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03.01.2015 Special Report

ActionAid in 2015: Increasing Possibilities for People Living in Poverty

By Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
ActionAid in 2015: Increasing Possibilities for People Living in Poverty
03.01.2015 LISTEN

In 2014, just like the years before, we worked together with our partners and collaborators to increase development possibilities in poor and marginalized communities. It was mostly challenging and sometimes difficult navigating traditional and customary inhibitions to cause change to happen in some of our rural communities. Interestingly, it is in some of these communities that we recorded some of our most inspiring change stories. While there are still many challenges to our work, we remain resolute in our conviction that a world without poverty and injustice is possible if we build stronger partnerships and alliances with those who can make change happen.

ActionAid Ghana will be 25 years old in 2015. It takes a lot of living to be 25 years. We are still quite young, but it has taken more than just a lot of living to remain the Charity of choice in Ghana. We have lived our organisational values and worked through difficult circumstances to implement programmes and projects that target the strategic needs of people living in poverty. It is exciting to see people in deprived communities take leadership of the development processes around them and initiate the change they want to see in their own surroundings. This gives us hope that the change we seek is already here with us, and the people who can effect those changes are ourselves. Together, we can achieve the best for ourselves and our children.

We hesitate to flaunt our achievements over the past 24 years, but we are quick to report the efforts and developments that are taking place to improve the lives of poor and excluded people. Across our major themes on women empowerment, education, food security and climate change, we have experienced some inspiring change moments. Our work with the alleged witches in the Northern Region, which started in 2005, gained the desired attention when national and local stakeholders met to discuss witchcraft accusations and human rights abuses in Ghana. Following the national conference on 10th December, 2014, the Bonyasi witch camp was closed down on 15th December, 2014. The five residents of the camp, together with 50 more from the other five witch camps, were subsequently reintegrated into welcoming communities.

There are five more camps in the Northern region, which all together host more than 400 women and a few hundred dependents. While ActionAid and the Ministry of Gender, Children and Social Protection, together with other national and regional partners continue to work towards the welfare of the old and vulnerable women, there is a lot to be done to reintegrate all the women into their original communities and ultimately disband the camps. In 2015, we would intensify the campaign on the human rights violations at the camps, and also highlight gender discrimination and other cultural and traditional forms of violence that work against the development of girls and women in Ghana. These hamper their development and work against their dignity.

As a country, we have an obligation to promote women's right to economic and leadership opportunities, to enable them take part in the fashioning of policies and decisions that affect their development. Towards this objective, we launched the Unpaid Care Work campaign in February 2014, to draw attention to the enormous work burden on girls and women, which prevents them from accessing opportunities for personal and community development. The campaign called for the recognition, reduction and redistribution of the care burden on women. Another objective of the social innovation was to highlight the monetary value of women's unpaid care work to our Gross Domestic Product, which is usually not calculated because it is not recognised. While the effect has been gradual, we have seen some progress in masculine attitudes and behaviour in traditional rural communities where women face social and cultural discrimination. In 2015, we would double our work on women empowerment.

On education, we continue to promote our programmes on positive discipline and fundamental rights in schools, including the formation and promotion of Girls Clubs and Camps, Young Female Parliament, and other initiatives targeted at harnessing and deploying the potentials of young people. These commitments have come with the responsibility of tightening school governance structures, which recongise and encourage the participation of parents and guardians in the education of their children. These innovations are gradually but steadily helping to develop the confidence of young people, especially girls, who are showing greater enthusiasm for leadership opportunities. In 2015, we would work towards our organisational objective of ensuring that women access 40% of local leadership positions.

In 2014, we intensified our tax justice campaign with the launch of a research report on the harmful effects of investment incentives in Ghana. Through the collaboration of our partners in the Tax Justice Coalition and the media, we sustained the campaign and the public sensitization on the millions of dollars lost to the Ghana government through the granting of tax reliefs to multinational companies. With the formation of regional chapters of the Tax Coalition and the collaboration of the Parliamentary Select Committees on Trade and Finance, the tax campaign will be energized in 2015. We would widen the network of institutional and community support through increased media activity and stronger public partnership.

We are starting 2015 in a bold and promising way. With the approval of a new Country Strategy Paper (CSP V), which would be launched soon, we are confident that we would be able to achieve the goals and objectives we have set for ourselves for the next four years. Our numerous development interventions earned us the CIMG Award for Not-for-Profit Organisation of the Year in 2013. In 2015, we would increase possibilities for people living in poverty to claim their rights and work towards the development of their communities. This is our commitment to the poor and marginalized people in Ghana.

We wish our all partners and collaborators a prosperous year of action in development.

From the Communications and Public Relations Unit

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