Hon. Ms Ursula Owusu-Ekuful
Mrs Ursula Owusu-Ekuful (MP) is Ghana’s Minister for Communications and Digitalisation and serves as the Member of Parliament for Ablekuma West Constituency within the Greater Accra Region in Ghana.
Mrs Owusu-Ekuful before she was appointed the Minister for Communications in 2017, was a Managing Consultant with N. U. Consult Legal – Governance and Gender Consultants – thereafter she served as the Chairperson of the Social Development Sector Committee – a committee responsible for the development of policy interventions for women, children, persons with disability, the aged and all social intervention policies and programs for the NPP 2016 manifesto.
She is also a member of the ITU Broadband Commission in addition to the following –
- She is a member of the Ghana Bar Association,
- an Executive Member of the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) Ghana,
- and a member of the African Women Lawyers Association (AWLA), Ghana.
- a Masters degree in Conflict, Peace and Security from the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre Minister Ursula Owusu-Ekuful also Co-chaired the AU/EU Digital Economy Task Force launched in 2018 by t EU/AU.
In 2012, she was elected to be the Member of Parliament for the new constituency Ablekuma West Constituency as their first member of parliament.
In 2015, she contested and won the NPP parliamentary primaries in the Ablekuma West Constituency. She retained her parliamentary seat during the 2016 Ghanaian general elections, by winning with 34,376 votes out of the 60,558 valid votes cast making 56.96%. She and other female MPs were subject to personal attacks after there was a dispute over places reserved for female members of parliament. She was reported as saying that she was considering her future in politics, but the following year she became the Minister of Communications.
In 2017, she was appointed as the Minister to head the Ministry for Communications by President Akufo-Addo. She is currently the Minister for Communications and Digitalization.
in December 2020, she contested for re-election as member of parliament in the 2020 Ghanaian general election as the parliamentary candidate for the NPP. Going into the election as the incumbent Member of Parliament of the Ablekuma West Constituency, she retained her seat after polling 37,363 out of 69,353 votes. Her closest competitor Rev. Kweku Addo of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) was second with 30,733 votes, whilst the other candidates who contested from the other parties, GUM, LPG and PNC polled 359, 330 and 65, respectively.
Freemasonry has had a complex relationship with women, which can be readily divided into many phases with no demonstrable relationship to each other until the 20th century. A few women were involved in Freemasonry before the 18th century; however the first printed constitutions of the Premier Grand Lodge of England appeared to bar them from the Craft forever.
The French Lodges of Adoption, which spread through Continental Europe during the second half of the 18th century, admitted Masons and their female relatives to a system of degrees parallel, but unrelated to the original rite. In the early 20th century, these were revived as women-only lodges and later they adopted male degrees giving rise to French women’s Masonry in the 1950s.
18th-century British lodges and their American offshoots remained male only. In the late 1800s, rites similar to adoption emerged in the United States, allowing masons and their female relatives to participate in ritual together. These bodies, however, were more careful to discriminate between the mixed ritual and the genuine Freemasonry of the men.
In the 1890s, mixed lodges following a standard Masonic ritual started to appear in France, and quickly spread to other countries. Women-only jurisdictions appeared soon afterwards. As a general rule, the admission of women is now recognised in Continental (Grand Orient) jurisdictions. In Anglo-American Freemasonry, neither mixed nor all-female lodges are officially recognised, although unofficial relations can be cordial, with premises sometimes shared.