Women in Law and Development Africa (WiLDAF) has called on the President to translate his position as the Co-chair of Eminent Advocates of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development into actual rights for women in the country.

Ms Abigail Edem Hunu, the Programme Officer, WiLDAF Ghana, said Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) want to see an improvement in women appointment, and in other decision making bodies as Ghana was still lagging greatly in this regard.

Ms Hunu was speaking at a day’s step down training programme supported by Grassroots Africa on gender and the Sustainable Development Goal five (SDG’s 5) in Accra.

The aim of the training was to build the capacity of participants on gender and the SDGs to enhance their work and to enable them monitor the implementation of the SDGs especially in their respective organizations and regions or districts to feed into the future shadow reports.

The SDG 5 talks about the need to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls.

It also targets an end to all forms of discrimination against all women and girls everywhere, eliminates all forms of violence against women and girls in the public and private spheres, including trafficking, sexual and all other kinds of exploitation.

She said according to the 2016 Gender Gap Calculator, it was going to take Ghana 83 years to achieve gender equality and therefore the fight for SDG 5 was important as this was a human rights and it is also a pre-requisite for sustainable development and democratisation.

Ms Hunu said in order for government to achieve gender equality at a faster pace, there was the need to allocate funds to the education and sensitization of religious, traditional and community leaders so that some of the harmful traditional practices would be minimised or eradicated completely.

According to her, there were still gaps in the SDGs 5 and that was the reason why the Gender Gap Calculator indicated that it would take Ghana a long time but this could be averted if the right policies, laws, education and sensitisation initiatives were implemented.

It was also important for government to end sexual abuse drastically as this was a huge challenge in schools, institutions among others as well as the need to introduce gender equity topics into the syllabus of the training colleges to help in the fight.

She said the return of pregnant girls into their schools had also become a thing of concern to CSOs and advocacy groups and also appealed to the Ministry of Education to help create a conducive environment for such girls as the law mandated them to go back to school even in that condition.

She said as Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), they are willing to collaborate with government of Ghana because they were at the grassroots level and could help in the advancement of the rights of women in the country.