The Obuasi office of the National Commission for Civic Education (NCCE) has drawn up a programme to sensitise the citizenry on the need for them to actively participate in local governance, more especially on the impending district assembly elections.
According to the programme, staff of the Commission would visit the communities, churches and mosques to interact with the people for them to realize the importance and the need for their active involvement in all matters relating to local governance.
Already, the programme has started at Odumasi, one of the communities in the Obuasi municipality.
Miss Joanna Aboagyewah Appiah, an Assistant Civic Education Officer at the Obuasi municipal office of the NCCE, who announced these in an interview with the Ghana News Agency at Obuasi on Friday, said the programme was expected to whip up the interest of voters so that they would turn up massively during the district assembly elections.
She said one key objective of the programme was to help empower women in particular to increase their knowledge base and participate in district level politics.
"We want to encourage women to develop interest and avail themselves of the opportunity to be voted for during this year's district assembly elections", she said.
Miss Appiah noted that it would be more encouraging if at least more than 40 per cent of all assemblies were women instead of the current two or three per cent.
According to her, the active participation of more women in the district assemblies would enable them to access and make good use of the available opportunities to assist majority of women in poverty reduction.
She appealed to all shades of women to get involved in all decision-making in their localities so as to prepare them for the elections as well as issues bothering on governance at the national, regional and district levels.
Miss Appiah observed that there were biases against women in the country's politics and pointed out that never in the history of the country had a political party chosen a woman to be the presidential running mate.
She, however, expressed the hope that the situation would change in the years ahead. "We hope that in the near future, a woman will become a Vice President if not the President".