Papua New Guinea

10 May 2007

Initiative Promotes Women’s Political Participation in PNG

Women candidates listen to a workshop presentation.

Port Moresby - In less than two months Papua New Guineans will go to the polls to elect their new national leaders. Parliamentarians will be elected to replace the current ones who have been in office since 2002. At the close of nominations on 10 May, some 3000 candidates had registered to contest for the 109 parliamentary seats that are up for grabs.

What is becoming clear for this year’s election is that things are going to be different when the voters go to the polls between 30 June and 10 July 2007. For one thing, women voters will be voting in their own separate sections in each voting booth. Andrew Trawen, the national Electoral Commissioner, announced on the national radio network, NBC radio, that separate compartments for women voters will be set up at polling booths so that they can cast their votes in privacy. This decision by the Electoral Commission addresses a long standing problem that has undermined the effective participation of women in the electoral process in the past.

Because they have not enjoyed real privacy at polling booths in past elections, women have often found themselves unable to vote for the candidates of their choice. Instead, they have often been intimidated by their husbands, male relatives or other partisans into voting for candidates pre-determined by these people. With the separate compartments where they can now vote in private, the women will be able to exercise their voting rights fully without the fear of violence or intimidation by their family members, relatives or partisans. They will be able to reflect their own choice in deciding who they give their vote.

Mr. Trawen’s announcement marked the first major direct response to an effort mounted by the women candidates contesting the 2007 national elections. Following a UNDP-supported initiative to increase women’s participation in national decision making in Papua New Guinea, the women candidates issued an appeal to the Government to urgently address the obstacles that are hindering women’s representation and participation in the National Parliament and national decision making.

Chief among their demands was action to ensure full participation by women through ensuring an environment that would enable them to vote freely and fairly in elections without facing any forms of violence or the threat of violence, including such acts as intimidation and physical threats.

Rising from a three-day workshop that was jointly supported by UNDP, the Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID) and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), the intending candidates had also urged the nations’ political parties to pursue the goal of equal representation by endorsing an equitable number of women as party candidates for the 2007 elections.

Nearly 75 female intending candidates took part in the workshop, which was held in Port Moresby from 28 to 30 April 2007, to explore ways of increasing women’s representation in the country’s parliament and to seek to improve women’s overall participation in the national political life.

Entitled “The National Workshop for Intending Women Candidates in the 2007 Elections”, it was organized by a local non-governmental organization, the Papua Hahine Social Action Forum, in partnership with the Women in National Government Strategies for Change (WINGS) and the National Council of Women. It brought together intending female candidates from all parts of Papua New Guinea.

The objective of the workshop was to train the women candidates in the areas of good governance and transparent leadership by introducing them to parliamentary processes, systems and procedures, and to sharpen theirs skills to develop effective campaign strategies in order to market their issues and speak convincingly to voters. In addition, it sought to enable them to develop their capabilities to lobby for financial resources to support their campaigns.

In their statement at the end of the three-day workshop, the intending female candidates emphasized the vital importance of representation of women in the National Parliament toward achieving democracy and development. They argued that through such representation in all elected bodies, Papua New Guinea would be better placed to bring about the achievement of development targets, including those set out in the Millennium Development Goals.

The call for a safer voting environment was one of a series of bold actions they outlined for the government, political parties and other stakeholders to take in order to boost the participation of women.

Other actions recommended by the intending candidates include more concerted effort by the Government to meet its international obligations by reporting on and implementing the terms of international treaties like the CEDAW and by living up to the stipulations of the Millennium Development Goals with regard to women’s equal participation in decision making.

In addition, the intending candidates called for negotiations with relevant stakeholders toward the adoption of affirmative action in the form of reserved seats in parliament, voluntary party quotas or quotas established by legislation in order to increase women’s representation in the parliament.

By focusing attention on the challenges relating to the representation of women in national decision making in Papua New Guinea, the workshop sought to address a major failing in the country’s past electoral efforts.

Up until now, national elections in Papua New Guinea have been an almost all male affair. Few women contested for open parliamentary seats and even fewer ever got elected. In fact, in the outgoing cohort of parliamentarians, only one is female. This trend is repeated in almost all leadership positions in the country. For instance, the only female parliamentarian also happens to be the only one female minister. There is no female governor or provincial administrator and only a handful of women are in senior positions in the civil service, while the rest hold low level jobs.

UNDP, through its work in the area of gender, seeks to support efforts at addressing this challenge by promoting actions to increase the participation of women in national decision making. In that regard, UNDP seeks to encourage and empower more women to enter the political fray in the ultimate belief that if the MDGs are going to be reached, then women need the same freedoms and opportunities as men.

“This can only happen when there are more women in power to take the decisions and make the changes,” said UNDP Resident Representative Jacqueline Badcock in an address to the women candidates. “We are, therefore, working to equip women across generations, faiths and opinions to pursue careers in politics”.

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