Quotas

A group of Pacific women politicians and leaders have met in Fiji to find ways to boost the number of Pacific women in elected positions.

The Pacific has the lowest number of women in government in the world at just 4-point-7 percent.

Twenty women from seven Pacific Islands states came together for a workshop in Fiji last week, which was organised by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development and the Fiji Women's Rights Movement

Efforts to boost the participation of women in Afghan politics are in serious jeopardy, an IWPR debate has heard.

Noor Mohammad Noor, a spokesman for the Independent Elections Commission (IEC), said that attitudes towards female members of parliament and provincial councillors remained "backward" and that it was proving difficult to change public perceptions.

Addressing more than 20 students from universities in Kabul and Nangarhar, he claimed legislation passed in July last year to reduce the number of provincial council seats reserved for women was a mistake.

Women should have at least 100 of the 444 seats in the next parliament, the National Council for Women said in a statement Thursday.

Representation of women should be proportionate to their weight in society and their wide-scale participation in the constitutional referendum, NCW said, adding that an opportunity should be given to women to change the stereotypical idea of their role.

The National Democratic Institute (NDI) has been working to strengthen political parties, civil society, media and other key democratic institutions in Algeria since 1997.

Finding out why women’s voices are not being listened to is imperative to increasing the proportion of female political representation in Cambodia, a meeting heard yesterday.

The Committee to Promote Women in Politics (CPWP) – which is made up of 12 organisations – hosted discussions in the capital that included discussion about the importance of having a legislative population that is at least 25 per cent female, one of Cambodia’s Millenium Goals.

ISLAMABAD: To add to the hype surrounding local bodies elections, non-government organisation and human rights groups have urged the election commission to prepare and release gender disaggregated data. 

Addressed to the Prime Minister, Senate chairman and chief ministers, the letter demands categorised data to strengthen democratic culture.

A revision to Nicaragua’s law on municipal elections last year required political parties to put up equal numbers of women and men as candidates for mayor and city council. It also increased the number of city council seats in each municipality. The result has been more women than ever winning races for mayor and city council.

One of them was Antonia Rizo, a city councilor in San Sebastian de Yal. “When I arrived at my position, I was afraid to speak,” she said, because of lack of familiarity with the city’s legal system.

A little while back a lawsuit was filed with the Supreme Court to disallow funding of political parties that do not include women in the party list.

I do not know what happened with that suit - I have not yet heard that it has been discussed or decided upon, so I assume it is still an open case.

Some lawmakers have decided not to wait for the Supreme Court decision, and are taking the same idea via a different route - legislation in the Knesset.

Women Affairs Minister Hajiya Zainab Maina has called for the adoption of special measures to entrench affirmative action-certain percentage of women- in both elective and appointive positions at all levels in the 2015 elections.

She made the during her key-note address at a 2-day for female parliamentarians on state legislatures on affir-mative action and the quota implementation guideline.

We invite you to read the full article published October 30, 2013