Bashiratu Kamal is a feminist organizer, development practitioner, journalist, unionist and a gender and labour specialist. She works with a trade union and her duties include working to ensure that Collective Agreements, policies and legislations are responsive to the needs of women workers in the workplace. She leads several Union campaigns on the provision of Child Care facilities, Maternity protection and eliminating violence and sexual harassment in the Workplace. Bashiratu has worked on several projects that aims at organizing, providing training and education and facilitating the inclusion of women in the informal sector into the Union’s structures. She worked on providing alternative livelihoods for informal sector women in the agricultural value chain in about 50 communities where women’s committees were also established. She authored a module on Gender in the GAWU training manual and developed a gender policy for the Union 55 years after its formation.
She has published several work on women and the labour market and the impact of COVID-19 on women’s work in Ghana. She has authored chapters in yet to be released books in 2021 focusing on her journey to leadership and feminism. Some titles include: “Unperturbed” and “Becoming! The path to fighting for a just world”. Bashiratu recently completed a rapid assessment study for the Star Ghana Foundation on the “Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Sexual and Gender-based Violence focused on: witchcraft, cyber bullying and sexual abuse against children” She was one of the reviewers for ActionAid Ghana’s “tool kit for integrating unpaid care work into development plans” and working on several other projects with some Civil Society Organizations in Ghana.
A convenor for the #hijabisanidentity campaign launched in 2019 towards fighting discrimination and marginalization of Muslim women and girls for wearing Hijab in workplaces and to school. She is a member of the 15-member committee Ghana Feminist Forum by AWDF and Netright. Her Research interests focuses on Sexual and Gender-based violence, women and the labour market etc. she was recently commissioned to do a review of the “Women in Islam Journal” published by the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA).
She holds a Master’s in Labor and Global Workers Rights with a minor in Adult Education from Penn State University, a degree in HRM, Diploma in Development Leadership from the Coady International Institute and an Advanced Diploma in Journalism. She is a Cohort of the Ghanaian Women’s Social Leadership Program by the Robert F. Wagner Institute of New York University. She is also a fellow and council member of the Centre for Social Justice and the a volunteer as the Community Engagement Director for the FemInStyle Africa magazine, an online feminist magazine for women and by women.