Women's Empowerment and Good Governance Through - amarc

Best Experiences for an Action Research Process 54
Currently, at the national level, only 21 out of the 230-member legislature are women, while
in a Cabinet of 19, only three of the ministers are women. Furthermore, there are only three
women in the 24-member Council State, the constitutional body that advises the President
of the Republic. It is worth noting that these three are among the 14 members of the council
who were appointed by the president. An electoral college representing the 10 regions of the
country elects the remaining 10 members.
The situation is no different at the local government level, which is the lowest level of decision
making and is seen to be closer to the ordinary person. There are only three women
Presiding Members in the 128 rural District Assemblies in the country. Out of the 138 District
Chief Executives, only 12 are women. Although the percentage of women who contested the
election increased substantially during the 2006 district-level elections, Ghana’s Institute of
Local Government Studies says only 11 per cent of the members of the district, municipal and
metropolitan assemblies are women.
Besides the poor educational level and other factors mentioned earlier, it is believed that the
low level of women’s participation in governance at both the national and local levels has been
largely due to the perception that politics is dirty and better left to men, and because the demands
of the traditional roles of the woman as a mother and wife. Most husbands are widely
known to be unsupportive of their wives’ political ambitions.
Women in the media in Ghana
In 2006, a survey was conducted by Women Media and Change, an Accra-based NGO, on the
extent to which gender is incorporated into the work of eight selected media houses operating
in the country. The houses include the public broadcaster, Ghana Broadcasting Corporation,
the two public owned print media, two privately owned electronic and one print media, the Media
Foundation for West Africa and the Ghana Journalists Association, which is the umbrella
body of media practitioners in the country. The survey indicated that all eight organizations
view gender as an integral part of development and freedom of expression and support the
need for equal opportunities for both women and men. However, all the organizations reflect
greater representation of men at all levels of their structure. Seven out of 10 people in the the
organizations could not give any examples of any gender-specific work they have done while
most of them did not consider gender as an issue that should form part of their organizational