Extend maternity leave to 6 months – NGO

A non-governmental organisation (NGO), Single Parents Support Network, is pushing for amendment of the three-month maternity leave for career women.

According to the NGO, the review of the three months’ maternity leave to six will help achieve gender equality for sustainable development.

The Life Coach and Director of Single Parents Support Network, Esther Emefa Gadze, speaking to Class News on the sidelines of the launch of the 2017 Ghana Gender Equality Awards, said: “Statutory regulations require organisations to give three months’ maternity leave to nursing mothers and I think that it will be great if it’s reviewed to six months because we are advocating six months exclusive breastfeeding to help the child build up their immune system.

“Sometimes we think it is time for the organisations to start thinking holistically instead of thinking about only the bottom line. Because when the society is healthy, the organisation is healthy. When you have a society that thrives, we have a society that is happy, the organisation doesn’t need to put in security systems and spend so much money on security because your child is not wayward, because you’ve put in structures to make it possible for parents to be there for their children.

“Right now, what we see in corporate Ghana and actually all over the world is that you have targets that are unreasonable. We have fathers who are working so hard to provide for their children and most of the fathers are absent not because they choose to be absent; it is because of the situation at their work places. So if we can do something about it, when you are forming an organisation, when people sit down to make decisions, if they can factor in the family, I think there would be a reverse reaction where bottom line will automatically increase.”