Competition Discourages Women In Politics - IEA

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a public policy institute, has attributed the low participation of women in politics to the increasing competitive nature of elections and the anxiety of political parties to ensure that they win the maximum number of seats in parliamentary elections.

It said Ghana’s elections, since 1992 and its outcome, had shown that the elections, especially the primaries for the selection of candidates, had increasingly become competitive, and that “political parties have grown increasingly anxious to ensure that they win a maximum number of seats in Parliament.”

Brigadier General Francis Agyemfra (retd), a Senior Fellow of the IEA, who stated this at the opening of a three-day workshop on “Political parties’ strategy for developing female candidates,” expressed worry that despite the fact that political parties always indicated in their manifestos their support for women, they, however, concentrated their attention on putting up only the strongest female candidates.

The workshop was organised by the IEA, with the support of the Canadian High Commission to Ghana. It was attended by both male and female leading members of political parties with representation in Parliament.

“Unfortunately, despite calls from civil society and our development partners for increased women’s participation in governance roles, the focus of our political parties has remained on fielding the strongest female candidates and not on increasing the numbers of female candidates,” Brigadier General Agyemfra said.

According to him, that had made the efforts of gender activists, women’s rights movement and development partners yield no results in increasing female participation.

He said it was a welcome news that political parties had acknowledged the need for increased number of females in political roles, and had indicated their readiness to support women to stand for elections.