The African Union (AU) held the 38th Ordinary Session of its Executive Council at the beginning of February 2021. One of the agenda items was to elect six new members of the AU Commission. The Commission is the AU’s secretariat, which carries out its day-to-day operations. These are the first commissioner elections since the Union’s reform process began...

Since 189 United Nations member states adopted the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action at the Fourth World Women’s Conference in 1995, the language of ‘gender mainstreaming’ has been adopted by many countries for shaping their public policy and programme priorities. In India, gender budgeting was enforced in 2004 with the recommendations of the Ashok Lahiri Committee,...

When discussing the careers of women leaders, there’s a phenomenon referred to as the “glass cliff.” It’s an obvious relative to the term glass ceiling, which describes the invisible barrier to advancement that women often face when they are up for promotion to the highest levels of an organization. The “glass cliff” describes the idea that...

The Global Media Foundation (GLOMEF), human rights and anti-corruption advocacy media organization has ended this year’s 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence Campaign with a call on traditional leaders to desist from interfering with the law and shielding persons who sexually abuse young girls in society. Addressing a Summit dubbed “School Girls Summit” with...

As media coverage of Covid-19 continues 24/7, it routinely ignores an important dimension of the crisis: its impact on women. Writers — journalists, as well as opinion and commentary writers — have largely excluded women’s perspectives, their critical expertise, and the mounting evidence about how the pandemic is affecting women from Covid-19-related articles. Women scientists called out gender bias in media...

Every day, 137 women around the world are killed by a family member. 52 of those killings take place in Africa alone. Ousmane Diagana, Vice President of the World Bank for Western and Central Africa, reflects on Gender Based Violence and how we can protect and empower girls and women in West and Central Africa....

Back in 2011 I remember first sharing in my Forbes column my belief that we needed to get to 50 Fortune 500 women CEOs, which incidentally is still only a non-representative 10%. For years we did not get much past 6% … until 2020; we are now seeing progress and pushing north of 8%. While...

There cannot be any excuse for the low representation of women in the Parliament of Ghana. Currently, women occupy 37 out of the 275 seats in Parliament. This represents only 13.5% of members in parliament. This is far below the world’s average of 23% It also falls short of the UN recommendation of at least...

The Gender Centre for Empowering Development (GenCED) on Tuesday December 1, 2020 launched a research report on “Violence Against Women Within Political Parties”. The research, which covered the operations, structures, and processes of the major political parties in Ghana (NDC, NPP, CPP, PNC, PPP) made some revelations about issues that hamper women’s full political processes...

Forty adolescent girls in Kpone have received facilitators’ training on the eradication of gender based violence in the country. The beneficiaries were drawn from Kpone Methodist Basic A, Kpone Methodist Basic B, Kpone Presby Basic A and Kpone Presby Basic B schools. The training organized by a non-government organization, Women, Media and Change (WOMEC), formed...