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Gender Ministers and delegates across the globe, attending the 60th Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW60) at the UN Headquarters in New York, have hailed Ghana’s Gender Course of Action.

The delegates responded with thunderous applause after the presentation of the country’s Legal Instruments, Social Intervention Programmes and Action Plans by Nana Oye Lithur, the Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection.

Representatives of Member States, UN entities, and the United Nations Economic and Social Council’s (ECOSOC) and accredited non-governmental organisations from all regions of the world are attending CSW60 session.

Addressing a Gender Ministers Policy Dialogue Session, Nana Oye Lithur established the fact that Ghana, in line with the UN General Resolution passed in 1975, had established a National Women’s Machinery.

She said the Women’s Machinery now had Cabinet status in the form Minister of Gender, Children and Social Protection.

“So having the national women’s machinery is still the preferred best practice, Ghana believes it is solid, and in addition to having this machinery, we need to have a gender, legal and policy framework with constitutional provisions on gender equality,” she stated.

Nana Oye Lithur said in Ghana: “We have a national gender policy as a blueprint for implementation; we also have strategic framework and interventions to facilitate all inclusiveness, especially for vulnerable women”.

She said through the Gender Ministry, the Government had set up gender-based centres within markets for the hundreds of head porter girls who were very vulnerable.

“We also instituted gender statistics programme to strengthen capacity across all sectors to measure the extent to which government sectors are integrating gender concerns,” she said.

“Social Protection is the key strategy to empower women and scale up inclusiveness so we have introduced social protection,” she stated.

Nana Oye Lithur explained that having a “national registry, which was gender sensitive was very important like gender budgeting, which had existed for five years.

She said Ghana was sustaining capacity building across sectors including civil society, and remained committed to utilising international protocols to enhance national institutional arrangements for gender equality and for the empowerment of women. 

The Minister also outlined Government’s interventions through the enactment of laws such as the Children’s Act, Domestic Violence Act, Human Trafficking Act, the amendment of the criminal offences Act, and the criminalisation of Violence against Women and Girls.

She said customary servitude had been criminalised, whilst sentences for Female Genital Mutilation had been increased, and that these formed part of holistic social, and legal interventions adopted by the Ghanaian Government to ensure gender mainstreaming.

Nana Oye Lithur stated: “Ghana has also set up a Domestic Violence and Victim Support Unit under the Ghana Police Service with the establishment of offices located across the country for prompt interventions.

“The Judiciary and Government have also set up two specialist gender-based violence courts in the national capital of Accra, and at Kumasi in the middle-belt.

“We are also empowering girls and utilising data and research to target causes of gender-based violence, we are working on enhanced technical support and forensic capacity to improve investigations and prosecution, and the adoption of a policy framework to address gender-based violence in the healthcare sector,” she said. 

Nana Oye Lithur is the leader of the Ghanaian delegation made up of Members of Parliament, representatives from the Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Gender Technocrats.

The priority theme for CSW60 is “Women’s Empowerment and Its link to Sustainable Development”.

The CSW was established in June 1946 as a mechanism to promote, report on and monitor issues relating to the political, economic, civil, social and educational rights of women.

It holds annual sessions in March to evaluate progress made in protecting and enforcing the rights of women globally.

Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the UN under-Secretary-General and UN Women Executive Director, in her opening remarks described CSW60 as the first of the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

She said the Sustainable Development Goals included achieving Gender Equality and the empowerment of all women and girls as a centrepiece, with enabling targets threaded throughout all the other goals.

This would make gender systematically integrated into the implementation of the whole Agenda for Sustainable Development.

She said: “The CSW60 session marks the beginning of the countdown to 2030 to the future we want, in which no one is left behind. A future in which there is substantive gender equality”.

Dr Mlambo-Ngcuka said the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the SDGs was bold, ambitious and transformational.

“Now we gather to seek implementation modalities that match this bold agenda, where there can be no “business as usual”.

As we acknowledge the progress made, especially in the last 20 years, we also note that for many women and girls at risk that change is not happening fast enough.”