Power, Gender and Social Change in AfricaRaj Bardouille, Margaret Grieco Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009 M03 26 - 359 pages Gender 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
... percent women, placing them in the top 30 nations worldwide in terms of numbers of women in national legislatures. This is far above the African regional and world averages of about 17 percent women in a single or lower house of ...
... percent women, Zimbabwe's of 16.7 percent (since 2005), Botswana's of 11.1 percent, and Malawi's of 13.9 percent (since 2004). Women comprise 10.8 percent of Swaziland's parliament (since 2003), 11.7 percent of Lesotho's (since 2002) ...
... percent quotas for their candidate lists for National Assembly elections, the ANC before the 1994 election and Frelimo at its sixth party congress in 1992 (Myakayaka-Manzini 2004; Abreu 2004b). Subsequently, both parties committed ...
... percent of the total) elected from the provinces and the city of Kigali (two representatives from each); in addition two seats are reserved for the youth and one for the handicapped. Interestingly, in the first election (2003) under the ...
... percent women in national legislatures: voluntary (though internally-mandated) 30 percent quotas on the part of the dominant party in each country, with women required by the parties to be evenly dispersed throughout candidate lists ...