Mr. Speaker, let me thank the hon. Member who made the Statement for such an important statement on the occasion of the celebration of Rural Women's Day in Ghana. Let me also take this opportunity to pay tribute to our women.
About 90 per cent of the Members of Parliament here have been children of rural women; they had their mothers put them at their backs and walked through dangerous paths to farms and to collect
firewood or to do some other work that would eventually help them to grow up to become Members of Parliament. It is an opportunity for us to pay this tribute and also begin to think about ways and means of ensuring that we influence policy in the direction that would permanently ensure that the rural woman does not remain the way she is since Adam.
Mr. Speaker, the problem and the painful issue about this is the fact that these women have not changed their circumstances since the time we knew them, since the time we were born. They are still the same people trodding along the streets, who farm and put their products at the road side; we drive by and buy from them. But whether one buys yam, cocoyam or whatever one buys on the street as one drives along, one should just think about the fact that it is a rural woman who had been working in the forest, who had been working on the farm and who has brought that food to our doorsteps.
Mr. Speaker, there is a bigger issue about it. It is an issue about how Ghana as a country is mobilizing our human resource to ensure that we can meet the challenge of the 21st Century. We cannot produce food and go out to buy it, market it in a way that reflects the 21st Century and then still produce it in a way that reflects the 20th Century Ghana; and the problem exists because we do not have a comprehensive approach to how to make use of the human resource base at the rural level.
The rural woman represents the back stalk; she represents the resilience of Ghanaians to fight to ensure that we do not give everything away; that we still are people who can feed ourselves to an extent. Every other thing in the road industry, in the construction industry, in the textile industry, in whatever form they are seen, all these are now in the hands
of foreigners either because we import them or because we bring the contractors here to produce for us. There is only one thing that is left and that thing is the fact that we produce our food from the forest and it is done partly and mostly by the rural woman.
Mr. Speaker, because of this single thing, it is important that we do not just let this Statement pass by as if it is just one of the Statements we make and then that is all. Let us take a deliberate approach in how we are going to tackle this or support the rural woman to get credit, support her to get some bit of education, support her to be able to market effectively the products of her labour. Mr. Speaker, until we can do this, until we can bring all the legislation to support this approach, we just talk and blow hot air and that is going to be more injurious to the rural woman.
Mr. Speaker, the reason is that if the rural woman produces eggs and we understand who she is and we have the opportunity to change her circumstance and we talk about it without taking any action, what it amounts to is making a mockery of her difficulty. There must not be a mooted approach to this problem; there must be a practical approach to it.
The problem is big and the problem is about food security. The problem is about fighting poverty and the person at the forefront of it is the rural woman and it is important that we take the requisite steps to do something about it.
Mr. Speaker, with this very simple contribution, I want to call on the Women Caucus in Parliament to present a paper to Parliament suggesting a policy direction and suggesting ways by which we can approach this problem. And I want to encourage the hon. Minister for Local Government and Rural Development
to come on board as well to present to Parliament how he is going to approach this problem devoid of the existing policy approach that we all know about.
Mrs. Angelina Baiden-Amissah (NPP
-- Shama): Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Statement made by the hon. Member for Tarkwa-Nsuaem (Mrs. Gifty Eugenia Kusi) and to thank her for coming out with such a Statement.
Mr. Speaker, you will realize that women are important partners in life and this is the reason why the Almighty God created them to add to the man; and I wonder how the world was going to be without women. I wish to state that without women in homes, most homes are going to run helter-skelter. But the rural woman keeps suffering. The rural woman is always at loggerheads with either a partner or members of the family.
Mr. Speaker, rural women produce a lot of food to feed the whole country. We see a lot of women sitting on articulated trucks through the night enroute to the urban centre to sell. And when the rural woman sells, it is something small she gets as profit while those who work in-between them, whom I may call the middlemen or women especially the market queens, get more profit than they do.
Mr. Speaker, when we visit the rural areas, we see rural women cracking stones to sell to take care of households including their husbands. Mr. Speaker, we see rural women picking wild fruits to sell just to be able to make ends meet. Mr. Speaker, yet the woman suffers a lot of inequalities even in her own home, coming from marriage and sometimes from society.
The Government is doing a lot to help women but we are asking that it does
