A young boy sweeping

Parents have been advised to distribute domestic roles and chores to ensure that boys supported girls to have maximum time to study and improve upon their academic performance.
Ms Dorcas Zoogah, the National Chairperson for the Young Urban Women Movement (YUWM), a move¬ment under the ActionAid Ghana, a non-governmental organisation said, males mostly performed better than females at school because of the less burden they have at home.
She stated that, it was necessary to give girls the support they need¬ed to ensure that they climbed up the academic ladder like their male counterparts.
Ms Zoogah stated this at the launch of the Upper West Regional Chapter of the YUWM at Wa by the ActionAid.
The YUWM is an organised group of women with the objective of em¬powering young women living in rural and urban communities of Ghana with skills to secure economic inde-pendence, have control over their bodiesas well as advocate better opportunities and rights in the areas of sexual and gender-based violence, unpaid care work and decent work.
In an attempt to address the im¬pact of unpaid care work on school girls, Ms Zoogah said, if mothers re¬distributed the chores and made boys to assist, girls would have some time on their hands to study and engage in other productive ventures.
“These girls wake up and do so much that they get exhausted even before the day begins. They have to do so much chores and get exhausted even before they go to school and are therefore unable to concen¬trate,” she said.
She cited instances where as a lit¬tle girl, she would be in class but will be thinking of the number of buckets of water she would need to draw home after school and which route to use to get to the source of water in addition to the evening meal she would be preparing for the family.
“The issue also has to do with the fact that some women do not even consider what they do as work and do not see the stress they go through. So our aim is to create the awareness about unpaid care work and help the females with better communication strategies to persuade the men to share in those roles,” she said.
Touching on sexual and gen¬der-based violence, the Chairperson was worried that most of the abuses suffered at home were perpetuat¬ed by females against females such as mothers or sisters-in-law against daughters-in law and asked that women should support each other so that they could jointly demand same respect from men.
“We need mothers-in-law who support daughters-in-law and not abuse them so that together they can demand for their rights from the men in the home but this does not happen overnight, it happens as a result of awareness creation and good commu¬nication skills,” she added.

From Darlington Fordjour, Wa