Encourage women to partake in active politics – Hannah Bissiw

The National Women Organiser of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Dr Louisa Hannah Bissiw, has called on the women leadership of political parties to mentor young ladies in and out of tertiary education to partake in active politics.

She explained that women’s participation in partisan politics was low and needed strategic intervention on the part of parties that believed in equity and equality to reverse the trend.

“It is unfortunate how when Youth Organiser’s positions are mentioned, everyone starts thinking of a male and only think of a female when the position of a Women Organiser comes up,” Dr Bissiw lamented.

She made the call at a stakeholder meeting held by the Gender Centre for Empowering Development (GenCED) for representatives of the NDC, New Patriotic Party (NPP), Convention People’s Party (CPP), and Peoples National Convention (PNC) to deliberate on how to enhance participation of women in active politics within their parties.

According to her, their male counterparts had reduced women to cooking, serving water and stopped women organisers at political party functions from serving food because that was not what they were meant for.

Dr Bissiw, a former Deputy Minister of Food and Agriculture, said research had shown any government with larger representation of women in politics, had corruption malpractices reduced drastically and implored female leadership of political parties to mentor the young ones and prepare them for future positions within the party and beyond.

Perpetual Lomokie, NPP Deputy Youth Organiser, reiterated the need to mentor the young ones and pleaded with the youth who had interest in politics to be humble and show respect to the elderly if they wanted mentorship.

Tetteh Chaie, the Greater Accra Regional Secretary of the NDC, said to totally climb the political ladder with women, political parties ought to amend their constitution however, he noted that “many women with interest in politics are hesitant to start from the grassroots and it becomes difficult for men who began from the base to let them have power when they appear suddenly and want to be at the top”.

Grace Acheampong, the Greater Accra Regional Women Organiser of NPP, bemoaned poor attitude of some young people who had interest to play crucial roles in active politics and challenged them to desist from easy ways of attaining leadership roles.

Her agenda, she indicated was to push more young women to play about 70 per cent of active roles in NPP, in order to increase women representation in decision making processes.

Esther Tawiah, the Executive Director, GenCED, urged the CPP and PNC to take advantage of the training to build membership to wipe out the perception of young people buying into the idea that the only valuable parties were the NPP and NDC and politics revolved only around them. -GNA