Women empowerment not intended to make them impudent - Rev Father

Sokode-Gbogame (V/R), Feb. 10, GNA - A Catholic Priest last Monday said advocacy for women's empowerment was not intended to make them impudent.

Neither was it meant to reinforce gender disparity but develop women's assertiveness to enable them tax their innate capabilities to the full, Rev. Fr. Terence Adzimah, Assistant Development Coordinator of the Ho Diocese of the Catholic Church said.

He was delivering a paper on "Building Capacity of Women for Sustainable Poverty Reduction at a workshop at Sokode-Gbogame. The three-day workshop for 30 trainers was towards a three-year poverty education programme among rural women in the Ho Diocese. Rev. Fr. Adzimah said seminars and workshops to address women's issues should include men as participants to make them contribute to the solution of the problems of women.

He said governmental policies must go beyond the establishment of bodies such as the Ministry of Women and Children Affairs (MOWAC) "to affect the individual lives of women across the country". Rev. Fr. Adzimah regretted that some parents still held the notion that it was more prudent to invest in the education of boys than girls. He suggested that unemployed young women should be given some form of vocational training at half the cost and also that gender awareness programmes should be intensified in the rural areas.