Elections
Only 28 women stood for parliament out of 258 contestants, representing 10.85 per cent. Only three women won their seats. This represents 4.92 per cent of the 61 seats. It’s a drop from 5.26 per cent in the 2019 elections.
In Botswana, women make up 54 per cent of the eligible voters. Yet few occupy the corridors of power, where decisions and policies that affect them are made.
The country has been praised for being a model democracy. One of the reasons is that it has held regular elections since independence in 1966.
There are, however, flaws in Botswana’s democracy. One is that women are woefully under-represented in government.
I am a scholar of public policy in southern Africa. I am also a proponent of equal representation of women, who are a marginalised majority. In my research, I argue that women’s limited participation hinders the consolidation of democracy.
Democracy is inconceivable without political parties. They put into practice the principle of representation. They select, nominate and support candidates for political office. Botswana needs to focus attention on improving the role of political parties as gatekeepers to the democratic space.
Read here the full article published by The Eastleigh Voice on 15 December 2024.
Image by The Eastleigh Voice
Nearly half the world's population - 3.6 billion people - had major elections in 2024, but it was also a year that saw the slowest rate of growth in female representation for 20 years.
Twenty-seven new parliaments now have fewer women than they did before the elections - countries such as the US, Portugal, Pakistan, India, Indonesia and South Africa. And, for the first time in its history, fewer women were also elected to the European Parliament.
The BBC has crunched numbers from 46 countries where election results have been confirmed and found that in nearly two-thirds of them the number of women elected fell.
The data is from the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) - a global organisation of national parliaments that collects and analyses election data.
There were gains for women in the UK, Mongolia, Jordan and the Dominican Republic, while Mexico and Namibia both elected their first female presidents.
However, losses in other places mean that the growth this year has been negligible (0.03%) - after having doubled worldwide between 1995 and 2020.
Read here the full article published by the BBC on 29 December 2024.
Image by BBC
There’s a question that has consistently gripped Botswana’s politics: bomme ba kae? (where are the women?). It became even more urgent with the country’s 2024 general elections.
Only 28 women stood for parliament out of 258 contestants, representing 10.85%. Only three women won their seats. This represents 4.92% of the 61 seats. It’s a drop from 5.26% in the 2019 elections.
In Botswana, women make up 54% of the eligible voters. Yet few occupy the corridors of power, where decisions and policies that affect them are made.
The country has been praised for being a model democracy. One of the reasons is that it has held regular elections since independence in 1966.
There are, however, flaws in Botswana’s democracy. One is that women are woefully under-represented in government.
I am a scholar of public policy in southern Africa. I am also a proponent of equal representation of women, who are a marginalised majority. In my research I argue that women’s limited participation hinders the consolidation of democracy.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 13 December 2024.
Image by The Conversation
What you need to know:
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In a historic moment for African politics, Ghana elected its first female vice-president and Namibia elected its first female president, joining Tanzania's Samia Suluhu Hassan in the continent's apex female leadership.
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Both leaders bring impressive credentials to their roles - Opoku-Agyemang as a former university vice-chancellor and education minister, and Nandi-Ndaitwah with over 25 years in senior public offices.
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While these appointments mark significant progress for gender equality in African politics, challenges remain as evidenced by the low representation of women in Ghana's cabinet and parliament, though Namibia shows better progress with 44.2% women parliamentarians.
The year draws to a close with two momentous political achievements in Africa. On December 7, Ghana re-wrote history by electing its first ever female vice president in Prof Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, as running mate of former President John Dramani Mahama, now president elect, under the National Democratic Congress which won with 56.55 percent of the votes.
Read here the full article published by The Nation Africa on 18 December 2024.
Image by The Nation Africa
Ahead of 2024, political experts and commentators were calling this “the year of democracy”. It was deemed a “make or break year”, as around 1.5 billion people went to the polls in more than 50 countries, which held significant elections.
For women, who are already underrepresented in global politics, there were some critical victories and losses.
Based on statistics from UN Women alongside current election updates, Women’s Agenda has calculated there are 30 countries where 31 women serve as Heads of State and/or Government. Just 20 countries have a woman Head of State, and 17 countries have a woman Head of Government.
At the current rate, gender equality in the highest positions of power will not be reached for another 130 years.
As authoritarianism is on the rise worldwide as well, national elections grappled with challenges involving voter participation, free speech, and electoral independence.
Here’s a look back at some of this year’s most influential election results for women.
Read here the full article published by the Women’s Agenda on 16 December 2024.
Image by Women’s Agenda
This has been a historic electoral year, with more than 1.6 billion citizens called to cast their votes in 2024. In more than 70 countries, people have decided the political path of their nations. Yet we end this cycle with the sense that democracy is more threatened than ever.
There is an undeniable disconnect between citizens and their leaders. The scepticism and lack of trust should not surprise us. We are not leaving an easy world behind, especially for younger generations. Climate breakdown, the lack of economic opportunities, social injustice, the global housing crisis – these challenges have steadily eroded the democratic ideal. As a result, our societies are facing a wave of distrust in democratic institutions, particularly among younger citizens.
This scenario highlights a fundamental issue many governments face: is it possible that representative democracy has stopped representing us?
There is one area where the numbers speak for themselves, and the message isn’t a positive one. Globally, less than 30% of parliamentary seats are held by women, and fewer than 30 countries are led by women. While these figures are better than in previous years, they still reflect a chronic problem; at this pace, it would take us roughly 130 years to achieve gender equality.
To put this into perspective, a plastic bag takes about 100 years to decompose. If we were to use one today, it would vanish from this planet before democracies achieve gender parity. Gender isn’t the only example of the disconnect between politics and people, but it is a particularly stark one: how can our system of representation neglect half of the people it is meant to represent?
Read here the full article published by The Guardian on 6 December 2024.
Image by Guardian
The ” Women legislators and economic performance” working paper by researchers at the universities of Essex, Michigan, Siegen, and Youngstown has found that Indian constituencies that elected women recorded “significantly higher growth” in economic activity over those that elected men.
The paper written by Thushyanthan Baskaran, Sonia Bhalotra, Brian Min, and Yogesh Uppal looks at 4,265 state assembly constituencies across India between 1992 and 2012, focusing on those where the woman candidate’s margin of victory was very small. This let the researchers look at cases where the legislator’s gender was effectively randomly assigned and not influenced by factors like a generally progressive constituency.
Click here to download the research.
NDI collaborated with the Federation of Women Lawyers - Kenya (FIDA-K) to review the performance of women in the 2017 general elections in A Gender Analysis of the 2017 Kenya General Elections. Through an examination of the legal and social environment within which the elections took place, and in comparison to the 2013 elections, the report provides data and analysis on women as candidates during the 2017 elections, and draws conclusions on the barriers to their success. These conclusions form the basis of recommendations for increasing meaningful women’s representation in Kenya’s elective bodies in the future.
Click here to read the report published by NDI on 28 February 2018.
Pakistani women face unique and frequently more severe challenges to their political participation than men do. In particular, the violence faced by Pakistani female political candidates, and voters is a serious barrier to their full participation in civic life. These challenges are especially difficult to address because they often go unrecorded and unreported. Security actors and public bodies such as Electoral Management Bodies (EMBs) may struggle to respond to protect and promote women’s public participation because of the absence of documentation and understanding of the nature and magnitude of the problem, as well as lack of specific programming responses that may be appropriate to the context.
The present study seeks to fill this knowledge gap by documenting the distinct challenges to women’s political participation in Pakistan, specifically examining the issue of violence against women in politics (VAWP) during electoral processes. The aim of the study is to produce an evidence base and identify the types of VAWP in Pakistan to encourage appropriate policy measures through legislative reforms by Election Commission of Pakistan (ECP), and other key stakeholders. Specifically, the aim of this baseline study is to identify the forms of VAWP and to document its prevalence and magnitude in the country.
Based on this analysis, the study offers a number of policy options to address the issue of VAWP as well as providing recommendations to develop effective measures for eliminating VAWP in consultation with Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), media, political parties, women candidates and voters, the National Database and Registration Authority (NADRA) and ECP. The study concludes with recommendations for the development of mechanisms to monitor incidents of VAWP ahead of elections.
Click here to read the report.
Abstract
Proportional electoral systems tend to be more beneficial for women's descriptive representation than majority systems. However, within proportional systems the gender equality of election outcomes differs, highlighting the importance of studying the actual use of electoral provisions in proportional representation (PR) systems. Therefore, we investigate the determinants of voting for female candidates in Belgium's local elections. This case is particularly interesting given the equal number of men and women on the candidate lists due to quota regulations, the possibility to cast multiple preference votes (lowering competition), and the high visibility of these local elections and its candidates. At the individual level, we find that women are more likely than men to vote for several women, yet same-sex voting is more common among men. Politically sophisticated respondents vote more often for candidates of both sexes. Against our expectations, a left-wing orientation does not increase the likelihood of voting for women. At the electoral district level, a larger supply of women at the top list position increases the chance to vote for this top woman, but there is no spillover effect to women lower on the list. District magnitude affects the number of preference votes but, against expectations, not the likelihood of voting for women.
Click here to access the paper.
The National Conference on “Gender and Electoral Reform: Making A Difference” in Malaysia was envisioned to look at current debates and obstacles as well as innovative strategies and alternative models in women’s representation in the Malaysian electoral process. This Conference introduced a panel of scholars and specialists to share their experiences and expertise, leading the discourse into the Malaysian context in hope of facilitating electoral reform together for a higher representation of women in politics.
This report covers the conference background and then explores the following areas: current debates, alternative models, the Malaysian context, experiences of politicians, barriers and strategies, and finally the conference recommendations.
Click here to access the report.
The research presented in this paper provides useful insights into how increasing women’s descriptive representation within a legislature affects citizens’ interest and engagement in the political process, or their symbolic representation. Uruguay’s first quota law was implemented in the 2014 elections, resulting in significant increases in the number of women serving in both houses of Uruguay’s Parliament. Surveying citizens before and after the elections, the research team found strong evidence that increases in women’s descriptive representation had a positive effect on citizens’ symbolic representation, and that this effect was stronger for women than for men. Before election day, women were significantly less likely than men to say they were interested in politics, less likely to state that they understood political issues in Uruguay, and less likely to report having trust in elections; after election day, these differences disappeared and women were as likely as men to be interested in politics, understand current political issues, and trust the electoral process.
This publication was produced by USAID in partnership with Arizona State University and the Institute of International Education as part of the Research and Innovation Grants Working Papers Series.
Click here to read to read the study.