Power, Gender and Social Change in AfricaGender plays a hugely significant and too often under-considered role in predicting how accessible resources such as education, wage-based employment, physical and mental health care, adequate nutrition and housing will be to an individual or community. According to a 2001 World Bank report titled Engendering Development—Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice, enormous disparities exist between men and women in terms of basic rights and the power to determine the future, both in Africa and around the globe. A better understanding of the links between gender, public policy and development outcomes would allow for more effective policy formulation and implementation at many levels. This book, through its discussion of the challenges, achievements and lessons learned in efforts to attain gender equality, sheds light on these important issues. The book contains chapters from an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including sociologists, economists, political scientists, scholars of law, anthropologists, historians and others. The work includes analysis of strategic gender initiatives, case studies, research, and policies as well as conceptual and theoretical pieces. With its format of ideas, resources and recorded experiences as well as theoretical models and best practices, the book is an important contribution to academic and political discourse on the intricate links between gender, power, and social change in Africa and around the world. |
From inside the book
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Rather, the only constituency to which the MP is accountable is the political party.
All of this leads to concerns about party paternalism and concerns about women
MPs' abilities to push for gender equality platforms. Under such circumstances ...
Former Ugandan MP Miria Matembe (2006, 9) confirms this view: as a patronage
opportunity, she argues, the quota system “does not necessarily attract qualified
and competent women to espouse the cause of gender equality...but any ...
Opposition parties, by contrast, did not define a mechanism for selecting women
to their reserved seats, according to ... In general, she also finds that the women
MPs elected from the provinces and Kigali on the gender quota were far less ...
the long term reserved seats could have a “crippling effect because women can
become scared to stand on their own in constituencies” (Morna 2004b, 60). More
optimistically, women MPs in Tanzania also argue that women who enter the ...
accomplishments despite women's greater presence in those parliaments for
only a decade or so. In Namibia, women MPs have taken credit for the 1996
Married Persons Equality Act that makes women and men equal before the law in
...