From 1st to 7th August each year, World Breastfeeding Week highlights the critical importance of nursing for children across the globe. This year, the commemoration is accompanied by a fact sheet with new data from the 2019 Global Breastfeeding Scorecard, which revealed, among other things, that only four out of 10 babies in 2018 were exclusively breastfed. Babies in rural areas were breastfed more than for their urban counterparts and at 23.9 per cent, upper-middle-income countries had the lowest breastfeeding rates. While the benefits of breastfeeding ...

Africa’s poorest countries saw little to no progress on average in improving the quality of their policy and institutional frameworks in 2018, according to the World Bank’s annual Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) released yesterday July 31. The average CPIA score in Africa’s 38 International Development Association (IDA)-eligible countries in 2018 remained unchanged at 3.1 on a scale of ...

The Finance Minister in his supplementary budget submission to parliament made the claim that the government is going to renegotiate all take-or-pay power agreements to take-and-pay will scare away prospective investors not only in the power sector but even more in the development of any future gas Exploration and Production (E&P) field. This claim, if true, is not only ill-advised ...

Government has unveiled two separate funds – the Green and Delivery Funds – intended to generate monies to facilitate Ghana’s attainment of the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The initiative is being undertaken by the CEOs Advisory Group on SDG established by President Akufo-Addo to help generate resources to fund projects. The selected CEOs from various corporate organisations ...

Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Nancy Patricia Pelosi, has admonished Ghana to work assiduously to ensure that all forms of diseases are eliminated in the country. She said it is also incumbent on the West African nation to ensure that all have access to good quality healthcare, stressing that healthcare is a right for everyone, not just a ...

President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo has stated emphatically that “aid can never develop the African continent”. The continent he says must get to work if she is to develop to meet the aspirations of her peoples. Addressing the 2019 African Governors of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (African Caucus) meeting at the Kempinski Gold Coast Hotel on the ...

Three main coalitions on women’s rights and gender equality in Ghana, namely: The Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT); The Women’s Manifesto Coalition (WMC); and the Domestic Violence Coalition (DVC), have sounded an alarm bell on the rise of misogyny, ethnic sentiments, hate speech and incitement to hatred, in recent times made by some religious leaders and public figures. ...

ABANTU for Development, a women’s rights advocacy organization has urged Ghanaians to consider voting massively for women candidate in the upcoming district level election to be held in November 2019. Abantu is of the view that facilitating the election of more marginalized citizens, especially women into districts assemblies in the upcoming election 2019 will not only be fair and just ...

After a horrific two-year ordeal across three countries – being bought and sold by people traffickers and surviving running out of fuel on an inflatable boat while trying to cross the Mediterranean – Mohamed finally gave up hope. The Somali man’s wife Leyla, 21, recalls the day he burnt himself to death after hearing that they were not on a ...

Water is life and essential to health and food production. In Ghana, while some communities have free flow of potable water, unfortunately the same cannot be said for others. According to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Platform (JMP) 2017, 5.3% of the population in Ghana rely on water from unprotected dug well or spring. While 7.0%, rely on surface water. Even ...