Women's equal political participation

UNDP supports gender responsiveness of political institutions and facilitates women’s access to opportunities and skills to exercise their political rights, participate in decision-making, exercise leadership, and contribute to development processes. UNDP does this by:

• Promoting women’s participation as voters and candidates in electoral processes through training of women candidates, awareness campaigns, and promoting gender parity in electoral management bodies (EMB).
• Promoting the use of Temporary Special Measures, including gender quotas.
• Facilitating the inclusion of women and women’s organizations and networks in constitution-making processes, and helping to address gender discriminatory clauses in constitutions.
• Supporting women’s coalitions in political parties and representative bodies.
• Encouraging political parties to: (i) remove all barriers to the participation of women, (ii) develop their capacity to analyse issues from a gender perspective, and (iii) adopt policies and/or quotas to promote women’s participation at all levels of decision-making.
• Promoting coalition building and networking among women representatives and decision-makers.
• Supporting gender mainstreaming in parliaments through induction training for MPs on gender issues, mainstreaming gender impact reviews into parliamentary committee work, gender analysis of proposed laws, gender-sensitive budgeting, support for cross-party women’s caucuses, and women’s mentoring programmes.

UNDP collaborates with women’s networks and academia; and works closely with its sister agencies including  UN Women, DPA, OHCHR, UNICEF; and inter-governmental organizations such as OSCE/ODIHR; and Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) working on women’s political participation, including IDEA, USIP and Interpeace, as well as regional and national CSOs.