Eastern Region girls’ enrollment programme launched
Ms Helen Adwoa Ntoso, Eastern Regional Minister, noted that though Ghana has achieved gender parity in primary education, girls’ enrolment in Technical Vocational Education Training (TVET) was relatively low.
She said this accounted for 15 per cent of the local enrolment, according to the Ghana Living Standard Survey.
Ms Ntoso made the observation at the launch of a campaign to promote girls enrolment into non-traditional professional trades, in the region, in Koforidua on Wednesday.
It aims at promoting ‘gender equitable socio-economic development’ through institutional capacity building, improvement on women’s employment and entrepreneurship, and focuses on sustainable poverty alleviation among women in Ghana.
The programme also focuses on institutional capacity building to enhance gender mainstreaming into national planning, monitoring and evaluation and improvement in women’s employment, to enhance their access to financial business development services.
Ms Ntoso said: “It is in view of this that the government through the Ghana Education Service under the educational reforms, revised the curriculum in such a way that provision was made for boys and girls to study technical and vocational subjects at the various levels, beginning from the Junior High School”.
She said socio-cultural barriers were negatively affecting girls and women in technical and vocational education training in Ghana.
Ms Ntoso said societal norms perceive male and females differently and have different expectations for both children and adults.
“These perceptions and expectations are deeply rooted in our socio-cultural practices and therefore affected women more than men”.
She noted though that there are a wide variety of technical and vocational courses, which students of both sexes are free to undertake, girls normally fit for those courses traditionally regarded as being female domain.
Ms Ntoso said government was committed to achieving gender equitable development through gender mainstreaming and women empowerment.
She said that the government and the African Development Bank launched a four –year Gender Responsive Skills and Community Development project.
Ms Ntoso said 59 Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies in Ghana were benefiting from the project out of which seven are in the Eastern Region.
“I am happy to announce that the region has under the project, benefited from the provision of 15 computers to Community Development Vocational Technical Institutes, provision of a motor bike to the Regional Directorate of the Department of Community Development for monitoring.
“The region has also benefited from the training of instructors of the Kpong, Kyebi, and Suhum Community Development Vocational Technical Institutes as well as the award of scholarship to 59 girls from extreme poor households in the beneficiary districts”.
Ms Jane Kwapong, Eastern Regional Director of the Department of Women, said the campaign sought to promote non-professional trades.
Source: GNA