Gender and Social Development
Gender equality is inherently connected to sustainable development and is central to realising human rights and inclusive growth. A key aspect of promoting gender equality is the empowerment of women, through focus on identifying and addressing power imbalances and giving women more autonomy to manage their lives.
Context
There has been remarkable progress towards women’s rights across the globe and this has empowered women to function more prominently in the public sphere in many parts of the world including Ghana. However, there are still strategic issues to be addressed. As of February, 2021, women held only 14.6% of seats in parliament, at the local level there are only 37 females out of 261 MMDCEs, only 4% of elected Assembly members at the last District level elections were women and 20% central government appointees MMDAs were women. Also, women and girls age 10 and above spend 14:4% of their time on unpaid care and domestic jobs in relation to 3.5% spent by men. Also, while women of reproductive age (15-49 years) frequently face barriers regarding their sexual and reproductive health and rights, adolescent birth rate have increase to 78 per 1,000 women age between 15-19 from 75-1 per 1000 in 2016 and in 2018, 10.2% of women between the ages of 15-49 reported that they had been physically or sexually abused by a former or a current intimate partner. In addition, women face significant poverty, physical and sexual harassment, and issues with women’s access to assets (including land), yet as of December, 2020, only 40% of indicators needed to screen the SDGs with a gender lens were obtainable (UN Women, 2021). There is therefore the need to close these data gaps in order to achieve SDG commitment in Ghana.
Thus, the Institute of Local Government Studies (ILGS) Gender Centre of Excellence exists to promote gender equitable socio-economic development and to strengthen the human resource capacities of key staff of the decentralised structures to enable them mainstream gender into planning, budgeting, monitoring and evaluation processes.
Proposed Vision and Mission of Centre
Mission
To engage institutions and social agents in positioning ILGS as an innovator in addressing gender inequality and power imbalances in governance and industry.
Vision
To support teaching, research and outreach towards creating platforms for equal access to resources and power for socio- economic development as well as ending violence and sexual assault against women, children and the vulnerable.