EMBRACE WOMEN EMPOWERMENT PROGRAMMES (PAGE 11, MAY 25, 2010)

THE Sungtaa Nyog women’s group, a civil society organisation in the Lawra District of the Upper West Region has celebrated its 10th anniversary with an advice to women to fully embrace women empowerment programmes as a step in fighting poverty.
The Secretary to the Sungtaa Nyog women’s group, Madam Rebecca Karbo, stated this when she addressed a durbar to climax the anniversary celebration of the group at Lawra.
The durbar, which attracted about 300 women among other dignitaries, was on the theme: “Empower women to reduce poverty”.
The group is a body of various women’s groups within the Lawra Traditional Area, who came together in the year 2000, to seek their interest and welfare. They included farmers, petty traders and ‘pito’ brewers.
Madam Karbo stressed the need to speed up renovation works on the Lawra Market to attract more women and also to improve upon the revenue collection capacity of the district assembly.
She also appealed to the assembly to improve water facilities in the district so that more people would have access to clean water.
On education, Madam Karbo appealed to the government to extend the school feeding programme to cover all schools in the district.
The Member of Parliament (MP) for Lawra Nandom, Mr Ambrose Dery, who was the guest of honour, said empowering women was necessary to empower the community since women formed majority of the society.
He said women were good managers of families and it was important to empower them to enhance the development of their communities.
Mr Dery, therefore, commended women under the Lawra paramountcy for coming together as a unit and said “In that way, you would become viable and we can also support you”.
The MP supported the group with an amount of GH¢12,500 for them to use as seed money to support their microfinance revolving fund, and pledged his continued assistance to the group so far as they worked towards a good cause.
He advised that “members of the group particularly the leadership must be accountable to the members and learn basic book keeping skills”.