Political Parties
The monetisation of politics in Africa is impeding the effective participation of women in political and electoral processes, Ayisha Osori, a democracy and governance expert, has said.
Madam Osori, who is the Director of Open Society Foundations, a civil society organisation, observed that many women on the continent did not have the ability to raise the needed capital to fund their political activities.
Speaking to journalists at the opening of a conference on Increasing Women’s Political Presence in West Africa at the University of Ghana (UG), Legon on Tuesday, she said bankrollers of political parties and activists were mainly men and thus, made it difficult for women to overcome the monetary barriers.
Click here to read the full article published by News Ghana on 16 May 2023.
(CNN) — Lori Chavez-DeRemer sat in the gallery of the House nearly two decades ago with her mom and her twin daughters – tourists peering down at lawmakers on the floor of the chamber.
“I’d really love to be here someday,” the Oregon Republican recalled telling her mother, who encouraged her to think about a run. She’d recently been elected to her city council, but she had her doubts. “I said, ‘Everybody on the floor there probably has a law degree. I’m a stay-at-home mom.’”
But Chavez-DeRemer flipped a Democratic seat in November, helping Republicans win a narrow House majority. She is now among a record 42 Republican women in Congress and one of the first two Latino members of Congress from Oregon.
The trail she has blazed is emblematic of the progress that the Republican Party has made in electing women over the past decade – hard-fought milestones reached only after outside groups began playing a larger role in primaries.
Click here to read the full article published by CNN on 14 January 2023.
Preventing Violence Against Women in Politics – Benchmarks for Political Parties (2022) is a joint paper by democracy organisations working with political parties, which presents interventions for political parties on how to prevent and address any form of violence against women in politics (VAWIP) in order to strengthen women’s participation and representation in politics and political decision-making.
The paper is produced by Demo Finland, International IDEA, The Oslo Center and The National Democratic Institute (NDI) as part of the Political Party Peer Network (PPPeer).
Click here to access the report.
A secret review into the Liberals’ disastrous election loss in May has ruled out formal quotas for the number of women MPs in federal parliament and instead recommends a British-style recruitment drive to improve the party’s gender balance.
Former party director Brian Loughnane and Liberal Party finance spokeswoman Jane Hume have been leading the review, which began soon after the last federal election, and the pair briefed the federal executive on the almost-finalised review on Monday.
Click here to read the full article published by The Sydney Morning Herald on 30 November 2022.
Monika Zajkova was elected as the new party leader of LDP, ALDE Party member party in North Macedonia, at the party’s 8th National Congress held under the slogan "United, brave, loud!" on Sunday 20 November in Skopje.
Zajkova, a member of the North Macedonia's Parliament since 2020 was elected with 374 votes in favour and one against to the position for the next four years, assuming the role from Goran Milevski. Zajkova becomes the youngest party president in North Macedonia at the age of 31 and the first woman to lead LDP.
"I promise you future-oriented leadership,” she said in her acceptance speech to Congress, “because I see the LDP as a party that builds policies in the present, which will ensure a future where we will live better than today. The place where our generations will live to whom we bear the responsibility to take action today, right now!”
Click here to read the full article published by ALDE Party on 23 November 2022.
Xi has revealed an all male politburo for the first time since 1997. The move erases one of the few steps women had made towards real power in Communist China
Across seven decades of turmoil and change, one thing about China’s leadership has remained unchanged. It is all-male.
Men led China into the famine of the Great Leap Forward, through the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution and during the economic opening of the 1980s and 90s. In Xi Jinping’s “new era” of digital authoritarianism, men remain in charge of the country.
The Communist party has run China for 70 years, and in that time no woman has ever been a member of China’s Politburo Standing Committee, the small group that runs the country, much less led the party or been made president or premier.
Click here to read the full article published by The Guardian on 23 October 2022.