Parliaments & Representatives

Nigeria’s renewed push to correct decades of severe gender imbalance in political representation has thrust one proposal to the centre of national debate: the Reserved Seats Bill, a constitutional amendment legislation seeking to create additional elective seats exclusively for women in the Senate, House of Representatives, and State Houses of Assembly.

The idea is simple: To increase women’s representation because, clearly, if deliberate steps are not taken, women will remain excluded from Nigeria’s political system. But the process of implementing this bill, particularly how political parties will nominate candidates and the emerging concerns over cost, campaign size, and electoral fairness, is far more complex.

This explainer unpacks the bill, breaks down how parties may eventually select candidates, examines potential drawbacks, and situates Nigeria’s conversation in a global context.

It also interrogates the argument that women contesting state-wide seats will face gubernatorial-level campaign burdens and what that means for the cost of governance.

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Across West Africa, women leaders and legislators are intensifying calls for ECOWAS to enforce laws mandating gender quotas in politics. The demand, freshly echoed at the ECOWAS Female Parliamentarians Association (ECOFEPA) Forum held during the Parliament’s 25th anniversary Extraordinary Session in Abuja, rests on a compelling argument: women make up more than half of the population, yet occupy only a fraction of parliamentary and executive seats across the region.

From Senegal, where women occupy over 40 percent of parliamentary seats due largely to strong quota laws, to Nigeria, where women account for barely 6 percent of legislators, the disparity is both glaring and persistent. The appeal by ECOFEPA president, Veronica Sesay, for member states to legislate reserved seats and proportional representation has revived a long-standing debate on legal fixes for political inequality.

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Tajikistan ranked 89th out of 181 countries in the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Index 2025/26, scoring 0.685, according to the latest global assessment of women’s well-being and rights.

Across Central Asia, Kazakhstan placed 72nd (0.722), followed by Turkmenistan at 74th (0.720), Kyrgyzstan at 84th (0.697), and Uzbekistan at 98th (0.674), The Caspian Post reports via Tajik media.

One of Tajikistan’s strongest indicators is everyday safety: 93 per cent of women said they feel safe walking alone at night in their neighborhood-marked in the index as the best result within the comparison group. However, the country trails in areas related to rights and protection. Access to justice was rated 0.7 on a 0-4 scale, the lowest in the group, while 14 per cent of women reported experiencing intimate partner violence, also the weakest показатель among peers.

Results for inclusion are mixed. Women in Tajikistan complete an average of 10.9 years of education. Employment among women aged 25-64 stands at 28.8 per cent, financial inclusion at 39.4 per cent, and 68 per cent of women use mobile phones. Women hold 26.6 per cent of parliamentary seats.

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A quilting metaphor, unique to our nakshi kantha, aptly describes Bangladesh's politics today. The intricate needlework that underpins the beauty of our nightly wrap-on continues to be a revered tradition, often ignoring the actual individuals who recycle worn-out cloths to infuse it with new vitality. The presence/absence of the women weaver's story in this tapestry is telling of our gendered reality. In theory, half the country is female. They lift trophies in football and cricket, they climb mountains, and they outperform their male peers in classrooms, laboratories, clinics, marketplaces, and factories. Yet, when the time comes to claim spaces of real political power, their role starts becoming scarce. The submission of candidatures by 110 women for the forthcoming election is one such example.

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Iraq’s Council of Representatives published a list of 81 candidates for the country’s presidency on Monday after nominations closed, including four women, as Kurdish parties put forward nominees for the largely ceremonial post.

Under Iraq’s power-sharing system, in place since the first multiparty elections in 2005, two years after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein’s rule, the premiership, the most powerful executive post, is held by a Shiite politician, while the speakership of parliament goes to a Sunni and the presidency is occupied by a Kurdish politician.

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New research from the University of St Andrews has found that increases in women’s parliamentary representation within a country are related to enhanced public trust in the national parliament. 

Published in the Routledge Handbook of Gender and Corruption, researchers from the University of St Andrews Business School analysed data on trust in parliament from the Integrated Values Surveys, a uniquely comprehensive dataset covering 107 countries from 1990 to 2022 and more than 492,000 individual responses.   

The results show a link between greater women’s representation and trust in parliament within countries. This relationship is statistically significant and takes account of variation in corruption levels, democratic quality, electoral systems, economic development, and key individual characteristics such as sex, age, education, and employment status. 

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