Today is International Women's Day - a day to shine a spotlight on gender inequality.
The recent Afrobarometer press release indicated that women in Ghana continue to lag behind males in a number of areas - financial decision-making, political interest and participation, ownership of key assets and education. We have commented earlier on some of the gender differences in science in Ghana.
The U.N provides the sobering information that not a single country has achieved gender equality out of a 129 studied and additionally none are on track to meet the gender-based Sustainable Development Goal indicators.
Sustainable Development Goal 5 which seeks achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls is the main SDG on gender. Today we present three SDG5 indicators for Ghana using available data from the 2017/2018 Multiple Cluster Indicator Survey (MICS).
Goal 5.3 which seeks to eliminate all harmful practices, such as child, early and forced marriage and female genital mutilation has not been achieved:
– 18.6%
i.e. almost 1 in 5 women aged 20-24 were married before they were 18 years and
– 6% of women
15-49 years reported that they had been circumcised
Goal 5.b
which seeks to enhance the use of enabling technology, in particular
information and communications technology, to promote the empowerment of women
has also not been achieved
– the percent of males who own mobile phones is 13%
higher than that for females
Goal 5.5 seeks to ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities
for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic and
public life
– 36 out
of the 275 Members of Parliament are female representing 13% and indicating very limited progress has been made towards achieving this goal.