Vice President John Dramani Mahama on Tuesday appealed to women in the West African sub-region to use the African women’s decade as an opportunity to develop strategic action plans that could be implemented to achieve quick gains for the sub-region.

He said training at various sectors on new methodologies, professional development activities particularly for women and financial literacy that would empower women to increase contributions to society was key to development.

Vice President Mahama made the call in an address read on his behalf by Mrs Juliana Azumah Mensah, Minister of Women and Children’s Affairs, at the opening session of the UN Women High Level Symposium on Sustaining Gender Equality Responses in the ECOWAS Zone in Accra.

The three-day symposium was attended by Ministers of State from the sub-region, UN agencies and development partners to explore the opportunity of sustaining national responses to gender equality.

In addition, they would share effective approaches and mobilise action for national and local development through continued investment in gender equitable growth and renew institutional commitments to raise the gender equality agenda in the overall aid effectiveness debate.

Vice President Mahama said Ghana would continue to improve on the implementation of gender responsive budgeting initiative and other related programmes on increasing women participation in leadership and governance.

He said government had made major strides in promoting women’s equality such as passage of the Domestic Violence Act, the Livelihood Empowerment Programme instituted to provide social grants and psychological support to extremely poor households.

Despite these efforts to promote gender equality, Vice President Mahama said, there were still challenges that prevented the sustainability of the programmes, citing the relatively low participation of women in politics both at the national and local levels.

He said conscious efforts were needed both from a top-down and bottom-up approach to increase the number of women in politics, adding that such as quotas were being considered as starting point for fixing these gaps.

Mrs Mensah said although governments in the sub-region had made progress in gender responsive development planning and programming, there were still challenges in fulfilling the sub-regions’ commitments and obligations to gender equality and women’s empowerment.

She expressed the hope that the discussions would help to mobilise region-wide high level support to innovative programmes and mechanisms for financing and sustaining response on gender equality and budgeting at national and local levels of governments in the ECOWAS Zone.