She said it was time to examine the role of women and integrate the gender perspective as a critical tool in the timber and cash crop industry, to speed up Africa’s economic transformation agenda and sustainable development.

Dr. Mrs. Asare made the call at a close-out session of the “women’s role along Ghana’s timber value chain research project”, which was conducted by Tropenbos Ghana, at Fumesua in the Ejisu Municipality.

She said to achieve the sustainable development goals; certain key areas like the forestry sector could be strategically targeted to serve as catalyst for the advancement of women.  Dr. Mrs. Asare said in spite of their hard work, most women in Ghana were disadvantaged in terms of economic, social and political opportunities.

There was the need to change this and create enabling environment for women to actively participate in the socio-economic transformation agenda of the nation.  Mrs. Mercy Owusu-Ansah, Director of Tropenbos Ghana, said women played significant role in making the forestry sector and the Timber Value Chain (TVC) more vibrant.

She said the one year research project, which was funded by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), aimed at developing a gender responsive safeguard in respect to the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) and the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA) programmes.

Mrs. Owusu-Ansah, said the FLEGT and VPA were very important interventions, which had a lot of implication for women in the forestry and timber value chain, who were mostly engaged in the establishment of plantations, harvesting and transportation of timber and other forest products.

She said the study, which was conducted through the review of reports and policy documents, surveys of actors along Ghana’s TVC and in-depth interviews with experts, revealed that the distribution of women income along the chain was very similar.

“Most of the women were channelling their income, about 66 per cent into household activities, paying school fees and doing the social things and very little was put into investments and building projects,” the study pointed out.

Mrs. Owusu-Ansah said though Ghana’s TVC was male-dominated, females still had important roles to play in charcoal processing and others. She stressed the need to make information available to women and create an enabling environment for them to participate actively in the VPA discussions at all levels.