Women in Upper East enlist girls for mentoring

Madam Agnes Atayila, President of Past and Present Assembly women Association (PPAWA) in Bolgatanga has appealed to women to engage in discussions and activities that would foster the unity and progress of women.

She noted that women needed to concentrate on issues that would strengthen their capacities and create opportunities for them to excel in any duty they found themselves.

Madam Atayila, who is also the Regional Chairperson of the People’s National Convention (PNC) and a former Presiding Member of the Bolgatanga Municipal Assembly, was speaking to women and school children in Bolgatanga to mentor and motivate them to aim high and work themselves into areas that were traditionally male dominated.

The programme was organized by the Department of Women (DoW) as part of activities to mark International Women’s Day in Bolgatanga. It brought together women achievers and departmental heads to talk to girls and women to prepare them for the future.

She said poverty and ignorance could only be eradicated if women were well informed and advised them to ignore the insults that they received because they excelled in some male dominated fields. “The insults are ploys to keep women out of politics, businesses and to assign them to poverty and unnecessary submission to outmoded cultural beliefs,”, she noted.

She said it was time Ghanaians celebrated the achievements women made to the socio economic and political development of the country because such feats did not come on a silver platter but as a result of hard work and perseverance.

Madam Ayishetu Jesewunde, a 60 year old trustee of the Upper East Regional Branch of Federation of Muslim Women Association of Ghana, (FOMWAG) called on Muslim women to use their resources, though scare, to ensure that their children, especially daughters, go to school.

She said women had the tendency of using the little resource they had to buy bowls and flashy things to decorate their rooms at the detriment of their children’s welfare.

She said FOMWAG, through its educational programmes, encourages their members, especially those living in the Zongos, to disabuse people’s minds that such areas were only for illiterates.

She advised children to take their studies serious.

Other mentors who interacted with the young girls are Mrs Agnes Asangalisa Chigabatia, a former Deputy Regional Minister of Upper East, and Former Member of Parliament, Mrs Zenabu Wasai- King, Regional Director, Environmental Protection Agency, Mrs Fati Bobtoya, a Public Nurse, Miss

Joycelyn Adii of DoW and Madam Melenie Kasise, a retired educationist.