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
... Rwanda, women activists from the Tanzania Gender Networking Project have monitored closely the reserved seat system, put in place following the 1992 political transition, for its impact on women MPs and women's representation (Morna ...
... Rwanda has the greatest number of women in parliament of any country in the world—48.8 percent—since its 2003 election, the first election to use electoral gender quotas. In Mozambique and South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda, the progress ...
... Rwanda, Hella Schwartz (2004, 38-40) found in a survey of all 80 Rwandan MPs that the majority of MPs knew exactly which women MPs were elected by quota and which were elected by party list. In general, she also finds that the women MPs ...
... Rwanda is further restricting the impact of women legislators. Finally, Longman charges that the lack of political freedom at all levels of government in Rwanda limits the ability of women to influence policy. “Until the Rwandan ...
... Rwanda that in general women MPs, however elected, were far more likely than men MPs to consider women's interests “important duties” and therefore, she concludes, the use of the gender quota has “contributed to the presence of MPs with ...