Women's political participation

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.

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.

Civil Society Organizations working on women issues yesterday converged at the YWCA old hall in Freetown to validate the Sierra Leone in-Country monitoring of  UNSCRs 1325 and 1820 Sierra Leone Report 2013.
The Report states that there has been moderate progress in women’s participation in governance within the different sectors surveyed in the research process.

We invite you to read the full article published August 30

Candidates aspiring to join parliament on the women ticket have since Monday campaigned in different districts upcountry. A total of women have hit the campaign trail in the race for the 24 slots reserved for women, in a college vote that will take place on September 18.

The constituency in the election for women representative is at the provincial level.

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

Women rights organizations have urged the political parties and election commission to take care "not to undermine the already won battle" regarding women empowerment by failing to ensure 33 representation of women in the upcoming Constituent Assembly (CA) election. 

Nepal had become one among the few countries in the world with high women participation in the parliament by inducting 33 percent of women through the last CA election held in 2008.

Vanuatu’s Parliament has passed legislation providing for reserved seats for women in the country’s Municipal Councils.

The amendment to the Municipalities Act, which was passed with unanimous support among MPs, provides that one seat in every ward in a municipality must be reserved for a woman.

Under the new law, a female candidate for an election to a municipal council cannot contest for both a reserved seat and a general seat in a ward in a municipality.

Women across Afghanistan risk being unable to vote in next year's presidential elections because of a severe shortage of women in the security forces, the country's election monitor said on Wednesday.

Afghanistan's Independent Election Commission (IEC) said that there were just 2,000 of the required 12,000 women needed to carry out body searches required for voters entering polling stations set aside specially for women.