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THE Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has urged women in the country to consciously harness the benefits that come with the numerous digital interventions by the government.
That, he said, would improve the lot of women and further enhance efforts at balancing the gender equation between men and women.
Dr Bawumia was speaking at an event to mark this year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) at Accra New Town yesterday.
The day was marked on the global theme: “DigitAll: Innovation and technology for gender equality” and the Vice-President called for support for the digitalisation agenda by the government, since digital interventions would push the development of the country forward.
The event was organised by Breast Care International (BCI), a non-governmental organisation, with free health screening for women residing at Nima and its surrounding areas, as part of the BCI’s social responsibility and also to offer support to underprivileged women in society.
There were presentations on breast and cervical cancers by experts to sensitise women to those diseases and how they could prevent or mitigate occurrences.
Dr Bawumia said breast cancer was the number one ailment killing women in the country, saying it was for that reason that he partnered the organisers, so that women would get more education to deal with the disease.
Touching on what the government had done so far on digitalisation, he said: “Now everyone has an identity, with their records captured.”
Similarly, he said, there was digital address, which also aided direction and locations for businesses to deliver goods.
Dr Bawumia also mentioned the renewal of insurance, the granting of students’ loans and mobile money interoperability, which he explained had helped in transferring money from one mobile network to another and also from one’s bank account to a mobile money account, and vice versa.
He said through digitalisation, essential drugs were being delivered with drones to hard-to-reach communities and said it was really helping women.
On the Ghana Card, the Vice-President said the government was introducing a new policy which would ensure that all newborn babies received their Ghana card numbers right from birth.
The initiative, he said, would commence from March 31, this year.
The Founder and President of the BCI, Dr Beatrice Wiafe Addai, urged women to resist all cultural stereotypes stifling their initiative and drive, either self-imposed or artificially crafted.
“The choice of the venue for this year’s celebration of IWD is deliberate, to the extent that this is a densely populated community with a high female population needing periodic, free breast screening, which stands BCI out in the pursuit of the overall well-being of our women,” she said.
She urged all women to be cautious of breast and cervical cancers and also take advantage of the various forms of screening for breast care.
The Queenmother of Osudoku, Amponsa Dokua III, who chaired the event, said women must not use herbal medicine for breast cancer treatment and rather report to hospital when they saw symptoms of the disease.
