Let's mentor female students

Sept 8, 09

Story: Musah Yahaya Jafaru & Fauziatu Adam

A JUSTICE of the Commercial Court, Mrs Justice Margaret Welbourne, has urged women professionals to mentor female students to achieve academic excellence and occupy key positions in the public and private sectors.
She said although women formed more than 50 per cent of Ghana’s population, very few of them occupied important positions in the judiciary, banking, politics and other professions.
Mrs Justice Welbourne was launching the ‘Women Mentoring Walk 2010’ in Accra on Thursday. The mentoring walk is a programme that brings together accomplished and experienced women to mentor younger women to achieve their potential in various professions.
The mentoring walk, the second in the series, is being organised by the Mentoring Women Ghana, a non-governmental organisation.
Mrs Justice Welbourne noted that women professionals were confronted with challenges, but asked them to make time to attend to up-and-coming females.
“Women need to mentor and encourage each other as they climb the educational ladder. I know you have challenges, but you need to help the young ones to come up,” he said.
She stressed that the young females should be encouraged to climb higher on the educational ladder, adding, “The sky should be the limit.”
According to Mrs Justice Welbourne, the Chief Justice, Mrs Justice Georgina Wood, had launched her own mentoring programme for senior high school students, which seeks to encourage them to opt for the legal profession.
The Minister of Women and Children’s Affairs, Ms Akua Sena Dansua, in a speech read on her behalf, re-echoed the need for people with higher education, advanced entrepreneurial skills and professional expertise “to share this important knowledge and skills with the younger ones”.
“In that way, they can avoid repeating the mistakes made by us so as that they can make progress at a faster rate,” she stressed.
Ms Dansua suggested that in mentoring, such values as discipline, diligence, self-control, self-confidence, honesty, academic excellence, good time management, physical fitness, philanthropy and sharing were instilled in the mentees.
Likewise, she said, the mentees should be made aware that success in academic, business, or any other field did not mean much without good moral values.
Ms Dansua said the mentoring programme would be more suitable for graduates of universities, polytechnics, training colleges, senior high schools and their equivalent, as well as other adolescents and middle age women, as they could imbibe useful values and be better equipped to face the challenges of time.
The Chief Executive Officer of the Mentoring Women Ghana, Ms Brigitte Dzogbenuku, said most participants had established fruitful relationships, with some getting jobs in the first mentoring programme this year.
She said the 2010 mentoring programme promised to be bigger, and indicated that her outfit would receive applications and conduct interviews to ensure that they were truly interested in the programme.
Ms Dzogbenuku said 40 people who would qualify would be assembled in Accra for 10 days beginning from February 24, 2010. They would visit and interact with women in leadership positions in the public and private sectors. Subsequently the mentoring walk would be held on Saturday February 27, 2010.