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Following the round of UN Conferences on Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, many states in the developing world established national machineries to first ‘integrate women into development’, and later to spearhead the task of gender mainstreaming adopted in the Beijing Platform for Action. Analyses of these national machineries in different African countries suggest their effectiveness is constrained by, among other things, inadequate conceptualizations of mandates and functions and inadequate resources, including personnel. In this chapter, we analyse Ghana’s Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC) to understand how gender issues have been conceptualized and treated institutionally. To anchor our analysis, we include reflections by a former senior bureaucrat within the ministry, to understand the challenges and possibilities of working to advance gender equity within the Ghanaian state.

We [Takyiwaa and Nana Akua] met Francesca while working on a research study on ‘policy discourses around women’s empowerment’as part of the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment research programme. For that study, we were interested in the main institutional policy actors in Ghana, in respect of women’s empowerment. As the Ministry of Women and Children’s Affairs (MOWAC) is the lead policymaking agency on this issue, we had a series of interviews with a number of ministry staff, including Francesca who was at the time the director of the Department of Women of MOWAC. Out of that engagement came the idea to co-author this chapter on what it means to be a ‘femocrat’in the state bureaucracy, from both insider and outsider …