Savannah Women Integrated Development Agency (SWIDA-GH), a non-governmental organisation (NGO), has engaged stakeholders to introduce its Women Empowerment for Leadership and Action for Development (Women-LEAD) project to them for their inputs to help finetune its activities.

Women-LEAD project is an initiative that seeks to empower women and girls within the Northern region with strategic leadership and advocacy skills to attain economic freedom and increase their participation in decision-making in their communities.

It is a three-year project being funded by Global Affairs Canada and Plan International, Ghana, under the auspices of Plan International’s “Women Voice and Leadership” programme in Ghana.

It is being implemented in five communities in the Tamale Metropolis and five communities in the Sagnarigu Municipality of the Northern region.

The engagement, dubbed; “Policy Implementers Forum”, brought together officials from the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE), Department of Gender, Labour Commission, Legal Aid Commission and NGOs among others.

It provided a platform for participants to share their institutional policies that specifically tackled women empowerment issues to help inform the SWIDA-GH’s Women-LEAD project line of implementation.

Hajia Alima Sagito-Saeed, Executive Director of SWIDA-GH, said the forum would afford her outfit opportunities to put together gender-sensitive policies in institutions and departments to scale up results on the implementation of the Women-LEAD project.

She said, “We brought them here today to share their policies that are geared towards the advancement of women so that when we come across any issue suppressing women in our operational areas, we will know where to appropriately refer such cases for actions”.

She appealed to authorities to create an enabling environment for policymakers to rigorously implement policies in the interest of women to enable them to realise their rights.

Participants present at the forum took turns to present and share their various gender sensitive institutional policies and what they do to help curb issues of gender inequalities in society.