Governance

Tzipi Livni is poised to become Israel's next prime minister - but ultra-orthodox newspapers in the Jewish state are refusing to publish her picture for reasons of religious modesty.

Israeli feminists have described the ban as ‘laughably ludicrous.'

The 50-year-old foreign minister and mother of two has been hailed by some of the world's press as a ‘Mossad beauty' but she has image problems closer to home.

Rwanda is the first nation in the world where women outnumber men in parliament after legislative elections Sept. 18. Women now account for at least 55 percent of the lower chamber in Rwanda, according to provisional results. Previously, they held 48 percent of seats.

"The role of the elected females is double: They must on the one hand concern themselves with the implementation of government decisions, and on the other be a voice for the grassroots," said Bellancilla Nyonawankusi, a Kigali election official.

Female lawmakers earned 20 seats in direct elections, Reuters reported. Another 24 were already secured in an indirect vote. Rwanda now has a higher number of female lawmakers than Sweden, where 47 percent of parliamentarians are women.

This is the second election since the 1994 genocide that cost 800,000 lives. Women have staked a strong role in rebuilding the country under President Paul Kagame's leadership and represent 55 percent of the 4.7 million registered voters.

A member of women's faction, Fatima Aalia, said here on Monday that the faction intends to change into a ‘women and family faction' in parliament in order to facilitate the path toward establishing a ‘women and family committee'.

In an interview with the Mehr News Agency, Aalia refuted a claim that currently men are members of the women faction, saying that the faction only consists of female lawmakers.

However, she said if a faction of women and family is established then male MPs can be members of the faction to discuss bills and proposals related to women and family.

She added that the establishment of a women and family faction will serve as a catalyst to propose the formation of a professional ‘women and family committee' which needs a two-thirds parliamentary vote.

The Women's Parliament was established to ensure women from different levels of society were able to participate in the political development of the country, according to the Speaker of the South African National Assembly, Baleka Mbete.

Addressing the 2008 Women's Parliament on Monday, Ms Mbete said previously women tended to be marginalised from political development because they were so "busy being the backbone of families" and that they tended to leave the politics to men.

However, the Women's Parliament had enriched the processes in Parliament which affect the lives of many South Africans.

Development Plans (IDPs), produced as a statutory requirement by all municipalities, are local planning processes that are intended to give strategic direction to the work of municipalities. Increasingly, they are being seen as a forum for achieving links between spheres of government and facilitating co-ordinated planning, budgeting and implementation. But are national gender policy directives and guidelines adhered to within local government, in IDP processes and outcomes, and in implementation, and do they benefit women? These are some of the research questions the Human Sciences Research Council aims to address in a study by analysing national and provincial (KwaZulu-Natal) support to local government on gender and integrated development planning. National guidelines and targets are helping to ensure that women benefit from local projects even where local politics and governance processes marginalise women’s voices, ALISON TODES, PEARL SITHOLE and AMANDA WILLIAMSON found during this research project that formed part of an international initiative by the International Development and Research Centre, Canada (IDRC).