has donated two high-speed Lockstich sewing machines to teach women in the programme how to sew.
The machines, which perform functions such as regular sewing, embroidery, knitting, among others, will help to train 40 participants who are currently under the WEED programme.
The Chairman of the Board of Directors of WISE, Dr Juliet Tuakli, who received the items on behalf of the WEED project, said the programme had been a huge success so far.
According to her, 200 women had been trained in the last two years and most of them had returned to their marital homes and were no longer dependent on their husbands.
She said women who were under the programme were given training, after which they were given capital, with minimum interest, to start their own businesses.
One of the success stories of the WEED programme is that of a woman who was raped by rebels in Sierra Leone, for which reason her husband refused to accept her.
After going through the WEED programme in Ghana, she was given capital to sell iced water. She currently owns a deep freezer and is able to take care of her four children. Her husband has also decided to take her back.
A teenage girl has also been able to put her son through school after she received micro-credit from the programme and she is currently into batik making. She also makes pastries for sale.
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