Young voices speak: Empower woman!

It is a Saturday afternoon. A typical African and Ghanaian sunny afternoon. Bodies hustle and shove against one other in the busy streets of Accra as voices chorus and clash sometimes.

I heard so many voices today. in my house.In the “trotro”. In the market. I must confess that some of the voices were silently loud. I heard some of these voices through the eyes of some women I saw on T.V, in the market, in the trotro I picked today.

This week I heard some on radio and in some offices I visited this week .The most true and interesting voice i heard this week was the one in the Daily Graphic talking about the challenges of today’s career mother. It was real life story form the perspective of a woman. i savoured every word and listened with my heart. My heart bulged with pride and commented silenlty "this is true indeed".

It’s exactly 3pm right now. In a short while, young people’s voices would be heard on radio…our voices will chorus perspectives from young people.
But the truth of the matter is, right now my body aches to be at Labaadi beach. We have a lot of beaches here but my passion is driving me to the studio. Ever since, I decided to be a woman’s advocate, my time and senses have not been mine alone but for all woman nationally and globally.

As a young radio broadcaster, Saturdays are only the days we have a whole hour on national radio to discuss issues that affect young people including young women. Last Saturday’s discussion was a heated one. The one hour air time fled before we said Jack.

As I battle between going to the beach or to the studio, last weeks discussions gush through my mind as if it was just yesterday: The bone of contention in the studio was “Women’s empowerment”. What about the boys or men? my colleague Emmanuel protested before we dashed into the studio.

I sometimes replay our voices in my mind:
Empowering women from young people’s perspective is giving women opportunities to become who they want to become. It is giving them the platform to climb to the highest pinnacle in life. It involves respecting women’s voices and including them in decision making.

In a world that is fast changing and developing there is no doubt about the need to empower women educationally, economically, politically, emotionally, and spiritually.

But what does it mean in a broader perspective?
In a broader perspective, women’s empowerment is about respecting rights to the fullest and creating the opportunities and platforms for women to develop in every aspect of their lives.
To empower women, economically speaking is to give women the skills, training and the education to generate money in order to be in a better position to take care of herself and to support their families. It involves the expertise in investment etc. This means that more vocational training institutes should be built for women who have the desire to have skills of their own etc.

Another very important sector that women need to be empowered is political. Women should be given the opportunity to take up positions such as members of parliament, ministerial positions and presidential positions if the qualify. It also means finding mechanisms for women to contribute to national and international debates of issues that affect the political scenes of the nation and of the world.

It also means including them in decision making in the home and also at the national level
Ghana for instance as a country has made some strides in empowering women in the different sectors of life. We even have a woman as our speaker of parliament who is a role model in our society. We have a number of women occupying ministerial positions and as members of parliament.
Women empowerment is a key to development: When we empower women we are able to reduce poverty, promote democratic governance, and promote health, environment and sustainable development and above all achieving Millennium Development Goal 3.

No nation can attain optimum development in every sector without the inclusion and empowering women in all the sectors of development-economic, political, social, health, emotionally and spiritually.

It is necessary to know that we are first of all actors and change makers- we need to be more proactive in empowering ourselves than waiting for eternity for policies to be drafted and implemented which may never come out from the pipe lines anyway.
Let’s start by deciding to go to school and upgrade ourselves no matter where we have come and what the situation is like.
Let’s mentor the young ones in every way and lets start women’s empowerment by empowering the young girls.