A Giant Step for Women's Political Leadership

Commentary by Yolonda C. Richardson, CEDPA President & CEO

January 13, 2006—When Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf takes the reins of Liberia on Jan. 16, she will lead a nation of just over 3.3 million people that has been marred in conflict for decades.

It is an important step in Liberia’s movement toward peace and development, coming after a two-year transitional government that has led Liberia since the end of the most recent civil conflict there.

It is also a giant step for women.

Johnson-Sirleaf will be the first woman to win a nationwide presidential election in Africa. She joins a very small club of women around the world who currently lead their countries. These include Angela Merkel, who became Germany’s first female chancellor in November, and Michelle Bachelet of Chile, who won the run-off election for the presidency of Chile. The election of these women is a remarkable accomplishment. Still, women face stiff barriers to their participation in setting the course of a country.

While these women are well qualified to lead her nations—Johnson-Sirleaf is a Harvard-trained economist who served as Liberia’s former finance minister, at the United Nations and World Bank—qualifications often are not enough to break through deeply entrenched barriers that exclude women from meaningful participation in the political arena.

In fact, despite decades of progress in the United States and around the world, women fill only about 16 percent of seats in national parliaments. Nowhere in the world do women hold 50 percent of the seats of government. Women hold at least 30 percent of the seats in parliament—the minimum threshold that governments agreed to strive for at the 1995 United Nations Conference for Women in Beijing—in less than 20 countries.

However, in countries emerging from conflict including Liberia, there is a window of opportunity to ensure that women are involved in the process of creating new policy frameworks, governing structures and new democratic cultures.

Africa has several such success stories.

When Rwanda emerged from the 1994 genocide, it included women in rebuilding the nation and framing the new constitution, including setting aside a percentage of parliamentary seats for women. Today, women are in key leadership posts there, including the minister of justice, several cabinet members and on the supreme court. In fact, women hold nearly 49 percent of the seats in the lower house of parliament in Rwanda—more than any parliamentary body in the world.

In South Africa, women had to fight for inclusion in the negotiations that eventually led to the first democratic elections in 1993. The nascent women’s movement there was bolstered by investments in women’s organizing, leadership training and advocacy. South African women’s organizations demanded and won language in the newly drafted constitution that emphasized women’s rights, including political representation. Today, women hold about 33 percent of the parliamentary seats and a number of important leadership positions, including deputy president.

When Nigeria became a democratic society in 1999, CEDPA partnered with local community activists to mobilize and register more than 750,000 people to vote, nearly a third of all the country’s voters. These 100 Women’s Groups elected a third of the 145 female candidates they supported for elective office, and women became a new force in Nigerian politics. These activists continued after the elections to hold town hall meetings, draft legislation and work with their newly elected candidates.

In Africa and elsewhere, increasing the number of women in government has been more than an exercise in fairness and equality, though those are important goals. It also has made a difference in governance.

The World Bank reports that there is an inverse relationship between the number of women in public office and government corruption, meaning that women are a good investment for building stronger democracies. Research also shows us that when there is a critical mass of women leaders in government, they are more likely to allocate resources for policies that benefit women, children and families.

In Rwanda, we now have a decade of evidence that demonstrates the impact of increasing women’s leadership numbers. Despite enormous challenges, several social and health indicators are improving. More girls have enrolled in school and investments that have been made to improve maternal health care have resulted in the reduction of maternal mortality there.

The results in Rwanda and elsewhere demonstrate that investing in women’s leadership is a smart way to achieve global development goals. As a nation, America could help support this kind of change by prioritizing women and girls within our foreign policy agenda. America should increase its funding of programs that support women’s leadership and specifically train women to vote, run for office, lead local civic initiatives, and develop the political and economic agendas that meet the needs of women, families, and communities.

The result will be the election of more leaders like Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf and the women of the Rwandan parliament—a giant step forward on a long road to progress.