MIASA & Departmental Monthly Seminar Series, November 2019 Edition

DEPARTMENT OF POLITICAL SCIENCE
Departmental Monthly Seminar Series
November, 2019 Edition

Topic: Just Add Women? Gender and Parliamentary Committees Across Sub-Saharan Africa

Date: 13th November, 2019

Time: 3:00PM

Venue: Kofi Drah Conference Room (Department of Political Science

Speaker: Susan Dodsworth (Research Fellow, International Development Department, University of Birmingham, MIASA Fellow)

Abstract

A growing body of evidence shows that women have a substantive impact when they are included in legislatures, particularly when it comes to health. Yet our understanding of how women in Parliaments achieve this impact remains poor. This presentation will show how women in two Africa legislatures- those of Malawi and Sierra Leone- have made use of parliamentary committees to successfully influence laws relating to health. These success stories are important because they show that women in politics have an impact even when their numbers are small. The presentation will also consider why women in Ghana's Parliament have not had similar successes: What is missing here - or different- and what might this mean for the renewed campaign to pass the Affirmative Action Bill?