Dzodzi Tsikata Quotes

State's lack of attention to inequality and oriented petriachal rule as an underpinning viable that requires remedial action to provoke viable state society relations.

Women's rights affect many interconnected spheres that cannot be separated. If one focuses only on one aspect and ignores the rest, women's rights are not realized.

In Ghana, women produce in their communities until they get married. To live with their spouses, they leave their communities and go abroad in the new community and access to the land is mediated by their husbands. Then, when women grow old, if they don't have any men, they can lose access to the land. If they get divorced, they lose it automatically.

But there is the mistake of deciding that it is not necessary to produce [other things] because, if you produce raw materials for export, you can earn enough money to buy food. So many farmers are not encouraged to continue producing and are not investigating how to produce, store, process and improve food security. Agriculture focuses on commodities.

For a long period of time, I paid attention to gender inequalities. Many governments over the years have made efforts to address the inequality agenda with some success. In the anticolonial struggle in Ghana, women were very active.

There are no policies that consider women as farmers. Then women are left aside and a cycle of disadvantages is perpetuated. It is not an economic question, but a matter of citizenship and rights. Anyone who declares themselves feminist cannot fail to recognize the connection between the rights of women and the right to the land.

Most importantly: we have to support women in agriculture because many times they are not the only ones producing food, even though they are involved in all the productive activities that ensure the survival of the entire family.

Without land control, women are second-class citizens. They also deny the right to work as farmers, because it is unthinkable to be a farmer without access to land.

A system in which some people do not have full access, control or possession of the land can only be uneven. According to the law, everyone can have access to the land, but there is discrimination regarding how to access the land, which affects women, young people and immigrants as well.

Therefore, there are many complicated issues that we have to face to ensure food sovereignty. The first step is to guarantee the access of small producers to the ground for their own production, on the ground for the market. Secondly, we have to guarantee the questions surrounding the land posession. Some groups of farmers, especially women, cannot independently acquire land for agriculture.

Africa is a continent of farmers, of small producers who do not have a vast production. Which doesn't mean that this is a bad strategy, because I believe that small-scale agriculture is promising and often undervalued. For example, Ghana has become a world leader in cocoa production based on small-scale agriculture. This should teach us that small farmers can produce successfully for the market.

However, some of these policies were very limited because there was talk of gender inequality, but women's rights affected many interconnected spheres that could not be separated. If one focuses solely on one aspect and ignores the rest, the rights of women will not be concreted.

Feminist don't only fight for their welfare but to make the entire society better, the only way to reduce the ill thoughts about feminism and it's goals is to encourage more young women to openly take part in the worthy cause.

We must center the voices and experiences of marginalized communities in our quest for social justice.

I believe there is a reason when we say that agriculture is increasing, but some of the most basic food security questions have not been addressed. In a country like Ghana, there are common illnesses related to food shortages and some people, at certain times of the year, do not have access to food. This is a very serious problem, particularly for children and women.