Gifty Annor-Sika Asantewah, the President of Women in Forex Ghana and a Financial Market Analyst, has stated that the reasons for the low patronage of women in forex is because of ignorance and the misconception Ghanaian Women have towards forex trading and to a larger extent, finance in general.
According to the President of ‘Women in Forex Ghana’, despite the huge population of Africa, only a small fraction involve in forex trading. A situation she said is the reason why women are practically ‘non-existent’ in the forex market industry.
“First of all, I will attribute it to ignorance. Because, there’s 1.26 billion people in Africa. In spite of this huge numbers, we have less than 15% that are into forex trading. That means that only 1.8 million people in Africa out of the over 1.2 billion are into forex trading. And majority of them are men. So women are more like non-existent.”
Gifty Annor-Sika Asantewah
Gifty Annor-Sika Asantewah noted that, most women don’t really understand the forex industry. She further opined that even the handful of women who know the market don’t practice because of the general misconception about women and finance in the country.
“Is because we don’t know what entails in the forex Industry. And even the little amount of women that know, fear because of the misconception and the mess they have heard about the financial market.
“And their overly conservative nature. Not everybody in Ghana understand the digital economy. One main reason is our traditional misconception about women and finance. When it comes to finance, a lot of our women think it’s the man’s duty to financially contribute to the quota. When it comes to the up-keeping of the home, they relegate everything finance to the men.”
Gifty Annor-Sika Asantewah
This, the financial analyst said, has a rippling effect to why women don’t even want to engage into any finance at all. She also mentioned that “there are no technical know-how, few mentors right now to even indulge and the fear that comes with it.”
Create Domestic Platforms for Trading
Mrs Annor-Sika Asantewah, therefore called for the relevant stakeholders to regulate the forex market. She noted that the government is losing huge revenues due to improper regulations in the sector.
“Because of lack of regulation, the government is losing a lot. The most important thing is to regulate the forex Industry. The Securities and Exchanage Commission (SEC), the Bank of Ghana (BoG), should have a formulation to have strict regulations for the industry.
“Again, the domestic platforms for trading will help govt get revenue and encourage traders to use the cedi currency more. Thus, helping the cedi value to compete well on the capital market”
Gifty Annor-Sika Asantewah
Additionally, the ‘Women in Forex’ President charged the authorities to use their powers to create domestic platforms for local forex traders. This, she noted, will make regulation effective.
“They should use their powers to have some sort of domestic platforms so that we can trade. With this, regulations can actually come into play and there could be a way of taxing and charging if you want to use the platforms.”
Gifty Annor-Sika Asantewah
What ‘Women in Forex’ Organization is doing to help Women
The President of the organization outlined various programmes her outfit is carrying out to ensure more women are trained in forex trading.
Mrs Annor-Sika indicated that her organization is looking to train about 10,000 youths, especially women in the next 10 years.
“We are looking up to 5000 people to actually have free classes. We have a pending class that is scheduled on the 9th to 10th of October, 2021, that’s targeting the university graduates”
Gifty Annor-Sika Asantewah
She also averred that they have paid classes as well. The paid classes, she said, gives the participants more. “We help them to practice and we give them 6 months to learn how to compound whatever amount they have after giving them the training and the mentorship.”
Touching on the challenges so far, she stated that they are running the organization without any support. Therefore, she called on the government and NGO’s to offer some form of sponsorship to help ‘Women in Forex’ to train more youths in forex trading.
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