Training Ghanaian women in professional driving

A Ghanaian Ngo has taken up an ambitious task to train young women in professional driving as a way to re balance the gender inequality in the field.

The Network of Women in Growth provides vocational and entrepreneurial training and support for young women to enable them launch and run their own businesses.

Mawusi Awiti, Head of the NGO, Network of Women in Growth said “The vocations are there. Anyone can get into it, it’s we who have structured that this belongs, this is where men should get to, this is where women should get to. The men are not preventing the women from being involved in what they are involved in. These women that are being trained, they would enter into the male dominated areas. We want to see women driving the president, we want to see women driving the speaker of parliament, we want to see, and when we are asking for these things and they ask us ‘‘where are the women’‘, we’ll say, Here are the women’‘

Lanjo Wonefiawomor, is a beneficiary who has set her sights very high saying she had been ‘’ hoping to drive the president for long. Because I am inquisitive and I want to know much for myself. And driving per se, we have the perception that its male dominated work. But me as a female and with my zeal and the determination that I have, I know what men can do, women can also do it and even better. So what they are doing I know I can also do it and do it better. So surely in future, I’m hoping to drive the president”.

The young women in professional driving project will not just provide jobs, lifting women out of poverty it also a way of combating stereotypes in a male dominated field.