Over the past two centuries, the European region has been the seat of many international milestones for women in politics. Various countries continue to achieve new high points for women’s political participation, inspiring women throughout the world. However, there is still great disparity in women’s political participation within the region itself.
This e-Primer looks at information and communications technology (ICT) for development through a gender lens. It provides a gender perspectives to issues of ICT policies; access and control; education, training and skill development; and content development, and introduces a framework to integrate gender in ICT for development and empower women.
A Practical Guide to Constitution Building provides an essential foundation for understanding constitutions and constitution building. Full of world examples of ground-breaking agreements and innovative provisions adopted during processes of constitutional change, the Guide offers a wide range of examples of how constitutions develop and how their development can establish and entrench democratic values. Beyond comparative examples, the Guide contains in-depth analysis of key components of constitutions and the forces of change that shape them.
Chapter 2 includes a section on "Principles related to gender" and Chapter 3 includes a section on "The rights of women".
How women participate in political parties – and how those parties encourage and nurture women’s involvement and incorporate gender-equality issues – are key determinants of women’s political empowerment. They are also key to ensuring gender-equality issues are addressed in the wider society. If strategies to promote women’s involvement in the political process are to be effective, they should be linked to steps parties can take across the specific phases of the electoral cycle – the preelectoral, electoral and post-electoral phases – and to the organization and financing of the parties themselves. This eighth report on equality between men and women describes developments towards gender equality in the European Union in 2010. Last year was a significant year for the European Commission’s work of advancing gender equality. We adopted a Women’s Charter on 5 March 2010 and by doing so, committed to strengthening gender equality in all our policies. We also adopted the Strategy for Equality between Women and Men (2010-2015) on 21 September which is an action plan to promote gender equality that will guide our actions for the period 2010-2015. These actions represent a political commitment by each member of the European Commission to advance equality between women and men in their own portfolios.
Democracy and the Challenge of Change: A Guide to Increasing Women’s Political Participation was created to be used by National Democratic Institute staff and other practitioners to develop, implement, monitor and evaluate women’s political participation programs across a variety of technical areas. With separate chapters on Citizen Participation, Elections and Electoral Processes, Political Parties and Governance, the guide provides a rationale for focusing on increasing women’s participation in each technical area, as well as programmatic frameworks, examples of best practices and case studies, and strategies to be used throughout the lifecycle of a program or project.
*The Guide will also be available in French and Spanish in the coming weeks.
This toolkit provides you with resources and ideas to help focus your efforts to fight domestic violence, sexual violence and trafficking and to give you a framework for action. It contains not only specific case studies of women across the globe, but it also provides policy background as well as concrete examples of what you can do to mount a campaign to combat human trafficking, sexual violence or domestic violence. Contact the authors at sfoster[at]stepheniefoster.com
and cindydyer[at]vitalvoices.org.
The EC-UNDP partnership in electoral assistance is unique for its scope, for its achievements and ambitions. It builds on a history of sector experience, specific attention to the lessons learned in previous projects and a mutual understanding of each other’s approaches, roles and capacities.
The partnership is proving to be of increasing value to electoral assistance operations to the beneficiary countries, as it allows to rationalize interventions in the area and leads to better and timelier formulation, implementation and monitoring of projects, and is in line with the concepts of enhanced donor coordination from the Declarations on Aid Effectiveness of Paris 2005 and Accra 2008. The resulting projects are consequently more effective, sustainable and in harmony with overall EU and UN objectives.
