Sierra Leone Revives Gender Bill to Reserve 30% of Positions for Women

On 21 July, Sierra Leone’s cabinet adopted a bill to set aside 30% of elective and public offices for women. A version of this Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) bill was first put forward in 2012 under Ernest Koroma’s All People’s Congress (APC) administration, but certain political obstacles blocked passage at the time. Now the Sierra Leone People’s Party (SLPP) is in charge, and there is another chance to lastingly improve the broader socio-economic conditions that lower women’s representation and hinder the equitable distribution of political influence. 

Significance – Hurdles before change

Gender representation is relatively low in Sierra Leone as in the rest of West Africa. Sierra Leone was ranked 182nd out of 189 countries on the UNDP’s Gender Development Index in 2020, and nearly half of the bottom 20 countries were in West Africa. Today, 18 out of 148 MPs in Sierra Leone’s parliament are women while only four women are in President Maada Bio’s cabinet of 32 people. Those four ministers manage the gender, tourism, marine and social welfare portfolios.

The two major parties, APC and Bio’s SLPP, have discussed affirmative action for more than a decade. However, they have not found a mechanism for applying that in practice – especially the proposal to create a 30% quota for women in politics and the public service – because of a misalignment with political interests. 

The women’s caucus in parliament developed the first GEWE bill in 2012, but the legislative process was aborted partly because MPs were concerned about how the law would affect general elections that were imminent that year. The bill proposed empowering the electoral commission to reserve one constituency seat in every district for female candidates on a rotational basis, and the president would also have been required to appoint women to 30% of cabinet and other public positions. 

An additional hurdle is to revise the constitution so that the proposed quota system is consistent with the highest legal norm. Section 56 presently gives the president discretionary powers to appoint a cabinet. It may require a referendum to amend this and also ringfence a quota for women’s participation as is the case in other countries. There is precedent on the continent for this. Uganda’s constitution for instance, specifically sets aside one seat in parliament for a woman in each district that is represented there.

Given these political complications, the Bio administration’s gender development efforts have mainly been in the form of extralegal programmes on education and sexual violence. These include the first lady Fatima Bio’s ‘Hands Off Our Girls’ campaign and the government’s free-tuition scheme for primary and secondary schools. Sierra Leone’s literacy rate is low at 43% and women and girls are disproportionately affected, accounting for just 35% of the literate population.

One factor responsible for that figure is that many girls marry or become pregnant before they are 18, while a longstanding government policy prevented pregnant students from attending school. In 2020 the government said it would discontinue that policy, but the resolution does not seem to have been backed with legislation to improve access to education for girls. Developing the GEWE bill again sets an opportunity to lastingly improve the broader socio-economic conditions (e.g. education) that lower women’s representation in Sierra Leone. 

Outlook –  Elections again 

The Bio administration plans to present the GEWE bill in parliament when MPs complete their recess and reconvene in the last quarter of this year. By then, it is uncertain that there will be enough time to take the bill over the hurdles described above because general elections are due in 2023 and there are few electoral incentives to motivate decision-makers. 

As president, Bio will have to demonstrate a greater amount of political will in order to enact the proposed legislation in his current term. This is because his cabinet appointments so far do not indicate that affirmative action is presently a top priority. This 30% quota was in his manifesto when he ran for president in 2012 and 2018, but he still named only four women in a cabinet of 28 when he took office in 2018. He has now removed one of them in the latest reshuffle but has stayed close to the same ratio by splitting the gender, children and social welfare portfolio between two women. It indicates how political appointments might be done under the proposed quota system with little resulting change in the distribution of influence. 

*Photo credit: Library of Congress

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