Kenya

The Federation of Women Lawyers has accused President Uhuru Kenyatta of treating women as ‘second class citizens’ after he failed to name any of them in his first batch of nine members of the Cabinet.

Fida said that in retaining only six men in his Cabinet, and naming three more as new entrants, he had failed to acknowledge the contribution women had made to the nation in the Cabinet.

NAIROBI, Sept 7 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Buoyed by record gains in last month's elections, Kenyan activists say they hope the nation's top court will enforce women's right to better political representation, following a surprise decision to nullify the presidential election.

More women have been elected to Parliament this year compared to 2013, but the 12th Parliament might be plunged into an unprecedented constitutional crisis of meeting the two-thirds gender rule.

Abdia Gole, 33, is a recent graduate of Business Management from one of the leading universities in Kenya, and a candidate for the upcoming County Assembly elections for Gorbo Ward, Marsabit County, in Northern Kenya. “I am going door to door, campaigning to urge women and youth to vote for me.

The IPU held a capacity-building workshop for staff of the Kenyan Parliament on mainstreaming gender into parliamentary work. The workshop, co-organized with the Parliament of Kenya on 19-23 June in Nairobi, was a follow-up of a self-assessment exercise conducted in 2016 on the Parliament's gender-sensitivity.

The political arena in the country appears to be far from offering a level playing field for women politicians, at least going by the recent party primaries where only handful of them successfully braved the bruising and bare-knuckled campaigns staged mainly by their male opponents.

The government of Kenya has launched a strategy aimed at supporting greater participation of women in elective politics. This comes ahead of the two third gender rule bill set to be reintroduced in parliament. The bill set to come up for voting for the third time at the National Assembly seeks to ensure that either gender has at least one third representation to both appointive and elective positions.