The Women We Don’t See: Considering Intersectional and Decolonial Approaches in Ghana’s WPS Agenda

Ghana’s second National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security phases out this year. As preparations to draft the third-generation National Action Plan are underway, critical questions surface: has the current plan actually served everyone well? Who was unseen or left out? Who disappears in the fine print? A close examination of GHANAP2 reveals how well-meaning policies can unintentionally perpetuate exclusion. Rethinking the GHANAP2 through intersectional and decolonial lenses shows how Ghana can build a plan worthy of its diverse women.

Ghana is committed to implementing the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda and is lacing its boots to prepare the next National Action Plan (NAP). The current NAP (GHANAP2 – 2020-2025) aims to correct the gaps of the first plan, which was only partially implemented due to weak coordination, budget issues, and a generally low profile within institutions. The second plan, in contrast, established a clearer institutional architecture, introduced an annual monitoring cycle, and aligned closely with the four UNSCR 1325 pillars: Participation, Protection, Prevention, and Relief & Recovery.

Yet the moment a plan collapses all women into a single category it embeds subtle biases that erase the very differences that matter for effective protection and participation. This tendency is particularly visible in GHANAP2. There exist diverse and layered insecurities experienced differently by women across Ghana. Typical examples include “kayayei” (head porters) exposed to exploitation and violence in Accra; elderly women banished to “witch camps” in the north; women farmers facing herder–farmer tensions, women in mining communities coping with displacement; environmental hazards; teenage pregnancies; land loss; and women with disabilities struggling to access justice and basic protection. These are not peripheral stories. They are the everyday realities of the women whose lives the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda seeks to transform.

The GHANAP2, however, does not fully capture these complexities. GHANAP2 frames “women and girls” as a single category, is led by government ministries, and follows a top-down, state-centered approach with civil society playing mostly a supporting role. This reproduces epistemic erasure, a situation where the knowledge and lived experiences of marginalized women are absent from formal security policy. To build a more inclusive and sustainable WPS framework, Ghana’s next NAP must meaningfully account for women’s social locations, local peace ecologies, and indigenous governance systems, not just international templates. Based on a decolonial and intersectional reading of GHANAP2, this piece argues that political, structural, and epistemic factors have limited intersectionality in practice; yet simple, realistic changes could transform the next NAP into a genuinely inclusive and sustainable plan.

The Universal Woman Problem: Why “Women and Girls” Is Not Enough

A first reading of GHANAP2 reveals strong organizational scaffolding. This includes an active National Steering Committee tasked with turning the five‑year plan into detailed annual implementation plans with budgets, including analyzing priorities and setting targets; annual planning meetings; mid-term and end-term evaluations; decentralized Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies roles; and funding notes. Yet this sound structure hides a major risk, namely, the plan’s universal target group of “women and girls.” While this phrasing appears harmless, it collapses the diverse and unequal realities shaping women’s security in Ghana. As intersectionality reminds us, gender is always experienced through other identities such as ethnicity, age, disability, livelihood, and geography.

GHANAP2 acknowledges differences in women’s experiences, noting examples like nomadic herdsmen affecting women farmers, armed robbery of women traders on highways, and the rape of school girls. Yet none of these differentiated realities are reflected in the plan’s targeting or indicators, making implementation generic. The universalism extends into the implementation plan of this NAP. For example, activities such as “train women,” “sensitize communities,” and “build capacity” are given without tailoring to the specific roles or barriers facing, for instance, a Makola market trader, a queen mother, or a kayayei in Agbogbloshie. As a result, relief efforts remain generalized. GHANAP2 notes for example, that National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO) kits do not meet the specific needs of pregnant women, older women, or women with disabilities.

The Monitoring and Evaluation framework, though systemically sound, also tracks impact numerically (“number of women trained”) without asking which women are participating or benefiting. Without disaggregated data and vulnerability markers, the NAP risks reinforcing existing inequalities and serving primarily urban, educated, NGO-linked women already visible to donors. While some argue that it is impossible to list every social group, intersectionality does not demand exhaustive identity lists; it requires naming and acting based on the structural markers of exclusion, such as rural/urban divide, disability, age, ethnicity, livelihood (farmers, traders, kayayei, etc.), displacement, marital status, and exposure to different conflict ecosystems.

Ghana can look at the examples of other countries that have NAPs with intersectional approaches, such as Kenya, which has included youth and persons with disabilities in their NAP; or, the Philippines, which frames the target group as not just “women” but “women of diverse and intersecting identities”; or, Finland which frames the target as “women in all their diversity”. These framings and inclusions might seem subtle, but omitting them in writing implies exclusion in practice.

A State-Centric Architecture: Where Are the Women Peace Actors?

While intersectionality helps show who is being left out, a decolonial lens helps us understand why they are left out. Decoloniality here involves undoing the ongoing influence of colonial power and knowledge systems that continue to shape how peace and security are conceptualized, who counts as an expert, and whose ways of knowing matter. By treating peace as something delivered rather than something already produced through local women’s systems of social order, current frameworks replicate colonial categories of knowledge and authority. Just as GHANAP2’s universalist focus on ‘women and girls’ risks flattening diverse experiences, its state-centric design similarly does not center the women-led, indigenous institutions that actively sustain social order. This means that the very actors who navigate intersectional vulnerabilities on the ground are rendered almost invisible in both planning and implementation. GHANAP2’s structure mirrors the four global WPS pillars and centers state institutions. It includes ministries, the police, armed forces, NADMO, district assemblies, development partners, and a single civil society seat on the National Steering Committee. What is missing are the indigenous, women-led institutions that support social order and peace across Ghana. By not structurally recognizing queen mothers who mediate disputes in their communities, market queens who regulate markets and mobilize rapid responses during unrest, or women’s cooperatives that advocate for fairer conditions for women, the plan implicitly treats peace as something delivered to women by state and international actors rather than something women already produce. This omission is not just symbolic but reflects a deeper epistemic bias that sidelines the authority and knowledge systems of local women peace actors. If the argument is that these actors already fall under stated umbrellas, or that they are recognized in implementation of related activities, they should still be explicitly named throughout an important document like the NAP, and their involvement in the designing of the plan should be clear and substantial. Although GHANAP2 was developed through a government-led and consultative design process involving state institutions, security actors, civil society organizations, and technical experts, the documentation of this design does not explicitly name local women peace actors or clarify their role as knowledge producers in shaping the plan. Ghana can look at the NAPs of South Africa, which has more active CSO involvement; or Bosnia and Herzegovina, which applies a local-regional-global approach; or, Canada, which recognizes two-spirit people. Localization, bottom-up approaches, and co-creation with all stakeholders are important in undoing colonial influence while producing peace and security for women in Ghana.

Why These Gaps Persist

The limitations of GHANAP2 are not simply oversights. They reflect deeper structural, political, and organizational constraints that shaped what was possible at the time. Inadequate funding is one of the obvious challenges. Meaningful intersectional programming is expensive, requiring disaggregated data systems, specialized training, targeted relief items, and sustained consultations and co-designing processes with diverse groups of women. Without dedicated budgets, inclusion remains an aspiration rather than an operational reality. There are also significant socio-political and legal sensitivities around naming certain groups, such as sexual minorities, including sex workers, such that planners might—understandably—opt for broad, less controversial language. It is a delicate consideration between what donors and partners would like to see and what the government would approve, with the ordinary Ghanaian woman at the mercy of this dance. And while Ghana has a rich ecosystem of women-led indigenous peace infrastructures, GHANAP2 collapses these actors into vague categories like “traditional leaders” or “community actors” to simplify coordination. If the next NAP is to be genuinely transformative, it must confront these constraints head-on by explicitly recognizing, resourcing, and institutionalizing the indigenous peacebuilding labor that Ghanaian women quietly perform every day.

Towards GHANAP3: What Would an Intersectional and Decolonial WPS NAP Look Like?

A more inclusive and grounded GHANAP3 does not require rewriting Ghana’s Women, Peace and Security agenda, only converting existing commitments into concrete, locally relevant action. Firstly, the plan should redefine its target group using social location rather than the generic category of “women and girls,” recognizing the distinct needs of rural women farmers, kayayei and informal workers, women with disabilities, fisherwomen, adolescent girls, widows, older women accused of witchcraft, and minority ethnic women, among others. Secondly, the National Steering Committee should be reconstituted to prominently and meaningfully include the women who actually sustain peace on the ground, like queen mothers, young women leaders, women’s cooperatives, and women with disabilities, among others, so that their knowledge shapes national policy. Just one civil society representative on the committee is not inclusive enough. Thirdly, programming should be informed by district-level peace ethnographies to capture women’s real security roles, vulnerabilities, and coping systems. Fourthly, monitoring data should also be disaggregated by age, disability, livelihood, and geography, among other categories. Finally, a truly decolonial NAP would move beyond international templates and center indigenous and Ghanaian women’s own epistemologies. These initial recommendations, drawn from a close reading of GHANAP2, represent preliminary thoughts that should be validated and refined through participatory research, direct consultations, and insights from diverse Ghanaian women and stakeholders.

Conclusion

Ghana stands at a promising crossroads. GHANAP2 provides a strong institutional foundation, but its impact will remain limited unless Ghana reimagines how it understands “women,” “peace,” and “security.” A decolonial and intersectional GHANAP3 would begin with Ghana’s local peace ecologies, recognize women as diverse political actors, elevate indigenous institutions, see social location as central to security, and build peace with and not just for women. This is not simply a matter of technical refinement. It is an opportunity to craft a NAP that is authentic and reflective, one that draws on the lived realities of diverse women across the country. Given the current infrastructure for planning and implementing the WPS agenda in Ghana, this task may seem daunting, almost as if achieving meaningful change requires a complete overhaul. But in practice, the real leverage lies in the fine details, and the most transformative solutions emerge from careful attention to nuance. If Ghana gets this right, it could set a precedent for how WPS frameworks move to actual social transformation, seeing, at last, the women we too often do not.