When the Law Comes to You: AWLA Ghana Takes SGBV Sensitization Into the Heart of Bono East

For many women in Ghana’s rural communities, justice feels like a distant city — far away, expensive to reach, and written in a language nobody taught them.

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a community where violence against women goes unnamed. Where a husband’s fist is called discipline. Where a girl’s pain is called tradition. Where the law exists somewhere on paper, but never quite makes it to the village.

AWLA Ghana decided to break that silence. In October 2021, our team — in partnership with Oxfam Ghana, WiLDAF, and the European Union’s ENOUGH! initiative — packed into vehicles and headed into the Bono East Region. Not to hold a conference in a hotel ballroom. Not to produce a report for a donor folder. But to go, directly and deliberately, into the communities of Techiman and Kintampo where sexual and gender-based violence had reached alarming levels.

What we found when we arrived

Over 1,200 community members gathered across eight communities — Tanoso, Oforikrom, Attabuorso, Nsuta, Dentekrom, Chiranda, Jato-Akura, and Atta-Akura. Many had never sat in a room where a lawyer explained their rights directly to them. Farmers, market women, teachers, community leaders, and young girls who had never heard the words “legal protection” used in the same sentence as their names.

Madam Edna Kuma, Executive Director of AWLA Ghana, led participants through the Children’s Act, focusing on one principle she returned to again and again — the best interest of the child. It was not abstract legal theory. It was applied, practical, and urgent.

“When a girl is abused,” she told participants, “the incident must be reported. Not hidden. Not managed quietly within the family. Reported — so that perpetrators face the law, and so that other girls are protected.”

The Girl Child Education Coordinator for the Techiman South Education Directorate, Madam Ellen White, who attended the sessions, urged parents to contact her directly if they knew of girls whose education was at risk due to violence or pregnancy. She thanked AWLA, Oxfam Ghana, WiLDAF, and the EU for bringing this conversation into communities that rarely heard it.

Why rural communities matter most

It would be easy to run sensitization programmes in Accra, where NGOs are plentiful, media is present, and audiences are already partly informed. What AWLA Ghana committed to in Bono East was harder and more necessary — reaching women and children in hard-to-reach communities where sexual violence statistics are not abstractions but lived, daily realities.

The ENOUGH! project, which brought this partnership together, was built on a clear premise: that ending sexual and gender-based violence requires more than laws. It requires communities who know those laws exist and who have been given the confidence to use them.

That is what AWLA Ghana brought to Bono East in October 2021. Not pity. Not charity. Legal knowledge — freely given, clearly explained, and delivered in person.

The work continues

The Techiman and Kintampo sensitization was not a one-day event. It was part of a sustained programme of engagement, awareness, and legal education across the region. The communities we reached are now better equipped to identify abuse, report incidents, and support survivors through the process of seeking justice.

Every woman who sat in one of those sessions left knowing something she did not know before. And that knowledge — of her rights, of the law, of the people who will stand with her — is something no one can take away.

AWLA Ghana is committed to ensuring that the law reaches every woman, in every community, regardless of how far she lives from the nearest courthouse.

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