ghananlpcommunity/ghana-gov-speeches-sentences huggingface dataset:
Men who exhibit similar traits are called strong leaders.
This phenomenon unconsciously put a lot of younger women off from aspiring to senior leadership roles.
A lot needs to be done to change th is narrative.
Workplaces must intentionally review their policies and processes for hiring and performance management to ensure that well-deserving women get a fair chance to get into top leadership positions.
Shareholders must consciously ensure gender equity in Board and Top management composition, for organisations to reap the benefits that women leaders bring to the table.
Programmes to identify high-potential women that can be groomed and trained to join the leadership track in every organisation must be encouraged.
Women still bear a disproportionate burden at home managing their homes, caring for children and aged relatives.
Lack of reliable and affordable childcare and domestic care-giving help work against women’s progression up the corporate ladder.
As a nation, how can we better develop the domestic help and caregiving industry as a professional sector of our economy that supports working mothers and women professionals in general?
Women also have a role to play in all of this.
Afterall, no one can help us if we will not help ourselves.
We need to be clear about what we dream and aspire to be and have a plan to develop ourselves not only in terms of academic qualifications but also in personal leadership development.
Wome n need to build up their own confidence, refuse to listen to the voices from within and without that tell us we are not good enough or are too something.
We need to seek opportunities to be mentored, coached, and sponsored within their organisations and beyond as they prepare for leadership.
Given demands on a woman’s time , i t is important to prioritise and make time for what is necessary for personal and professional development.
In the digital era we live in, women have even more opportunities to better prepare for leadership and to thrive in leadership.
The greatest advantage that mobile and digital technologies offer women is the potential to sidestep some of the traditional, cultural and mobility barriers particularly, in emerging and developing countries like ours.
The digital revolution characterized by artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing and mobile robotics have the tendency to improve female participation in economic life and enhance the economic and social independence of women.
Technology used properly, can help women acquire c ritical skills through on -line learning and mentoring programmes anywhere and at any time.
Women can also leverage technology to take care of their many needs and responsibilities, such as 6 managing the household budget, making purchases online, with more d igital payment options, using digital financial services and cutting down on time spent at bank branches, and using telemedicine facilities where they are available, among others.
Technology can help organisations provide flexible work arrangements that enable more women to take up certain roles and excel at them.
Workplace cultures must also evolve to evaluate performance based on output and value -addition, instead of mere physical presence in the office.
The pandemic has taught us that future - ready organisations that had made the necessary investments in technology were able to produce even more during the pandemic with staff working from home and taking care simultaneously of children who wer e home schooling and other domestic responsibilities.
This of course requires many organisations to remodel their work processes and automate them to get the most out of flexible work arrangements.
For the graduating cohort s of the Female Future Programme, you have been blessed with opportunities many of your peers do not have, and I do hope that your employers are already seeing the benefits of this programme not only for you for your organisations.
Now it is up to you to build on the knowledge an d skills you have acquired and to make it count.
A comprehensive stakeholder approach is required to address all the structural and cultural barriers that keep women lagging behind in rising to the top in the digital economy.
This is necessary to unleash our economy’s full potential and to make it more resilient.
For our part , Bank of Ghana takes pride with internal policies that prohibit discrimination in whatever form.
Our female officials are a strong community that is motivated to grow professionally to take up leadership roles.
Indeed, about a third of all our senior management roles are occupied by women.
Our promotion and compensation policies are non -discriminatory and our policies during t he pandemic supported particularly our female staff who worked under flexible arrangements to handle childcare and other responsibilities.
We provide female staff members, opportunities to acquire critical leadership and senior management training including the Female Future programme.
Our Bank of Ghana Ladies Association provides strong support for our female staff members and advocates for policies that promote a conducive work environment for women.
Many other organisations are doing these and more, and this gives me hope.
We must however all commit to do more.
In addition, as a regulator, Bank of Ghana enjoins all banks to abide by Ghana’s Sustainable Banking Principles which include 7 the need to promote gender equality in Board, management, and other roles, and to promote gender inclusive access to banking products and services.
I look forward to a day soon when in Ghana we won’t have to count how many women have been CEOs, Board chairs, Parliamentarians, Presidents, and the like.
A Ghana where every girl knows there are equal opportunities not only to start and advance in school, but also to dream big and achieve their dreams unconstrained through smart work and tenacity.
I wish us all fruitful deliberations today that lead to tangible progress in breaking the biases and other barriers that hinder women’s full participation in leadership in the digital economy.
I applaud again the efforts of the GEA and I congratulate the graduating cohort s of the Female Future programme.
I trust that many more women will benefit from this programme and the alumni will serve as great ambassador s and inspire and impact many other women to achieve more.
1 UN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT FUND (UNCDF) International Women’s Day Dialogue On the Theme: “Women as Builders of Digital Economies in Ghana – A Call to Action to Close the Gender Gap in Access to and Usage of Digital Financial Services in Ghana” Keynote Address By Elsie Addo Awadzi Second Deputy Governor, Bank of Ghana At Labadi Beach Hotel, Accra 8th March 2022 2 Hon.
Lariba Zuweira Abudu, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Gender, Children, and Social Protection Mr.
Charles Abani, UN Resident Coordinator, Ghana Mr.
Enea Stocco, Country Lead Ghana, UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) Ms.
Nandini Harihareswara, Senior Advisor, UNCDF Ms.
Arianna Gasparri, Technical Specialist, UNCDF Other officials of UNCDF, other UN Agencies, and partner organisations Officials of Bank of Ghana Invited Guests, Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, Happy International Women’s Day!
I am delighted to be here today for such an important dialogue.
About the same time a year ago, Governor Ernest Addison participated in the launch of the 2021 International Women’s Day global advocacy campaign for “Reaching Financial Equality for Women” promoted by UNCDF, the Better Than Cash Alliance, UN Women, the World Bank, and others.
The campaign included a 10-point action plan for governments and businesses to rebuild stronger after COVID -19 by prioritizing women’s digital financial inclusion.
Bank of Ghana acknowledges the efforts that UN agencies such as UNCDF have made over the years and continue to make , to promote gender equality and women’s socio -economic empowerment in Ghana, towards building a strong and more resilient economy.
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen, over two decades ago, the world recognized gender equality (Millennium Development Goal 3) as integral for socio-economic development.
Since then, some progress has been made in relevant indicators, however, the truth is that there has not been much progress in the last 15 years.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020 which benchmarks 153 countries on their progress towards gender parity in four dimensions: Economic Participation and Opportunity; Educational Attainment; Health and Survival ; and Political Empowerment , globally, the average (population-weighted) distance completed to parity is at 68.6%, an improvement from its last edition.
Progress has been more advanced towards closing the Educational Attainment and Health and Survival gaps – 96.1% and 95.7% respectively to date, both marginally improved since the previous year.
The number of women in senior roles within the Economic Participation and Opportunity dimension has also increased marginally, in that, globally, 36% of senior private sector 3 managers and public sector officials are women (about 2% higher than the figure reported the previous year).
Despite the progress, the same report notes that there is still a 31.4% average gender gap across all four indicators that remains to be closed globally.
On average, the largest gender disparity remains the Political Empowerment gap.
Despite it being the most improved dimension, only 24.7% of the global Political Empowerment gap was closed in 2020 .
The second-largest gap is observed in the Economic Participation and Opportunity indicator, with 57.8% of this gap closed so far, which represents a slight step backwards since the year before.
Further details on the Economic Participation and Opportunity indicator are sobering.
For example, women’s participation in the labour market is stalling and financial disparities are slightly larger on average.
Only 55% of adult women are in the labour market, versus 78% of men, while over 40% of the wage gap (the ratio of the wage of a woman to that of a man in a similar position) and over 50% of the income gap (the ratio of the total wage and non -wage income of women to that of men) are still to be bridged.
Further, in many countries, women are significantly disadvantaged in accessing credit, land or financial products, which prevents opportunities for them to start a company or make a living by managing assets.
Projecting current trends into the future, the WEF 2020 report suggests that the overall global gender gap will close in 99.5 years, on average, and it turns out that lack of progress in closing the Economic Participation and Opportunity gap prolongs the time needed to close the overall global gender gap to some 257 years.
There is more disturbing news.
On top of the gender disparities observed in key indicators, or perhaps precisely because of the se disparities against women, women also tend to be at the receiving end of a disproportionate amount of the burdens brought about by socio -economic shocks such as those caused by pandemics, wars, conflicts, and climate change, all of which the world has faced recently and continues to face with intensity.
The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, led to a contraction of the global economy by 3.2% in 2020, according to the IMF‘s 2021World Economic Outlook, with the equivalent of 255 million full-time jobs lost, businesses especially those in the informal sector eliminated, with more than 100 million people pushed into extreme poverty – the first increase in over 20 years , according to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals Report 2021.
The economic burden women bore in addition to the burden of childcare during school closures, and caring for sick relatives have taken a toll on many already disadvantaged women.
While policy makers around the world pushed trillions of US dollars into the global economy to help all eviate the untold socio -economic hardships caused by the pandemic, very few of these interventions took into account the pre -existing gender disparities that had worsened as a result of the 4 pandemic.
In many cases, therefore, many women are worse off now than they were before the onset of the pandemic.
Building a more gender equal world has , therefore, never been as urgent as it is now, for us to build now (and not in 257 years as suggested by the WEF in 2020), a more sustainable and resilient world that will stand the test of time.
With the multiple complex challenges the world faces, we are at this moment standing at the crossroads where we either do nothing intentional to eliminate the gender gap and thereby see the already fallout amplified for households, communities, nations and the global economy, or we take the bull by the horns now to do what it takes to make significant progress towards gender equality and achieve more positive outcomes for the whole world.
The good news is that the story is not all grim.
There are, in my view, more opportunities today than ever before to strive towards more gender equality.
Technology and digitization hold great promise especially for the developing world to leapfrog economic, political, and social advancement of women by leveling the playing field in a cost-effective way and help to achieve in particular, SDG5 on “Gender equality and women's empowerment”.
The digital economy provides immense opportunities for women to advance themselves through online education and skills acquisition, telemedicine, increased trading in goods and services with more digital payment options, telework where it is available, digital savings, credit, insurance, investment and pensions opportunities, all leveraging widely available technology.
The World Economic Forum’s 2018 report on “Our Shared Digital Future: Building an Inclusive Trustworthy and Sustainable Digital Society” highlights the benefits of the digital economy to promote economic and financial inclusion and supports the view that the digital revolution, known commonly as “the Fourth Industrial Revolution”, has the power to reduce inequalities across the world, although doing so depends on empowering everyone – regardless of geography, income, age or gender – and it requires concerted action and greater collaboration across all players.
According to the GSMA’s State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2020 report, mobile connectivity continues to accelerate digital inclusion and drive increased connectivity with almost half the world’s population now using mobile internet.
By the end of 2019, there were 3.8 billion people using mobile internet (an increase of 250 million users since the end of 2018), with three quarters of all mobile internet users living in low- and middle-income countries.
In particular, it is widely acknowledged that digital financial services (DFS) have the potential to make a significant difference in bridging the gender gap in access to finance which has remained at nine percent in the developing world since 2011.
DFS can help bridge the gap in account ownership, increase women’s participation in the financial system and give them the opportunity to save formally or access credit.
It can also help their business by lowering costs and giving access to a diversity of financial services.
McKinsey estimates that DFS could turn 1.6 billion of the 2 billion unbanked people into formal financial services customers by 2025, thus adding US$3.7 trillion to the GDP of emerging economies.
Indeed, the World Bank’s Global Findex data base, for the first 5 time in 2017, reported the significant opportunities for leveraging digital technologies to increase access to and use of digital financial services by the unbanked , particularly women.
This is supported by the UNCDF’s 2021 call to acti on to “Reaching Financial Equality for Women” by prioritizing women’s digital financial inclusion.
The reality however is that while the digit al economy helps to overcome some of the barriers women face (lack of access to physical bank branches, mobility constraints, and privacy concerns among others ) that prevent them from accessing formal financial services and from full participation in the traditional economy, some barriers remain even in the digital economy.
In addition to those, there are also other barriers that are peculiar to the digital economy.
This creates the so-called “digital gender divide” that inhibits women’s full uptake of DFS.
A lack of literacy and digital skills, a general lack of trust in DFS, and a lack of affordability are key barriers to mobile internet adoption and barriers to the effective use of DFS .
The GSMA’s 2021 Mobile Gender Gap Report suggests that women are 15 percent less likely to own a smartphone than men, down from 20 percent in 2019, with 234 million fewer women than men accessing the mobile internet.
The gap differs between regions and appears most pronounced in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, women are 14% less likely to own a basic mobile phone and 34% less likely to own a smart phone that can connect to mobile Internet , and in Ghana, women are 16 percent less likely than men to have a mobile phone that connects to the internet.
Even when access is granted, the digital gender divide persists in usage .
Among smartphone owners, women are 18% less likely to use mobile Internet.
Female mobile users also feel less able than male users to learn a new activity on a phone by themselves.
These factors translate into lower usage of DFS where they exist.
Beyond the social cost, excluding women from the digital economy can take a significant economic toll on low and lower -middle income countries.
According to Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), over the last decade, these countries have lost a total of US$1 trillion in gross domestic product (GDP) to the gender gap in internet use.
Based on current tax -to-GDP ratios in these countries, this loss represents an estimated US$24.7 billion in lost tax revenue in 2020 and unless the gap significantly narrows, these countries will likely continue to lose billions more of economic activity (USD) each year if women continue to be excluded from the digital world.
Women have been the backbone of Ghana’s economy and have from time immemorial contributed significantly to our socio-economic growth and development.
According to the World Bank, 44 percent of micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Ghana are female -owned, and this sector accounts for about 92 percent of all businesses and contributes about 70 percent of Ghana’s GDP.
Ghana’s private sector is d ominated by women entrepreneurs, second only to Uganda, according to the 2019 MasterCard Index of Women Entrepreneurs.
Our women farmers, food processers and vendors, market women, textile manufacturers , fashion designers, and dress makers, hair and beauty stylists, creatives, artists, jewelry makers, contractors, and professionals in 6 every field of endeavour , and many others have been some of the most unsung heroes of our history.
Against all odds, they continue to soldier on and support their families, communities and our economy.
In our fast-growing and fast-evolving digital economy, however, we run the real risk of excluding many of these hard -working women and their valuable contributions to our socio -economic development.
Opportunities exist for women to harness the benefits of technology and new markets across Africa under the AfCFTA and beyond Africa, thanks to technology and e-commerce platforms among others.
These market opportunities offer hope to women to start, sustain, and scale up their businesses and compete around the world.
To enhance more participation of women in Ghana in the digital economy, however, there is the urgent need to address supply-side and demand-side barriers by adopting gender -focused interventions to respond swiftly to the opportunities presented by the digital economy.
Let me pause here to introduce you to the stories of two remarkable young women I know personally that give me hope.
Meet Abiba, a 21-year-old young lady from Bawku who was born and bred in Kumasi.
Raised by a single mother who after losing her husband early on, raised and tried to educate all five of her children with the help of her small kenkey -making and supply business.
Abiba, the last of her mother’s five children is the first to have completed Senior High School.
With fewer credits than could get her into university, she decides to find work t o make ends meet.
After traveling to Accra to find a job as a house help, she ended up taking a six-week coding course for girls, organized by Soronko Academy and sponsored by Rotary International.
She acquired critical digital skills such as basic comput er literacy, word processing, setting up an email account and sending and receiving emails, website development, social media use, and above all mentoring and coaching from seasoned women in corporate Ghana.
Abiba was transformed into a digitally literate young lady, with some exposure to different career options and business opportunities.
Abiba went back to K umasi a few months later and taught h er mother basic digital literacy skills that enables her to use mobile money for her kenkey business.
She also taught her older sister Fatima, who is a fashion designer , how to use social media to market her designs and clothes globally and how to use mobile money to receive payments.
Abiba herself , who continues to work as a house help, has dreams of furthering her digital education and become a website developer one day.
Then meet Asantewaa, who before the COVID -19 pandemic was employed by a hotel as a front office cashier.
When the hotel closed its doors to guests at the height of the pandemic, she was suddenly out of the job market with no savings to fall back on for herself and her 3-year-old son.
After a few months of untold hardship, Asantewaa decided to try her hands at bead making, an old art she had been introduced to as a child by her grandmother, but which she had never been interested in pursuing.
After a few trials using money she borrowed from a friend to buy beads and other materials, she ventured out to show a handful of pieces on Instagram.
The response was 7 encouraging, and the rest is history.
She has since sold hundreds of unique pieces online with customers from far and near.
While Abiba and Asantewaa’s success stories are encouraging, there are many for whom the digital economy remains a luxury.
They either do not know the benefits it holds or do not know how to leverage it.
How can we create more opportunities for the many Abibas and Asantewaas out there to live their best lives and contribute fully to nation-building?
For Abiba it was Soronko Academy and Rotary International and a domestic emp loyer who gave her a chance to break through the digital divide.
Soon she had paid it forward by transferring critical digital literacy skills to her mother and older sister.
For Asantewaa, it took the pandemic to help her find her creative self, and with the help of a friend accessed a soft loan to start a small business which is now a thriving online business, thanks to her ability to access and use technology.
I dream, think, and work every day towards a day right here in Ghana where every waakye or kenkey seller, every market woman, every hairdresser and dressmaker, every caterer, every events planner, and every woman and girl will seize the opportunities that are already available to reinvent themselves and their businesses and to create l asting value for our economy using the power of technology and in particular digital financial services such as mobile money, the GH-QR Code, and other innovations that continue to evolve.
A lot has been done already in Ghana to make that possible.
The Government’s policy measures under the National Financial Inclusion and Development Strategy, the Digital Financial Services Policy, and the Cashlite Agenda, support financial inclusion broadly, and of gender inclusive finance in particular, including through digitalization of women-focused Village Savings Groups.
On its part, Bank of Ghana continues to introduce measures within its statutory mandate to promote financial inclusion including through an enabling environment that promotes the availability of and access to and use of DFS for all economic actors.