Somaliland being a male dominated society, only quota system will facilitate our women to be elected as members of our parliament

Even though women are our mothers, sisters, daughters, wives, however, we pay the least attention to them when it comes for employment, political power like electing them as members of parliament. Out of our two parliament house that consist 164 members, only single parliamentarian among our parliament and that is violating their rights. in an African country not far away from Somali-land, Rwanda 64 % of their parliament is women.   Most of our women selling Qat by sitting on the streets/tarmac to sell it all day and night, it’s the worst job to do since they always face disputes/violations from those men who buy it, some go knocking door to door asking if they need any help around the house i.e. house cleaning or washing clothes, others made cookies for sales, and so on so forth. Almost every mother leaves her house and kids including infants at 4:00 am everyday just earn little money to help their families when our male members of the society enjoying dignified jobs, our women trading a business that downgrades their image as women. 

We should opened u new responsibilities up for them to take a more active role in their communities at large, not only in private business and within the household, but also visibly in peace building, leadership and state-reinstating processes. It was here where women as community leaders assumed responsibility, endowed to them by the circumstance. Women in Somali-land hid restrictions which is tribal loyalty as our politics remains a man’s world. .Most political parties get support from clans, which decide who should become candidates and the clans don’t put women forward. The clans want men because they know where the men’s loyalties lie. The clan a woman is born into tends to be reluctant to support her if she marries into another clan, yet her husband’s clan may suspect she remains loyal to her own clan. Somaliland, home to 3.4 million people, consists of three main clans with eight sub-clans.

Although many of our women declared to stand as a candidates of our next parliament to be formed next year, however, doubts is hanging around their clan members whether to elect them or not despite the fact most clans prefers male members on their parliament to be elected next year. Most of our society considers our girls as transit in their houses considering the girls will be part of families that may different by clan and therefore, they consider them part of the clan that possibly may her. Therefore the only solution we overcome our female discriminating is only quota system of reserving them. The use of electoral quotas for women is much more widespread than is commonly held. An increasing number of countries are currently introducing various types of gender quotas for public elections: In fact, half of the countries of the world today use some type of electoral quota for their parliament.

statics at present indicate women constitute 20.4% of the members of parliaments around the world. Recently, Rwanda superseded Sweden at the number one in the world in terms of women’s parliamentary representation 64 %women against Sweden’s 47.3%. Rwanda is an example of the new trend to use electoral gender quotas as a fast track to gender balance in politics. Other parliaments, however, still have very few women elected.These are the main quota types in use today. While reserved seats regulate the number of women elected, the other two forms set a minimum for the share of women on the candidate lists, either as a legal requirement. In some countries quotas apply to minorities based on regional, ethnic, linguistic or religious cleavages. Almost all political systems apply some kind of geographical quotas to ensure a minimum representation for densely populated areas, islands and the like. However this database focuses on gender quotas – that is quotas that apply to women for elective office.

Quotas for women entail that women must constitute a certain number or percentage of the members of a body, whether it is a candidate list, a parliamentary assembly, a committee, or a government. The quota system places the burden of recruitment not on the individual woman, but on those who control the recruitment process. The core idea behind this system is to recruit women into political positions and to ensure that women are not only a token few in political life. Previous notions of having reserved seats for only one or for very few women, representing a vague and all-embracing category of “women”, are no longer considered sufficient. Today, quota systems aim at ensuring that women constitute a large minority of 20 – 30 %, or even to ensure true gender balance of 50-50%. In some countries quotas are applied as a temporary measure, that is to say, until the barriers for women’s entry into politics are removed, but most countries with quotas have not limited their use of quotas in time.

Most quotas aim at increasing women’s representation, because the problem to be addressed usually is the under-representation of women – this is particularly relevant since women usually constitute 50% of the population in any given country. An electoral gender quota regulation may, for example, require that at least 20- 30% of the candidates on the electoral lists are women. At the third stage, those elected, we find quotas as reserved seats. Here it is decided that a certain percentage or number among those elected must be women. Increasingly, gender quotas are being introduced using reserved seat systems, and increasingly women elected on reserved seats quota systems are not appointed, but elected like in Jordan, Uganda and Rwanda. zooming up, the only workable solution that can enable us overcoming this bad image is only quota system for the minority even though our women constitute over 50 % of our society. The quota system in the event accepted, the percent quota should produce not last than 15 number women parliamentarians. 

Ismail Yusuf.   Rabasoro55@hotmail.co.uk