An effective political campaign is a connected series of operations designed to persuade constituents to vote for you, your candidate, a party or an issue. Campaigns require methodical planning, organization and implementation.
Women face a number of obstacles implementing effective, winning campaigns. Women generally have more difficulty than men do in raising sufficient funds to win a campaign, in large part because they are traditionally not the primary breadwinners. Similarly, women may not have equal access to decision-making regarding the distribution of funds. Traditionally, women must earn the internal support of their party or, alternatively, work even harder to win as independent candidates. Rather than focusing on the substance of a campaign and its message, the media and the public may focus instead on the appearance of a woman candidate or her role in the home. To earn the support of their own party and constituents, women must work harder than men do to create clean, targeted and compelling messages.
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.
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politics that it is often hard to wade through what’s true and what’s simply taken as truth but is actually a baseless, outdated stereotype.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 t
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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.
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.
With just 99 days to go until election day in November, political parties and candidates are all hard at work, looking for votes.
The NGO Committee on the Status of Women, Geneva, and its partner organizations, will host an NGO
Perspective by Bharati Sadasivam, Gender Practice Team Leader