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Features & Opinions

Tackling Ghana’s Mental Health Challenges in an Unequal World

The COVID-19 pandemic has unleashed a devastating blow on people living with psychosocial disorders. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) some groups, including health and other frontline workers, students, people living alone, and those with pre-existing mental health conditions, have been particularly affected. Services for mental, neurological and substance use disorders have also been significantly disrupted in many countries. ...

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Rules, Rights and Rastafarians

Over the last week or so, many opinions have been expressed about Achimota School’s decision to prevent two Rastafarian high school students from attending classes due to their dreadlocks. Though this is not the first time in Ghana that children with dreadlocks have been told to cut them off to be permitted to attend school, it is the first such ...

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Ten years on, Libyan revolutionaries live with wounds and unfulfilled dreams

As revolution swept their region in 2011, three young Libyans joined mass protests against Muammar Gaddafi’s four-decade rule. They now live divided by Libya’s frontlines, their futures irrevocably shaped by the uprising. The first demonstrations against Gaddafi’s rule began in the eastern city of Benghazi on Feb. 17, 2011. A decade on, Libya is still split between rival factions, and ...

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Time to rethink licensing Rounds for Africa’s Oil and Gas-Producing Countries

While the details vary by country, the licensing round process has, in general, become too prone to delays and uncertainty. In late 2019, as the African oil and gas industry was looking to the future with optimism, Offshore Engineer wrote that the continent had reason to expect a “more productive 2020.” Instead, the unforeseen happened, and the COVID-19 pandemic had ...

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School Reopening, Children with Special Needs and Matters arising

Dr Matthew Opoku-Prempeh, Minister of Education

The announcement by President Akufo-Addo to reopen schools on 15th of January, 2021 was received with mixed feelings. A day after the announcement, I monitored on social media platforms, some parents expressing excitement that the children were going back to school after staying home for nine months, some said the children were mingling with other children anyway and it didn’t ...

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Don’t Underestimate the Power of Natural Gas to Transform Africa

Africa has already made an indelible mark in the oil industry. It is home to four of the world’s top 20 crude oil producers — Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, and Libya — and these same four countries also have some of the largest oil reserves in the world. So far, it hasn’t made quite as much of a splash in the ...

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Why Ghana needs a new financial sector regulation architecture

Ghana’s financial sector is in crisis. A crisis occasioned by the collapse of over 300 financial institutions; and which has affected every division of the financial sector. Universal banks, savings and loans companies, microfinance companies, capital market institutions, and insurance companies have been impacted. While majority of the collapsed institutions were licensed and regulated, a few were unlicensed and ought ...

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Ghana still lives in the poverty threshold HIPC or no HIPC

The hullabaloo surrounding whether Ghana has been classified as HIPC or not is characterised more by partisan and emotional pronouncements than rational and fair reportage and comments. Political spinners are spinning. The strategists are relentlessly strategizing. What more, the Government has given its own interpretation. Opposition parties have also given their interpretation. And the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has sent ...

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Addressing violence against women and children through the SDGs

Violence against women is usually executed by close relations mostly men; in some instances, we see women attacking their fellow women. This constitutes one of the biggest violations of human rights, a dent on dignity and the foremost impediment to achieving the Global Goals. Surprisingly, there are instances where women have committed violence against other women, in most cases against ...

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Human rights, poverty and development

Ogochukwu C. Nweke, lawyer

The subject of human rights is one that cuts across many aspects of our universal reality. The Declaration of Rights to Development, endorsed by the UN General Assembly in 1986 and in Article 1(1) reiterates the fact that every human being has the right and deserves access to economic, social, cultural and political development, both in terms to participation and ...

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