Stop Using Women as Excuses and Let Them Lead the Change: Why Ghana must rethink equality

In today’s world, equality has become a popular slogan. Every institution claims to promote it. We hear about empowerment, gender balance, and women in leadership. Yet, behind these glowing words lies an uncomfortable truth: women and children are often used, not empowered.

They are used to attract funding, applause, and sympathy, while the systems that keep them marginalised remain untouched.

When Empowerment Becomes Exploitation

Gender equality was meant to give women equal respect, opportunity, and voice. But too often, “empowerment” has become a marketing strategy. The image of a struggling woman or a barefoot child is now used as emotional currency to raise money.

Organisations like UNICEF and others have done remarkable work, but their campaigns also raise important questions. Why are women and children almost always shown as helpless victims? Why are African faces mostly used to evoke pity rather than pride?

These images may raise funds, but they also sustain a global narrative that Africa, and its women, can only be saved from outside.

When Images Inspire Donations but Not Change

Across Ghana and many parts of Africa, countless women and children have unknowingly become the faces of international fundraising campaigns. One widely circulated example showed a rural woman walking under the scorching sun with a bucket of water on her head. Her photograph appeared in brochures, websites, and global charity appeals, raising substantial sums of money in the name of “community development.”

Another global campaign featured the image of a malnourished child sitting barefoot on dusty ground, an image shared across continents in newsletters, donor presentations, and social media appeals.

Both images generated sympathy and money. Yet in both cases, reports from their communities years later revealed a sobering truth: very little had changed. The promised borehole never arrived. Classrooms still lacked textbooks. Electricity remained unreliable. Children continued studying under trees. The very people whose faces fueled these successful campaigns saw no meaningful transformation in their own lives.

Their images touched hearts around the world, but their realities remained the same.

This exposes a broader and painful truth: too often, the individuals whose pictures raise millions never receive the benefits. Their struggles become emotional triggers for global fundraising, while the underlying structures that perpetuate their suffering remain unchallenged.

How These Images Damage Africa’s Global Image

There is also a deeper consequence. These repeated portrayals of suffering women and helpless children have shaped how the world views Africa. For decades, the continent has been depicted as a place defined by crisis, poverty, and dependency, a narrative used to drive global fundraising.

These images travel much farther than our successes. They overshadow our achievements, distort our identity, and bury our progress.

Generations around the world grow up believing that Africa survives only on charity because the only images they see on TV and other social media platforms are of misery, not mastery, of pain, not potential. This is not just unfair, it is damaging.

African Leaders Must Put an End to This

It is time for African leaders to take a principled, firm stance. No nation can shape its destiny when others control its narrative.

Governments and institutions across the continent must stop allowing organisations, whether international NGOs, foundations, or media outlets, to use African faces for sympathy-driven fundraising without accountability or transparency.

African leaders must demand:

• Clear consent and protection for the use of people’s images

• Transparency on how funds raised with African faces are spent

• A shift from pity-based messaging to dignity-based storytelling

• Narratives that highlight Africa’s strength, innovation, and leadership

• Investment in local capacity, not foreign publicity campaigns

Africa’s identity is not for sale.

The era when African suffering was a global fundraising commodity must end.

The Myth of the ‘Weak Vessel’

For generations, women have been called “the weaker vessel.” The phrase, though often meant with kindness, has been used to justify exclusion and condescension. Yet weakness is not a matter of gender; it is a matter of denied opportunity.

Across Ghana and Africa, women have sustained families, driven local economies, and led communities through difficult times. Their resilience holds the continent together. The real weakness lies in systems that silence their potential.

Performative Equality

We now live in an era of performative equality. Women are placed on panels but excluded from decision-making. They are celebrated on International Women’s Day but forgotten the next day. Institutions speak loudly about inclusion but rarely build structures that make it real.

True equality means women are not simply present; they are powerful. It is not about visibility; it is about influence. Not about attendance, but about authority.

Equality Is Not Sympathy

Equality cannot be built on pity. When we treat women as people who need protection instead of respect, we reinforce the very stereotypes we claim to fight. Empowerment must come from partnership, not patronage.

Children, too, must not be used as symbols of suffering. Their faces should inspire investment in education, technology, and innovation, not pity donations.

How Ghana Can Shape a New Narrative

Ghana stands at a turning point. We can redefine empowerment by presenting women not as recipients of help, but as leaders of change.

1. Redefine Representation

Show women as innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, and decision-makers, not as victims.

2. Shift from Charity to Capacity

Support women-led enterprises and cooperatives. Build skills, not dependency.

3. Educate for Equality

Teach boys and girls that equality is about shared dignity, not competition.

4. Reform the Media Lens

Highlight excellence over suffering. Celebrate women like Esther Ocloo and today’s rising Ghanaian innovators.

5. Ensure Equal Accountability

Hold women and men to the same ethical and professional standards. Equality means fairness, not favouritism.

When women’s voices set the agenda, not just echo it, Ghana will no longer need to “promote” equality; it will practice it.

The Real Test of Equality

The question is not how many projects are done for women, but how many are done by women.

Not how much money is raised in their name, but how much power is placed in their hands.

Equality is not charity; it is justice. And justice begins when we stop using women and children as symbols of need, and start recognising them as rightful owners of their destiny.