Mrs. Benedicta Tenni Seidu speaking at the durbar
Girls’ Education Network (GEN) last Friday held a community durbar at Adenta Sakora in the La-Nkwantanang-Madina Municipality in the Greater Accra Region to celebrate this year’s ‘International Day of Girl Child’.
The community durbar brought together school children, teachers, parents and opinion leaders in the district to campaign for the return of all children to school when the next academic calendar resumed in January 2021 following the closure of schools due to Covid-19.
The durbar, which preceded with a route march by schoolchildren and teachers, was a strategy designed GEN to celebrate the 2020 International Day of the Girl Child and to reinforce the Back-To-School campaign activated by the Ghana Education Service (GES).
Speaking at the durbar, he Convener of GEN, Mrs. Benedicta Tenni Seidu, said it is never true that boys were more human than girls, and that the description of girls as less human by some Ghanaian cultures was total misinformation.
In most Ghanaian cultures, a woman is hailed for giving birth to a boy, with statements such as “W’awo nipa,” to wit, “she has given birth to a human being.”
Such statements, according to her, are not only wrong but also portray a misunderstanding of how the world and humanity were created.
Referring to the creation story in the Bible, Mrs. Seidu, who is also the Director of Girls’ Education at GES, described females as the only people who God took time “to research” before creating, as every other creature He made came by word of mouth.
Some of the schools in the district that participated in the celebration included West Africa Secondary School (WASS) Experimental JHS, Victory Academy Basic School, Zamsa Academy and Wisdom Ways Academy.
The La-Nkwantanang-Madina Municipal Director of Education, Madam Angela Nkansah, who chaired the durbar, thanked GEN for investing their energies and resources into the education of girls and for selecting her district to celebrate this year’s International Day of the Girl Child.