Elections

As election campaign enters final stages, the two leading candidates have been accused of pandering to sexism to win the votes of aggrieved young men.

The identity of South Korea’s next leader will be determined this week by the economy, housing prices and incomes, but the road to the presidential Blue House will also be dotted with the wreckage of the country’s poisonous gender politics.

After a quarter of a century of democratic experience that followed another 25 years of a revolutionary process that put women’s emancipation at the centre of the revolutionary discourse, women in Mozambique still face social, economic and political exclusions that impact their participation and representation in politics in general and in electoral processes in particular, while constituting 51 per cent of the population and 53 of the electorate.

Enhancing Women's Political Participation in Africa (Women in Political Participation (WPP) is a Pan-African gender project on the different facets of Women and Politics in Africa. Funded by Sida and implemented by International IDEA, it aims to advance gender equality in politics and governance, in line with the Maputo Protocol of 2003, various associated sub-regional protocols and standards, and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

At the fore on social and economic fronts, women are in the backseat when it comes to political representation.

Grace Jajo’s voice first choked and then she broke into tears, a microphone in her hand, addressing a gathering at Manipur Press Club in Imphal, the capital of the northeast Indian state. It was February 6, three weeks before the first of the two-phase election in Manipur was scheduled.

The YWCA in collaboration with the Women Working Group on women’s peace and security has ended a three-day workshop here, geared at preparing women to participate in the 2023 Presidential and general elections as a means of breaking the barriers of women’s participation in national decision making.

In the recently concluded single-phase Uttarakhand election women voters outnumbered men by more than 4 per cent. Goa had the highest voters overall.