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Mr Abdul-Rauf Alhassan, the Jirapa Municipal Director of the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), has appealed to Parliament to expedite action on passing the Affirmative Action Bill into law.

He said passing the bill into law was a sure way of achieving increased women participation in decision making since it would become obligatory for the government to give equal opportunity for men and women to be able to participate effectively in decision making at all levels in the country.

Mr Alhassan was speaking during a capacity building workshop for the Equal Rights and Opportunities for Women and Girls Project (EROP) Support Team at Nadowli in the Nadowli-Kaleo District of the Upper West Region.

EROP is being implemented by GH Alliance, the African Centre for Human Rights and Sustainable Development (AfCHuRSD) and WOMEN IN NEED (WIN) with funding from the Dutch Embassy in Ghana.

The Jirapa Municipal Director of CHRAJ noted that ensuring equal opportunity for men and women in decision making would speed up development, adding that women have a lot of skills and potentials that could be tapped for nation-building and should therefore not be relegated to the bottom.

Madam Bernice Naah, the Executive Director of AfCHuRSD, said she was happy that the Speaker of Parliament, Mr Alban Bagbin, himself acknowledged that the Bill had been on the drawing board for far too long and that there was the need to do something about it.

She said per this, the Speaker recognised that women have a critical role to play in building the country, hence the need to pass the Bill into Law to give them equal opportunity to play their part.

She highlighted the need to build women capacity to better prepare them to avail themselves for leadership roles when the Bill was passed into law, hence the essence of the training being held for the EROP Support Team.