Women's political participation

In late March, Raveela Gangula rallied a dozen women to stop a drunken man from savagely beating his wife in Muthangi, a village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Although they restrained him and called the police, he was released that evening without charges.

“The police should have locked him up for at least a week and scared him from ever touching another woman like that again,” Gangula said. “The government does not support us.”

With the results still being counted from Afghanistan's recent presidential election, the top United Nations official in the country today urged efforts to ensure that women remain meaningfully engaged in the political process and improve political life there.

Khyber Pakhtunkhawa Chief Minister Pervez Khattak has announced that women police desks would be established at all 500 police stations of the province to facilitate the province’s female population.

Speaking at a ceremony in the provincial capital city, Khattak announced the establishment of Model Police Stations at Gulbahar, Faqirabad and UniversityTown areas under a pilot project which would be later extended to other police stations across the province.

This project empowers rural women in Kenya to engage with (county and national) government and participate in budget making and the prioritisation, monitoring and implementation of development activities. This will improve government accountability and responsiveness. It combines tech and non-tech solutions to address low participation by women in decision making.

Women’s empowerment and political participation are not only crucial for women: they are essential for effective democratic governance, one which promotes human rights and equity.  The same can be said about the importance of boosting youth political participation.

The U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) invited three young women parliamentarians from Latin America and the Caribbean to join a recent discussion in Salamanca, Spain, on young women’s political participation in the region.

A group of around 800 Moroccans, mostly women, staged a march in the capital Rabat on Sunday demanding that a constitutional guarantee of gender equality be applied in the kingdom.

The march from the city centre to parliament was led by the Civil Coalition for the Application of Article 19, which is reportedly made up of some 500 NGOs, and was joined by civil society organisations, lawmakers, rights groups and lawyers.

The WIP Study Trip to Iceland was a successful learning exercise about the global leader in gender equality. International female Parliamentarians coming from more than 20 countries had the opportunity to meet the President, the Prime Minister, Members of the Government and Members of the Parliament of Iceland during the 2-days Study Trip in Reykjavík (3-4 April).

Three milestones in the history of Iceland were essentially mentioned during the Study Trip: