Campaigns

The Women’s Campaign School is teaching women how to run a successful campaign.

The Girl Guides once taught young women to cope away from civilisation with camping trips and nature skills.

Now, they are more concerned with helping them face the challenges of modern life.

The youth group yesterday took its first step into politics, demanding school lessons in body confidence and equal numbers of men and women in Parliament.

Persatuan Kesedaran Komuniti Selangor (EMPOWER) is gravely concerned with the quality of the debate going on regarding a woman candidate for the Selangor Menteri Besar (MB) post.

Impossibly high moral standards are placed on Wan Azizah. We have heard from many quarters criticisms such as: she is Anwar Ibrahim’s wife and thus his puppet; that she purportedly has no clout; she is not competent enough; and that she does not have the “wow” factor. On this basis, critics have shunned her as a potential candidate for the MB’s post.

Wai Wai Nu is a diminutive 27-year-old with pro-democracy activism in her genes and a quarter of her young life spent behind bars.

The former political prisoner is now working to end the persecution faced by her people, the stateless Rohingya Muslims in western Myanmar.

The mistreatment she and her family have suffered is just one example among many of abuse aimed at the Rohingya, a minority of around 1.33 million living mainly in Rakhine State. Most are denied citizenship despite having lived in Myanmar for generations.

The United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women has launched a report and training manual for building the capacity of stakeholders on Affirmative Action in the country.

The manual titled: "Sociocultural Determinants of Voting Patterns in Nigeria - Reference to Women's Participation and Representation," was expected to serve as guide towards ensuring increased participation of women in the political process.

There is so much conventional wisdom about women in politics that it is often hard to wade through what’s true and what’s simply taken as truth but is actually a baseless, outdated stereotype.  Part of the problem, at least at the national level, is that there just isn’t enough information to go on because only a handful of women have run for president – 13 women to be exact, dating back to 1872. The entire GOP field will probably be about that size come 2016, but I digress.

Photo-AFP

Some accused it of being predictable and even boring - a presidential election in which the incumbent was all but guaranteed of being re-elected without, perhaps, even the need for a second round of voting.

But then tragedy intervened and changed everything.

We simply do not know what kind of president Eduardo Campos, the presidential candidate for Brazil's Socialist Party who was killed in a plane crash last week, would have been.

The top candidates for Toronto’s mayoral race and where they stand on key issues are well known, but the odds are that few people know who is running for city council in their ward.

A non-partisan group of approximately 15 youth is looking to change this lack of knowledge among Toronto voters. Most of them are under 35 years old and call themselves Women in Toronto Politics or WiTOpoli for short.