Women marching in the 50-50 campaign last year.
Late last year, numerous NGOs in Zimbabwe embarked on a campaign to include women in 50 percent of the campaigns in the country’s elections on Saturday. Instead, Zimbabwean women, who are half the country’s population, will make up just 13 percent of candidates for the House of Assembly and 30 percent of candidates for the Senate, according to statistics provided by the Women in Politics Support Unit. In an interview with a reporter from Inter Press Service, Luga Shaba, executive director of Women’s Trust, discusses why the NGOs did not meet their mark.
Tonderai Kwidini (TK): Your campaign was aimed, in part, at having women account for 50 percent of persons on the ballot for the upcoming elections. But figures suggest that parties are falling short of that goal. What are the main reasons for this?
Luta Shaba (LS): I guess the campaign has not had an impact on the political parties because there is no clear mechanism in place to mandate political parties to abide by SADC guidelines on women’s participation in politics. (Zimbabwe is a signatory to the Southern African Development Community’s 1997 Declaration on Gender and Development, which set a goal of having 30 percent of decision-making posts in member nations in female hands by 2005, a goal since adjusted to 50 percent of posts.)
The guidelines are clear but there is a gap left between these and the national policies. We are therefore saying that the government has to put in place constitutional guidelines for all political parties to make sure that women have a place in politics.
TK: Speaking to IPS last year, you said the campaign wanted “to thrash out issues that are stopping us as women from getting into power and making transformative changes to the lives of women.” What issues have you identified in this regard, and how have you dealt with them?
LS: The most distressing things have been the political party machinations, where female candidates have sometimes been used as pawns in a political game, being thrown into areas where chances of winning might be remote. The other big issue has been the lack of access to resources such as finance, which is in itself a gendered problem in terms of the historical preference towards men.
Women have been made to believe by society that their best place is in the home, via marriage.
The other problem is the lack of information. Women are fed with all kinds of falsehoods discouraging them from participating because of a poor education background. We have, however, tried to turn this around by saying that women must use the resources that they have — such as the big numbers and a deep understanding of the community networks, and spreading information about participating in issues of governance.
Read the rest of the interview here.
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