Women urged to seek empowerment

THE aim was to take gender studies from the classroom to the wider society, and the Institute for Gender and Development Studies (IGDS) based at the University of the West Indies, Mona, was able to accomplish this last week with a public lecture on Monday followed by a breakfast forum the following morning.

At both meetings, Vice Chancellor at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana, Professor Naana Opoku-Agyemang, inspired the gathering of women representing various sectors of the society to remain committed to who they are. She also spent much time dispelling the myths about African women who she said had always been depicted as people singing for their foods with flies in their faces as they stayed at home with their starving children, waiting for the men to bring them something to eat.

“We hear that African women are invisible (and) that is not true,” Opoku-Agyeman said during the Women and Leadership public lecture at the Rex Nettleford Hall.

“If today we don’t find women in hospitals as doctors, or if you don’t find enough lawyers and doctors and judiciaries then something has gone wrong,” she said.

Opoku-Agyeman, who in 2008 became the first female to occupy the vice chancellery post, said that while going to school was originally for men, this is no longer the case. She said too that women no longer stayed at home as is depicted in literature.

“It is the women who handle the finance in the family. Women are involved in construction, women are hunters. It is a woman (queen mother) who decides who will be king. Women are very, very knowledgeable,” she said. “We have our very first female chief justice, of whom we are very proud.”

The educator pointed out to the women at the breakfast forum that the economic gains of women generally was not for themselves but for their family.

“All the research shows that when a woman is empowered and she has a little money, immediately it goes to her children. Talk to the women in the market, those whose are hawking,” she said. “When she makes a little money after hawking peanuts in the sun all day, it is for that baby on her back, it is not for herself, it is for her family, and therefore it is only logical, it only makes sense that we want to empower them.”

She implored the women to continue to encourage young girls who have lost their way and to empower the youths of today.

“We can’t afford to lose our children, so whatever it is we need to do, we need to begin to do it today and do more of it and learn from each other,” she said, as she reminded the women that there was a purpose behind their creation.

“I don’t think anyone is created as a woman by accident, there is a purpose and it is part of our business to locate that purpose and to use it for the common good.”

Opoku-Agyeman was elected Ghana’s representative to the executive board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 2009 and was one of five eminent scholars selected from around the world to the United Nations Headquarters to deliver presentations during the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the British Trans-Atlantic Trade in Africa.

Professor Verene Shepherd, who had co-ordinated Opoku-Agyeman’s visit to Jamaica, said the IGDS hopes to have a breakfast forum at least every other month if they get interested partners to come on board to assist with funding the event.

“We are concerned about so many issues in the society that implicate gender and we think that we should not just stay on the campus and teach this in the classroom, we must share this with the wider public,” she told All Woman.

The forum was expected to increase dialogue around national, regional and international issues of relevance. This first forum was done in collaboration with the International Women’s Forum while the lecture was done in collaboration with the Office of the Principal at UWI.