Recent elections in East and Southern Africa have left fewer women in politics, placing countries at risk of not meeting equality targets, the United Nations (UN) said on Wednesday.
“Elections in the region have shown regression with regard to women’s representation in parliament,” UN Development Programme director Bo Asplund told a conference of women in politics in Johannesburg.
The equal promotion of women is part of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDG), aimed at bridging gender disparities by 2015.
Asplund said research has shown that when you have progress on the MDG of gender equity, there is automatic progress on two of the other MDGs — poverty and maternal health.
According to the organisation, elections in 2009 saw female representation in Botswana plummet from 18% to 6,6%. Polls in Namibia in the same year saw the number of women elected fall from 30% to 22%.
“Besides Rwanda, which boasts more than 50% women representation in Parliament, followed by South Africa with 46%, many countries lag far behind the African Union and SADC [Southern African Development Community] targets of 50%,” said Asplund.
“Some countries are likely to miss the Millennium goal of promoting women’s rights,” he added.
Asplund said the UNDP would be monitoring the countries that are having elections in the next three years, as the 2015 deadline looms.
“Between 2011 and 2013 of the 22 countries which constitute east and southern Africa, 16 are having elections,” Asplund said, adding that the figure was unparallelled in recent history.
South Africa
Brigalia Bam, chairperson of the Independent Electoral Commission of South Africa, told delegates that tradition and religion had hampered the progression of women across the continent.
“In many parts of Africa tradition and religion still dictate to women. Improvement in certain areas of women empowerment does not mean that the battle has been won,” she said.
Bam said men are needed to help get gender equality at the levels it should be as women are still relied on to keep leadership and the roles ascribed to them by society at the same time.
“There have been incidents where husbands will call their wives in Parliament to ask what the name and number of the family doctor is,” she said.
Bam also said that South Africa should not get complacent.
“As South Africans, we should be proud but we have to be very careful of our statistics. There is a danger because the minute a country begins to boast of its numbers, there’s a danger that we may start to think the problem is solved.”
In 2000, the United Nations pledged to achieve its goals of halving extreme poverty, boosting health and education and promoting gender equality across the developing world by 2015. — Sapa, AFP and M&G
View more on our special report on 16 days of activism here:.