Finance and Budgeting

Female politicians still face numerous obstacles despite momentum for change.

On a sunny afternoon near a busy motorway in Beirut, former Lebanese MP Paula Yacoubian sits in the headquarters of her charitable organisation.

The general political context in 2022 is definitely different from that of 2018. But will the new Lebanese Parliament consist of more than six women following the May 15 elections?

While the deadline for the Lebanese interested in applying for candidacy in the 2022 parliamentary elections, which is March 15, 2022, arrives in a few days, only 47 women number among the 419 candidates who have so far officially submitted their applications.

In an act of political muscle-flexing, Val Demings and Cheri Beasley managed to clear the Democratic field in two of the nation’s most prominent Senate races.

As Black women running in two of the nation’s most closely watched Senate races, Democratic Rep. Val Demings of Florida and former North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Cheri Beasley are poised to make history if they’re successful in November. But that’s only part of what makes their campaigns stand out this year.

On July 31, 2021, the Moroccan Parliament adopted a reform that did not receive much attention but did represent a big step forward in helping close the country's gender gap. It involved a new amended law on public limited companies to promote balanced representation of women and men in corporate governance bodies (law 19.20 modifying and completing law 17-95 related to public limited companies). It set mandatory quotas for women on the boards of publicly traded companies, with a target of (at least) 30% female representation by 2024, and 40% by 2027.

At the COP26 climate summit, the leaders of Estonia, Tanzania and Bangladesh were the first to sign the Glasgow Women’s Leadership statement, calling for countries to support the leadership of women and girls on climate action at all levels of society and politics. Yet these three women comprised nearly a third of all female leaders at the conference, out of 140 heads of delegation.

Women politicians in the country, on Monday in Abuja, unveiled an online resource portal for women seeking elective positions in the 2023 general elections.

During the unveiling of the project tagged: ‘Nigerian Women Aspirants Website’, financed by an international human rights organization, the women politicians under the aegis of Women In Politics Forum, also said that the mode of party primaries was not enough to bring the needed change expected to be seen in the country’s political process.