The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has proposed that a ministry for women be established.
According to a press release from the GHRA, the women’s movement in Guyana needs to be rehabilitated from its current reactive project-driven activities to recapture its dynamism, reset its values and dismantle the instinctive accommodation of other agenda.
The release stated that this cannot be achieved until a ministry for women or a mechanism of comparable force and resources is created to drive an integrated series of reforms through all other government ministries and agencies.
According to the release, the role of a ministry exclusively dedicated to promoting women’s rights and interests would be to keep key issues on the agenda of other relevant organisations; provide the tailored advice and evidence-based information they require and to bring the voices, experiences and priorities of different sectors of Guyanese women to bear on government.
The release suggested that a ministry or comparable agency could generate a large database of the skills and interests of women in Guyana possess and which they are prepared to put at the service of others.
According to the release, the official slogan for International Women’s Day 2017 (which was celebrated on March 8), ‘Be Bold for Change’ is timely in the Guyana context. The boldest move would be to demand that the rhetoric and personal support for women’s rights demonstrated by male leaders in many walks of life would be institutionalised in a government ministry, or similar Cabinet level agency, it added.
