Accra, Ghana, October 18, 2026: Seven stories from Ghana and across Africa, read through one question: who holds the power, and who pays for it?

A headmaster accused of abusing female students is now also the subject of a recommendation to be posted elsewhere. A woman’s bruises go viral and a minister pays a visit. Grown men ask a court to let them cut girls again. Read one at a time, these are news items. Read together, they answer the same question; whose word counts?

A transfer is not a sanction

Start with Obuasi Senior High Technical School. After the 5 August riot on the campus, a regional committee of the Ghana Education Service (GES) recommended that the headmaster and other staff be reposted to restore calm. Headquarters has not made a final decision.

To be fair, that recommendation arose from the riot inquiry, and the abuse allegations are being investigated separately. Nothing in it suggests an attempt to bury them. The headmaster has been suspended after a JoyNews documentary carried allegations from female students, and a GES deputy director-general, Dr Issahaque Munawaru, told Joy FM that any staff member found culpable would be dismissed.

But the principle matters. If misconduct is established, a transfer is not a sanction. Ghana has a long habit of moving accused teachers instead of removing them. Years ago, Parliament’s then Majority Leader complained that accused teachers are usually transferred from one school to another. A transfer solves the problem for one school. It hands it to the next set of girls.

JoyNews Research has tracked at least 44 cases of teachers and school heads accused of sexually abusing students since 2015. It finds school heads behind four in every ten recent cases. Of the six senior high school cases it recorded in 2025 and 2026, five surfaced through a phone video, a student speaking out or a journalist. By its count, GES itself has exposed only one case since 2019.

GES deserves credit for one thing. Dr Munawaru says the GES Council approved about 15 dismissals this October in sexual harassment cases going back to 2021. That is welcome. It is also five years, and no girl should wait that long to see a consequence.

Two ministerial visits and one police case

The Gender Minister, Dr Agnes Naa Momo Lartey, visited Nana Akua Addo and her family after videos of her alleged abuse spread online. She later met her husband once he left hospital. The Ministry says its priority is the children, and that social welfare officers will monitor their welfare.

The police say Nana Akua Addo petitioned the CID on 20 August, alleging physical, emotional and economic abuse. Her husband has not been tried, and he is presumed innocent. Everything here is an allegation and should be treated as one.

Now the uncomfortable part. A minister’s visit is powerful. It tells a woman she is not alone. It may also tell every other woman in an abusive marriage that help arrives when the video goes viral. For every Nana Akua there are women with no camera, no following and no minister. What happens to them at the police desk on an ordinary Tuesday?

A kind word is not a protection order. I would like to hear less about the visits and more about the shelters, the counselling and the timelines for cases like this one.

Grown men, girls’ bodies and The Gambia’s Supreme Court

A National Assembly member, Almamy Gibba, and seven others have asked The Gambia’s Supreme Court to strike down the 2015 ban on female genital mutilation (FGM), arguing it violates their rights to culture and religion. Parliament had already rejected an attempt to repeal the law in 2024.

This is no fringe custom. About 73 per cent of Gambian women aged 15 to 49 have undergone FGM. Enforcement is also in question. In May, the High Court acquitted three women prosecuted over an infant’s death after FGM. It found that the child died from injuries sustained during FGM, but that prosecutors had not produced legally admissible evidence against the accused. An acquittal does not endorse the practice. It does raise questions about how these cases are investigated.

The case is brought by adults, argued by adults and will be decided by adults. The girls whose bodies are at stake appear in the file as a statistic. And we should be honest about who often holds the blade: the three people acquitted in that May case were women. That proves nothing on its own. But social norms are enforced by whole communities, not only by men, and patriarchy does not need men in the room to do its work. A feminist reading has to say both things.

As far as public reporting shows, the Supreme Court has not delivered its final ruling. Every girl born in the meantime is born into that uncertainty.

Scrapping the female journalist award was premature

The Ghana Journalists Association (GJA) has removed the Female Journalist of the Year category from its 30th media awards. Its president, Albert Kwabena Dwumfuor, explains that the category existed because men kept winning the top prize, and women have since won it. He also worried that one woman could collect both awards. Most of us would call that a very good year.

I understand the logic, and I respect it. A category built to fix a problem should not outlive the problem. But has the problem gone?

I want to know who anchors the political programmes, who leads the business discussions and who is invited to explain the economy. I also want to know whether women are still disproportionately assigned to lifestyle and entertainment. That is the question I would put to the current schedules, and nobody has published the count for 2026. That is exactly why scrapping the category now looks early.

The nearest hard evidence is older, and it covers guests rather than hosts, so it raises concerns without establishing who presents in 2026. When the Ghana Women Experts project monitored six flagship radio and television shows in 2021, only 128 of 1,476 experts were women, or 8.7 per cent. Producers said women were reluctant to appear. The data also showed men getting more airtime.

A handful of women winning the top award tells us women can be excellent. It does not tell us they are handed the same shows to be excellent on. I should declare my interest: I come from broadcasting and I am General Secretary of the Network of Women in Broadcasting Ghana. Judge my bias as you like, then show me the numbers that prove me wrong.

Kenya faces CEDAW: having laws is not the same as living under them

Kenya appeared before the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) in Geneva on 8 October. So, does Kenya have family laws? Yes. Committee experts commended its progressive legislation, then asked about femicide, teenage pregnancy, child marriage that persists despite a minimum age of 18, and the status of a draft law to protect widows.

The gap lies between the statute book and the front door. Equality Now, which I consult for, argues in its analysis of the review that women in Kenya can still lose their homes when their husbands die, struggle to claim property they helped build, and face barriers to leaving violent marriages. The Article 16 shadow report submitted by Equality Now and its partners finds that, since the Committee’s last review in 2017, most of its recommendations remain unimplemented.

Ghana should read this as a mirror, not a spectator sport. If the law says equal, what does equal do for a widow standing outside her late husband’s house?

Child marriage is not somebody else’s problem

An African Union report launched in February found that around 130 million girls and women in Africa were married before 18. One in three child brides worldwide lives on the continent. The report warns that Africa is off track to end child marriage by 2030.

Ghana does better than many, but not well enough. The 2022 Ghana Demographic and Health Survey put 16.1 per cent of young women as married before 18 and 3.3 per cent before 15. The official presenting the results said that, at the current pace of change, the 2030 target is out of reach.

The burden is uneven, and the figures are not directly comparable. A separate analysis of the same survey looked at women who have ever married, a different group, and found early marriage at 29.2 per cent nationally. It was 38.2 per cent in the North East against 19.7 per cent in Greater Accra.

We celebrated the girl child on 11 October with speeches and hashtags. But the question that matters is this; how long must a girl wait before she is allowed to finish being a child?

One woman at the NPP’s top table

At its delegates conference in Kumasi on 3 October, the New Patriotic Party (NPP) elected 11 national officers. Only one was a woman, Mavis Hawa Koomson, who won the National Women’s Organiser position. The other ten positions went to men.

This is the top leadership of the main opposition party as it prepares for the 2028 election. When decisions are made about political strategies, manifestos and resource deployment, there is only one woman at a table of eleven.

Political parties frequently set up women’s wings as isolated silos. They are spaces designed to mobilise the grassroots female vote, but rarely spaces that share real executive power. If a political party cannot reflect structural equity at its own top table, how can it champion a gender-equal legislative agenda for the entire republic?

The thread that binds

These stories are not identical. An allegation of sexual abuse, a court challenge to an anti-FGM law, the removal of a journalism award and the composition of a political party’s leadership raise different questions. But each asks us to look beyond the headline and examine who has the authority to decide, whose interests are protected and whose experiences are overlooked.

We cannot measure progress by the existence of a policy, a ministerial visit, a woman winning an award or a party creating a women’s wing. We must ask what changes afterwards. Are students safer? Can survivors access protection without going viral? Can women shape the programmes that set the national agenda? Can widows keep their homes? Can girls finish their education and remain children?

These are not separate questions for separate days. They are questions about how power works, and who gets to live with its consequences. And if that makes us uncomfortable, perhaps that is where the conversation should begin.

Musings of a Feminist.

A Gender Lens Africa editorial.

A little provocation. A lot of questions. No pretending that gender inequality is somebody else's problem. From politics and media to relationships, culture, justice and the everyday contradictions of gender equality, Musings of a Feminist examines the stories making headlines and the assumptions hiding beneath them.