Monrovia– In a robust name to motion, the African Girls Leaders Community (AWLN) Liberia Chapter is urging Liberian males to change into lively allies in championing ladies’s management.
By Endurance M. Jones
At its first nationwide dialogue on “Constructive Masculinity: Altering Attitudes In the direction of Girls’s Management,” audio system careworn that gender equality can’t be achieved with out males altering the attitudes and practices that maintain ladies again.
They known as on males in positions of energy, affect, and on a regular basis life to create house for ladies to steer.
Males Should Be Allies
UN Girls Nation Consultant, Consolation Lamptey, emphasised that partaking males is important to dismantling dangerous gender norms.
“Masculinities should not static. Similar to gender roles, masculine roles can change. This potential for change provides us the best alternative to construct a gender-equal Liberia,” she mentioned.
Lamptey really useful that at the least 30 p.c of assets be devoted to partaking males as allies, whereas the rest continues to strengthen ladies’s voices and alternatives.
Tokenism Is Not Equality
Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf declared that whereas Liberia has made historical past with ladies’s management, it stays removed from true equality.
“One girl president in 184 years is tokenism, not equality,” she acknowledged, urging males to rethink their attitudes towards ladies as companions at house, in society, and in politics.
Sirleaf additionally known as for Liberia to steer once more by ratifying and domesticating the brand new African Union Conference on the Safety of Girls.
Leaders Stress Shared Duty
Justice Minister N. Oswald Tweh emphasised that dangerous stereotypes about masculinity gasoline inequality. “Selling optimistic masculinity requires males and boys to change into allies in dismantling dangerous norms and constructing a Liberia the place men and women contribute equally to progress,” he mentioned.
For her half the Minister of Gender, Youngsters and Social Safety, Gbeme Kollie Horace, added that males in authority should intentionally create house for certified ladies.
She warned that ladies’s political illustration has fallen to only 11% in 2024, a major drop from 14.9% in 2006, regardless of Liberia’s groundbreaking historical past.
“Girls’s management isn’t just an ethical proper it’s a strategic benefit for Liberia’s development,” Horace careworn.
Additionally talking on the convention, former Liberia’s International Minister Marjon V. Kamara, who serves as Chair of the AWLN Liberia Chapter, summed up the message: “Preaching solely to ladies is inadequate males have to be engaged as lively companions in selling equality.”
The dialogue concluded with a collective name for males throughout all generations to assist ladies’s management in politics, enterprise, and group life, positioning Liberia as soon as once more as a pacesetter in gender equality throughout Africa.
