Ghana’s election system keeps women out of parliament. How to change that ?
Source: The Conversation
Voters in Ghana elected the country’s first woman vice president, Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang, in early December 2024. Voters also elected John Mahama as president, a man who had served as president before, from 2013 to 2017.
In that first term as president, Mahama had also appointed the most women cabinet ministers ever in Ghana – six out of 19. But in the December parliamentary elections, women candidates barely improved upon the 2020 election result. Whereas 40 women – 20 from each of the two major parties – had been elected in 2020, only 43 women were elected in 2024 – 33 from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and 10 from the New Patriotic Party (NPP) according to provisional results. There are 276 seats in the country’s parliament.
This won’t change much until the west African nation addresses certain stumbling blocks, notably Ghana’s single member district or “first past the post” electoral system and its lack of a gender quota for parliament.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 11 December 2024.
Image by The Conversation
Voters in Ghana elected the country’s first woman vice president, Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang, in early December 2024. Voters also elected John Mahama as president, a man who had served as president before, from 2013 to 2017.
In that first term as president, Mahama had also appointed the most women cabinet ministers ever in Ghana – six out of 19. But in the December parliamentary elections, women candidates barely improved upon the 2020 election result. Whereas 40 women – 20 from each of the two major parties – had been elected in 2020, only 43 women were elected in 2024 – 33 from the National Democratic Congress (NDC) and 10 from the New Patriotic Party (NPP) according to provisional results. There are 276 seats in the country’s parliament.
This won’t change much until the west African nation addresses certain stumbling blocks, notably Ghana’s single member district or “first past the post” electoral system and its lack of a gender quota for parliament.
Read here the full article published by The Conversation on 11 December 2024.
Image by The Conversation