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News from the Field: Increasing women's political participation and representation in the Southern African Development Community region (SADC)

UNDEF is supporting a two year initiative carried out by the Southern African Development Community Parliamentary Forum, which is a regional inter parliamentary body composed of the following parliaments from : Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Widening and addressing the challenge of women’s political participation and representation has become a priority for each country in the SADC region. While gender equality, political participation and representation of women have in general been accepted as applicable principles in the SADC region, their translation into practice remain wanting.

It is commonly considered that representation of women must reach 30% before they can be of significant impact. While the best reforming countries attained 36% in women’s parliamentarian participation, the lowest mark in the region is 10.7%. Countries with the highest levels of women’s representation are often those that have a proportional representation system or have legislated or provided quotas for women parliamentarian participation within their constitution.

The overall objective of this regional project, which focuses on countries in which elections are scheduled between 2007 and 2010, is twofold and consists in:

• advocating for women’s political participation and representation


• developing empowerment strategies for female parliamentarians.

Started in April 2007, the project has implemented the many activities both at country and regional levels of the Regional Women's Parliamentary Caucus (RWPC) which is the operational body of the SADC PF.

In Zambia, out of the 24 women parliamentarians only 5 were reelected at the elections of September 2006. In order to address the critical issue of the high turnover of elected women, the RWPC organized, in July 2007, a roundtable which focused on the need to equip female parliamentarians with enhanced tools and resources. This event provided a valuable opportunity to bring together women elected from diverse political parties and to enable them to exchange best practices and map out future steps, such as :

• positioning the National Women’s Parliamentary Caucus as the main vehicle for advancing women political representation across political party lines;


• identifying measures to promote the 30% goal for women’s representation in elected offices;


• developing additional empowerment strategies for women in politics.
  Inputs presented by the RWPC on the situation of women political representation in Angola, Namibia and Swaziland have highlighted the value of regional cooperation in that matter.

In Mauritius, the Women’s Parliamentary Caucus has been established in the National Assembly of Mauritius, in July 2007, with the purpose of facilitating “peer cooperation” and support between elected women across party lines and therefore to accelerate the increase of the number of women parliamentarians.
At this occasion, a fruitful dialogue between, on one hand, key decision makers of the National Assembly such as the Speaker, the Deputy Chief Government Whip and, on the other hand, the Minister for Women’s Rights has been initiated to further the aims of the project.

In Swaziland, the SADC PF has conducted advocacy activities targeting Government, traditional institutions and civil society organizations. The Kingdom of Swaziland uses a non political party based system known as Tinkhundla under which parliamentarians are directly nominated from the community. Due to traditional biases in favor of male leadership, women are easily sidelined from the electoral process as illustrated by the following figures: out of 55 Tinkhundla constituencies, only 5 women were elected in the House of Assembly.
In order to face this challenge, the project is developing constituency based strategies in cooperation with the national gender machinery campaign entitled “Vote for a Woman” aimed firstly at motivating women to participate in politics and secondly at encouraging chiefdoms and voters to nominate women in their local communities.

In Zimbabwe, SADC PF activities are highlighting how women from Zimbabwe are still engaged politically despite the huge constraints that they have been facing, to secure their democratic participation and representation.
Interventions conducted by SADC PF have targeted the main political stakeholders in the country such as political party leaders, women parliamentarians, NGOs and civil society organizations working on gender and politics, Ministry for Gender Affairs, Ministry for Justice, Legal and Parliamentarian Affairs as well as the electoral management body.
The principal objective of these interventions is to encourage political parties to increase intra-party democracy processes and to challenge patriarchal value systems.
The obstacles to political participation of women in Zimbabwe including intimidation, domination and violence were underlined, while practices, strategies and policy options to enhance women’s political participation and representation were discussed.

At this early stage of implementation, the project has already contributed significantly to address the issue of women’s political involvement.

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