The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Ghana has carried out an awareness campaign at Chorkor, a fishing community in Accra to support Ghana’s effort to end all forms of gender-violence (GBV).
The campaign targeted the fishing community to reflect this year’s 16-day activism, which is aimed at reaching out to urban poor areas to educate and empower them to take part in actions to end gender-based violence.
Ms Jennifer Asuako, a Gender Analyst with the UNDP-Ghana, said it was necessary, to double up efforts in a collaborative manner to take actions to ensure that “gender-based violence becomes a thing of the past.”
Referring to available data, she said at least one in every three women faced violence in their lifetime, therefore, the need for all stakeholders to support every effort to prevent and eliminate all forms of violence, especially, against women and girls.
It is against this background that she said: “We (UNDP-Ghana) seize this opportunity for the 16 days of activism at UNDP to create awareness in the urban poor areas that are usually neglected in these activities.”
Mr Yaw Odame Gyau, a Senior Lecturer at the Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ), who led a delegation of student volunteers to take part in the activism, said the move was to promote the achievement of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
He said the partnership with the UNDP for the campaign was to synthesise people about the need for them to change their attitude and behaviour towards gender violence.
He said the exercise was to afford the students the opportunity to impact lives, by implementing research and other academic works, learning from a similar academic exercise on gender-based violence as part of their project work.
“The key thing is that we want to take our works off the shelves as academics and then bring it into the community and test the effectiveness of it, which we did,” Mr Gyau said.
Volunteers for the outreach, including representatives from UNDP and tertiary students, engaged members of the community and educated them on the need and what to do to support the fight against GBV.
They also used placards and stickers with inscriptions such as “As a man, do not perpetrate violence against your sister/brothers/ wife/child,” and “Unite to end violence against women and children,” to compliment the activism.
Some of the residents who shared their experiences with GNA commended the UNDP for the initiative,noting that they have been empowered to contribute to help reduce the incidence of violence against all persons.
Nii Ofoi, who benefited from the sensitisation, said: “This engagement is going to help us all in the community because a lot of children face maltreatment in their homes and this is going to help reduce it.”
