Adwoa Sakyi— Mobilising women for development

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Adwoa Sakyi (W&C)

Women here and there
Adwoa Sakyi— Mobilising women for development
Story: Doreen Allotey

AS a Gender Officer of the General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU) from 1989 to date, Ms Adwoa Sakyi has been involved in mobilising wage earners as well as self-employed women to plan and implement programmes of activities for their own development.
These programmes involve raising of awareness about the problems facing women in agriculture and within the communities in which they are working, educating women on the need to be educated, and the need for them to get involved in the governance and decision-making process of the country.
GAWU is one of the 17 national unions affiliated to the Ghana Trades Union Congress.
Human rights is also of great concern to Ms Sakyi. She plays an active role in implementing the union’s comprehensive project on violence against women, with support from a non-governmental organisation called the Gender Studies and Human Rights Documentation Centre.
Ms Sakyi has been carrying out programmes that have taken her to communities all over Ghana. She organises forums to educate men and women on such different laws as the Intestate Succession Law, Children’s Act, Marriage Laws and the Wills Act.
She has also found out, in the course of duty, that women often cultivate food crops and not cash crops, and seen this situation as a major setback in improving the finances of women.
The sad part of this situation, she said, was not because women farmers were incapable of farming cash crops, but simply because of their inaccessibility to land and a good capital base.
“The farm lands are mostly owned by men and marriage has several implications for access to land,” she said.
To help address this situation, Ms Sakyi has been collating the concerns of women on this issue and passing them to the new land administration programme of the government.
She has also realised that the low level of education of women prevents them from coming forward boldly to express themselves and even share their brilliant ideas and experiences with others.
“They even find it difficult to access poverty reduction programmes in the form of loans,” she added.
Ms Sakyi is proud that through the efforts of GAWU, Manchie, a farming community of about 700 people near Nsawam, now has a junior high school. The school, she said, started as a bamboo structure, erected by members of the union to provide shelter for a day care centre for the community so as to attract the attention of the Ghana Education Service to provide it with teachers.
“When all the structures were in place, children who were as old as 14 got ready to enrol in the day care to start formal education,” Ms Sakyi said.
Ms Sakyi has also been championing the elimination of child labour in the agricultural sector. She explains that she does this through raising awareness about the effects of the practice by getting farmers themselves to raise the health issues involved with the practice. She says, however, that the reason for the use of children as labourers was the lack of finance and of modern agricultural equipment to facilitate work on the farms.
Ms Sakyi was part of the panel that drafted the Women’s Manifesto, and is currently the president of the agricultural sector within the International Trade Union of Food, Agriculture and Allied Workers.
As a trade unionist, Ms Sakyi intends to contest for the seat of deputy general- secretary of GAWU in it elections scheduled for January next year.
She is not satisfied that the union, which has been in existence since 1959, has had only men at the helm of affairs to date. She, therefore, intends to make a difference.