women's empowerment

Few female candidates ran for seats in the by-elections for provincial and National Assembly seats in Pakistan recently, let alone won. Similarly, after the country’s general elections in May 2013, the number of women holding contested National Assembly seats fell from 16 to 6. To international observers, the numbers may make Pakistani women appear as passive observers in the country’s political landscape, complacent with the status quo. But the story of Pakistani women’s political participation is more complex.

Future Prime Minister of Malaysia. Mother. Wife. Friend. Daughter of the mercurial and charismatic Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

Nurul Izzah is all these and more.

How she has grown up.  When she started out in politics, and started speaking publicly, she came off as shy.

We invite you to read the full article published September 3, 2013

The Prime Minister of the Cook Islands says more women should run for Parliament but need to get there on their own merits.

Henry Puna says he strongly encourages women to take up positions of power in Cook Islands communities.

But he says he disagrees with others about how women may get to those positions of power.

We invite you to read the full article published September 3, 2013

Heated debate erupted on the floor in the Senate on Thursday after some Senators strongly opposed a provision in the election reform law that requires political parties to ensure thirty percent gender equality during candidates' registration.

Some of the Senators, who opposed with the thirty percent gender equality provision, said the committee on the election reform law should not legalize what is not part of the Constitution of Liberia.

The Congress party is revamping its frontal organisation, Women Congress, in a bid to empower grassroots level women party workers politically, socially and economically.

All India Women Congress (AIWC) has been directed to form self-help groups of women members to make them self reliant.

Politically, their credentials will be screened at different levels before their appointment on responsible posts within the organisation.

This week our Prime Minister will join the leaders of 15 Pacific Island countries at the 44th meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum.

The 16 all-male leaders will meet for three days in the Marshall Islands, and discuss important issues such as climate change and Fiji's progress towards democratic elections next year.

But let's hope they will also find time to discuss gender equality in the Pacific, and why it is that women in the Pacific are worse off, in many respects, than most other women in the world.

Senegal's former justice minister, Aminata Toure, has been appointed to replace the prime minister, Abdoul Mbaye, she announced to the press on Sunday after the former government had been dismissed.

Toure said after talks at the presidential palace in Dakar that the Senegalese head of state Macky Sall "did me the honour of asking me to form a new government... and I have accepted this post with much humility."

Government should support women participation in politics as they can contribute immensely to the development of the country, a senior official with the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission has said.

ZEC deputy chairperson Mrs Joyce Kazembe said the participation of women in politics had remained low because of several bottlenecks, a development that is likely to hamper the country's quest to have men and women share 50 percent representation in the political landscape by 2015 in line with the Sadc protocol on gender and development.

A former PDP Women Leader, Dr Kema Chikwe, on Friday in Abuja advised women to work hard to secure positions in the party as the special convention gets underway.

She explained that the purpose for the special convention was to elect new National Working Committee (NWC) members to fill vacancies created by the resignation of 16 national officers and their deputies.

“Each position of the NWC is specialised. You must have the prerequisite and be sufficiently prepared to hold these positions.