National Responses to Gender Imbalance The Formation of National Machinery for Policy Development

National response to the steadily rising menace of prejudices and practices against gender balance in the country remained lame and on paper until the international community, bogged down by the rising spate of discrimination and violence against the female gender in many parts of the world, rose to confront the issue frontally.

In 1975, the United Nations, under pressure to address the issue, declared that year as the international Women's Year and went ahead to declare the next ten years, 1976 - 1985, the United Nations Decade for Women and followed up with a series of International and regional conferences to address issues of women and gender equality.

With that declaration came the national impetus to place matters relating to the status of women and other related gender matters on the agenda of the government. In previous times, such matters had from time to time, been brought up by concerned voluntary women's organizations, who, in some cases, had had to resort to protest demonstrations in order to draw national attention to a particular source of injustice to women".

The singular issue from the declaration which came to change the face of gender policy development was one which enjoined member states of the United Nations to set up national machineries to oversee the promotion of women's right. The UN refers to these structures as "national machineries for the advancement of women" and defined them as "a set of coordinated structures within and outside of government, which aim to achieve equality in all spheres of life for both women and men."

The National machineries among other things were to study the condition of women, initiate programs to promote their emancipation and monitor progress made in that direction. It was also geared towards channeling communication between women and the government so that most pressing issues affecting women can be routinely dealt with without recourse to stage demonstrations.

The national machineries took various forms throughout Africa. In Ghana, it took the form of a council, the National Council on Women and Development (NCWD), set up by a decree issued by the military government at that time, the National Revolutionary Council (NRC), in 1975.

Since it was set up 26 years ago, the NCWD has played the lead role in the implementation of various women's rights strategies including the Nairobi Forward Looking Strategies (FLS) of 1985 and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995 (PFA).

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