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Allow women to own farmlands in the north – ActionAid
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The Upper West Regional Programmes Manager of ActionAid, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) in the country, Ms Terence Tienaah has appealed to chiefs and land owners in the region to allow women own lands for sustainable agriculture.
She said that women’s lack of control and ownership over land was impeding their efforts in attaining substantive productivity in agriculture.
“Elsewhere in this country where women have been allowed to own lands, we are seeing the impact they are making in agriculture, women can do well when they are empowered in this regard”, she said.
Ms Tienaah was speaking on the sidelines of a Stakeholders Consultative Meeting on the implementation of a climate smart project by the NGO christened “Northern Ghana Integrated Development Project (NGIDP).
The 48 months’ project which commenced in 2019 in 15 districts in the Upper West, Upper East, Savannah and Northern regions of Ghana sought to among other things, promote opportunities for sustainable agriculture, social protection and decent work in the agrarian sector.
Ms Tienaah said that there had been a lot of improvement with regard to access to land by women in northern Ghana due to increased advocacy but stated sadly that “the lands which were given to them were not permanent”.
“A woman is given a land and in the next farming season or two when the land has become fertile, the land is taken away from her and she is given another fallow one; if this continues the woman is unable to undertake production of cash crops because those ones take time to mature but they are the ones that bring in the much needed income”, she stressed.
She said ecological farming which was sustainable and favourable in addressing climate change was low among smallholder women farmers in the region due to ownership of land.
“So we see a lot of women in agriculture but most of them are working on their husbands’ farms, only a few of them can boast of lands that belong to them and are able to practise ecological farming and we need this narrative to change”, she said.
The Programmes Manager said they were working as an organisation in collaboration with local actors such as the Department of Agriculture of the various Dstrict and Nunicipal Assemblies as well as civil society organisations to reach out to as many smallholder women farmers as possible to support them in their vocation.
“We are not only looking at cultivation; we are also supporting women along the agriculture value chain by installing equipment for women who were into processing of Shea fruits to aid their work”, she said.
She used the opportunity to call on beneficiary communities of the intervention in the Upper West Region to maintain the pieces of equipment to ensure their longevity and serve the purpose for which they were provided.
From Lydia Darlington Fordjour, Wa
The New Patriotic Party (NPP) has urged the government to place all 54,985 candidates affected by the 2026 Basic Education Certificate Examination (BECE) placement exercise in schools and publish the final outcome.
The party says the government must ensure that the affected candidates secure actual school places rather than merely being allowed to access the self-placement portal.
In a statement signed by the Chairman of the NPP Policy Co-ordination Committee, Kojo Oppong Nkrumah, the party expressed concern about the situation facing the candidates.
The NPP said the government had announced that 53,887 of the affected candidates could use the self-placement system after initially being told that they had not qualified for secondary school.
It, however, argued that access to the portal did not guarantee that candidates would secure their preferred schools or programmes.
“Ghanaian parents and candidates will judge the resolution of the challenge by one thing only: how many of the original 54,985 are sitting in a classroom, not how many were allowed to open a website,” the statement noted.
The party said the government’s own figures showed that the country had 859,828 declared vacancies for 623,072 BECE candidates.
It explained that the main challenge was the concentration of demand in a small number of highly subscribed schools.
The NPP noted that 313,283 candidates selected Category A schools as their first choice, while those schools had 76,417 declared vacancies.
It therefore called on the government to explore ways to improve schools with available spaces, including providing teachers, laboratories and better programmes.
The party urged the government to use the 85 private schools participating in the Free SHS programme to absorb candidates who remained without placements.
The NPP further called for clarification of the rule and pass mark used for this year’s placement exercise, saying parents were entitled to know the standard before their children sat the examination.
It urged the government to take urgent action to ensure that the affected candidates were not left behind in the transition to secondary education.
By: Jacob Aggrey
General Secretary of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Justin Kodua Frimpong, has filed his nomination to contest the position of General Secretary again as the party begins its rebuilding efforts ahead of the 2028 general elections.
He was accompanied by party stalwarts and supporters who were in high spirits, expressing confidence that he is the right person to hold the position.
Speaking after filing his nomination, Mr Kodua Frimpong assured the rank and file of the party that he would not disappoint them.
“I can assure you that the faith the rank and file of the party have had in me, I will never disappoint them,” he said.
He also pledged to run a clean campaign devoid of personal attacks.
“I can assure you that our internal campaign will be devoid of personal attacks,” he told his fellow contestants and the rank and file of the party as he seeks to retain his position.
His tenure has seen the party through the 2024 general elections, where the NPP lost power to the National Democratic Congress (NDC) after eight years in government.
The party is currently in a rebuilding phase, with internal elections scheduled to elect new national executives to lead its reorganization towards the 2028 polls.
The General Secretary position is considered one of the most influential in the party’s administrative structure, responsible for the day-to-day running of the party secretariat and implementation of party decisions.
By Edem Mensah-Tsotorme
