A team from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has held a lecture and interactive session on Gender Capacity Building for staff of the Forest Services Division (FSD) of the Forestry Commission (FC).
Mrs Sheila N. A. O. Ashong, Acting Director for Natural Resources at EPA , gave a presentation on Mainstreaming Gender in Sustainable Land and Water Management. In this presentation, she spoke on many definitions of gender, the roles played and educated the staff on various gender concepts and terminologies.
She also talked about how both women and men must enjoy the same opportunities, rights and privileges in all spheres of life to promote gender equality. “All genders should be given the chance to benefits without discrimination,” she added.
Her presentation also touched on achieving gender equality and empowering all girls which is part of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be achieved by 2030. She mentioned that the Secretary-General of UN, Antonio Guterres, at the 66th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women held in March 2022, mentioned that “The challenges we face today – the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, the growth and spread of conflicts – are largely the result of our male-dominated world and male-dominated culture,”…the “perilous state” of world peace cannot be separated from “millennia of patriarchy and the suppression of women’s voices” and cited that as the reason why gender equality and parity are “fundamental prerequisites for a safer, more peaceful, more sustainable world for all.”
In her concluding remarks, she said that gender mainstreaming should be practiced to improve the quality of public policies and ensuring a more efficient allocation of resources.
The Capacity Building program ended with a question and answer session.
