Economic empowerment of women advocated by Krobo Queenmother

THE ACTING Paramount Queenmother of the Krobo Traditional Area, Manye Nartekie, has said it is useful to give women, especially queenmother, the relevant development training as a way of empowering them to help tackle the developmental needs of their people.

She said when queenmothers are empowered, they would complement the efforts of their male counterparts to work effectively, and extend their knowledge to other women and children in their communities, in a way that would help eliminate vices and outmoded practices for community and national development.

She said this in an interview with The Chronicle at the end of the opening ceremony of a three-year model training course for selected queenmothers from Southern Ghana, on the theme, “Traditional Leadership, Conflict Management and Gender” in the Central Region on last week Tuesday.

According to her, the training had equipped her with the requisite knowledge to take stock of the resources available in her area, and how best to use them for the development of her people, adding, “it has made me more confident to inquire and know about the problems confronting my people, especially, women and children, and how best to address them.”

She noted that the programme had enhanced her leadership skills, and therefore such programmes should be made more frequent and accessible to queenmotherss throughout the country, to increase their knowledge on what contributions and differences they can make to local and national development.

Explaining the motivation for the training programme, the Deputy Director of the Center for Indigenous Knowledge (CIKOD), Mr. Willie Laate, said the programme was formulated, together with the Institute for Development Studies of Cape Coast, as a strategy to mainstream gender in community organisational development.

The programme, which is the second in a series of three under different themes, was also aimed at strengthening the capacities of women leaders to make them assertive, and serve as a social control institution in moderating the activities of their male counterparts, he added.

According to him, though there were well-established government institutions that are playing important roles in the development of rural Ghana, traditional leaders remain the widespread institutions that can be found in every community, and were accessible to the poor.

Thus, the programme “will build the capacity of the indigenous institutions to be able to partner government institutions in the design and implementation of rural development,” and strengthen the traditional leadership qualities of women leaders for improved performance of their roles in governance at the local level.

Also, he stated that at the end of the training, traditional women leaders would be strengthened to utilise traditional and modern systems in creating gender awareness and modern conflict resolution for local level development.

He indicated that the first programme, under the theme “Governance and Local Level Development,” had resulted in many initiatives throughout the regions, and therefore appealed to the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, regional ministers, municipal and district chief executives, to officially recognise the contribution of traditional authorities, and design mechanisms to actively integrate the institution into the decentralised governance structure.

On the other hand, he challenged traditional leaders to be prepared to adopt modern accountability systems, and use them to improve upon traditional mechanisms, for transparency in their communities and districts assemblies.

The Programme Manager of the Konrad Adenaeur Stiftung (KAS), Mr. Isaac Owusu-Mensah, noted that it had become necessary for the traditional systems that are endowed with various mechanisms of conflict resolution, which provide for consensus building, to be utilised for proper conflict resolution and management in the country.

He pointed out that the traditional mechanisms for conflict resolution makes no party a winner, and therefore eliminate strife between conflicting parties after resolution, as compared to the modern legal framework, thus, “we must select the relevant mechanism to adapt to our current needs.”

He commended the use of the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) by successive governments, and urged the participants to use the knowledge they would acquire to promote learning to bring a change in the conduct of their development activities.