International Women’s Day: Reflections on how we are addressing intersectional injustices in Ghana
Three women from the Ghana somubi Dwumadie team pose to #EmbraceEquity.
Recently I had the pleasure of traveling to Ghana to join Options’ Ghana Somubi Dwumadie (Ghana Participation Programme) team for a week of reflection and planning. The programme focuses on engaging, empowering and improving the wellbeing, social and economic outcomes and rights of people with disabilities and mental health conditions in Ghana.
Although disability and mental health conditions can affect anyone and everyone, it does not affect us all equally. People with disabilities and people with mental health conditions who are also members of other minority groups by virtue of their socio-economic status, age, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, etc., face the intersecting weight of these identities and greater marginalisation, discrimination, and injustice as a result.
I was interested to learn more about how the programme had taken steps to achieve equity. The team works to recognise and respond to the dynamic intersections of marginalised identities within the community of people with disabilities and people with mental health conditions in Ghana.
Two key insights emerged for me from this visit about how we can advance both equity for these groups.
1. The role that civil society plays in advancing equity.
It was no surprise to me that two of the most pertinent examples of embracing equity were delivered by national NGOs. National NGOs know their context, they know their communities, and they are trusted to respond to very specific, personal needs. It is so important that these organisations are adequately and sustainably funded. Many global commitments have been made to fund national and local NGOs, but funding is still limited, hardly accessible, and mostly held by international NGOs.
For instance, Songtaba, a national NGO that receives a grant through Ghana Somubi Dwumadie, is working with ‘alleged witches’ who have been exiled to ‘witches camps’ where they face deplorable living conditions and have a high incidence of depression. In the camps where Songtaba works, about 93% of the inhabitants are women, 85% are over 60 years of age, and 99% of inhabitants have no formal education. So, whilst men can be accused of witchcraft, women are far more likely to be. This shows the inequitable gender dimension of this practice. Songtaba is supporting the integration of alleged witches from ‘witches camps’ back into their communities and advocating for the criminalization of witchcraft accusations.
Another example is from the work of Ghana National Association of the Deaf (GNAD) who also receive a grant through our programme. The association is advocating for an inclusive mental health policy and specifically for equitable access to the provisions in the policy for Deaf people. This is because a review of the mental health policy found minimal consideration given to deafness, with the assumption that initiatives aimed at the broader disability community would also benefit Deaf individuals. To overcome this, GNAD are training healthcare workers in sign language and offering translation services for Deaf people accessing health services, having noted a particular challenge for women giving birth.
2. The need for grassroots action alongside system level change.
A seed planted at the grassroots needs an enabling environment if it is to grow and survive. I believe that the fact that these grantees, and Ghana Somubi Dwumadie more broadly, work at both community level and at national level to shift policy, is critical to their success. Working simultaneously on both aspects shows that it’s possible to not just embrace equity but also advance justice.
Because if we proclaim to be reducing inequities, we must also be thinking about justice. This isn’t (or shouldn’t) be about making the status quo more accessible. We need to go further than responding to specific needs and to fix the systems that create and perpetuate inequities.
Disability and mental health conditions are a natural part of the human experience. When we work to improve the lives of people with disabilities and mental health conditions we have to situate ourselves within the broader fight for social justice.
International Women’s Day was started over a century ago. A huge amount of progress has been made since then, but this progress has not been felt by all women equally. The need to embrace equity is as pertinent as ever.
By funding locally-led projects that both recognise and respond to intersecting identities and work towards social justice, then hopefully days like International Women’s Day will only be needed to celebrate successes in a century's time.