Women should be encouraged to take up leadership positions – Prof Takyiwaa Manuh

The time has come for Ghana to take bold steps and implement policies that will encourage more women to take up leadership positions.

That’s according to the former Director of the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, Professor Takyiwaa Manuh.

According to her, gender parity is elusive in Ghana, emphasising that only a few countries in West Africa practice it.

“If you look at the regions in West Africa, I think apart from Central Africa, and maybe even North African region, we are really at the bottom. Senegal has a gender parity law, which is interesting to see.

“So it’s not about religion. It’s about state policy. It’s about intention, and so in West Africa, apart from Senegal, Cape Verde, and remarkably Togo is making a lot of progress.

“Most of those other countries that have achieved progress, they’ve done it through quota systems, they’ve done it through proportional representation,” she said.

Speaking in the yet-to-be-aired interview on JoyNews’ Personality Profile, Prof Takyiwaa Manuh said political parties have fiercely resisted the move to reserve seats for women.

She attributes this resistance to the delay in passing the Affirmative Action Bill, which advocates for such measures.

For this reason, she called on Parliament to pass the Affirmative Action Bill into law before the end of the 8th Parliament.

She also expressed worry about what she described as the proliferation of tertiary institutions in the country.

“When it comes to higher education, well, on the surface, it looks like we have a proliferation of institutions. And I think we’re going to need to have some conversations in this country, you know, how many institutions do we need? Now? It’s like one region, one university so we just created six new regions.

“So we’re going to create six new universities; do we have the money to equip them sufficiently? So, there are all kinds of issues at that level, you know, just even in terms of the institutional thing, and it’s creating some other sentiments where people feel that because the university is in their region, the head of it must be in the region,” she said.

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