ABSTRACT
Although rightly lauded as one of the strongest democracies in Africa, it is striking that women do not have a political quota in Ghana and that women's rights have been as often handed down through the politics of patronage as achieved through civil society activism. This chapter explores how the organization of political power has shaped progress in domestic violence policy in Ghana. The chapter highlights the contradictory role that powerful women leaders can play within the process of advancing women's rights, with the female Minister of women's Affairs publicly opposed to the original bill, which contained a controversial clause on marital rape. As in the Bangladesh and Ugandan cases, women parliamentarian's mobilization of informal social networks was a critical strategy that underpinned the successful passing of the law. However, framing domestic violence in such a way as to be nonthreatening to existing gender norms and relations limited its transformative potential and contributed to implementation gaps. Policy implementation in a competitive clientelist environment is a highly personalized and political process, and with few political gains from enacting domestic violence legislation, successive governments have failed to successfully implement the law.
