Empower Women with Land and Credit – Zanetor to Africa

At the 2025 Pan-African Women’s Day celebration, Klottey-Korle MP and Pan-African Parliament delegate Dr. Zanetor Agyeman-Rawlings reignited the conversation on women’s empowerment, this time shifting the lens toward deeper structural issues that continue to suppress African women’s economic potential.

She made a strong case for reconsidering how Africa approaches the subject of reparations, calling on the continent to reframe the transatlantic slave trade not merely as a historical injustice, but a war-like conquest.

“Millions were taken as prisoners of war,” she said, insisting that reparations must move beyond symbolic gestures to concrete investments in infrastructure, technology, and energy.

“We’re not asking for pity; we’re asking for what is owed, in a language development understands,” she added.

While addressing challenges facing women in cross-border trade—where women reportedly constitute nearly 90% of traders—Dr. Agyeman-Rawlings proposed a simple but impactful solution: deploy more female customs and immigration officers at all border points.

For her, this move would not only ease operational bottlenecks but offer a layer of safety and trust to the thousands of women moving goods across Africa daily.

Land ownership also took centre stage in her remarks. She highlighted how African women, despite forming the backbone of the continent’s agricultural workforce, are often unable to own land and therefore struggle to access credit.

“It’s unjust that the same women feeding nations can’t feed their businesses with loans, just because they don’t own land,” she pointed out.

Dr. Agyeman-Rawlings stressed that traditional women-led cooperatives—which she described as “more organic and efficient than many formal financial systems”—should not be discarded in favour of less effective modern models. Instead, she urged banks and development partners to craft financial services that recognise and build upon these grassroots structures.

She also called for the celebration of women role models through short video profiles within the Pan-African Parliament.

“If they can see it, they can aspire to it,” she remarked, emphasizing the need for young African girls to have visible female leaders to look up to.

Source: Liberalprint.com