Women in Political Leadership, SUAD M.UMER
hussen mohammed
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Abstract
Nowadays, issues of political participation of women become increasing all over the world. But still it doesn't reach the expected level and their participation limited at a lower level position. The situation is similar in Dire-Dawa administration. The main purpose of this research is to assess factors affecting women's participation in political leadership in Dire-Dawa Administration. What are the socio-cultural, economic and political factors, what is the attitudes of women toward politics and is there favorable policy environment are the major research questions. To do so, this study employed both qualitative and quantitative research approach and descriptive type of survey was used in order to get better and deep information. Besides both primary and secondary data sources were used to examine the issues under discussion and data has collected using questionnaires, interview and FGD. 135 sample sizes were employed and respondents were selected randomly from the selected 5 sectoral bureaus and administrative council. In addition, 7 higher political leaders including the mayor for interview and 6 chairman of standing committee and 3 heads of women organization (league, federation and union) for FGD were purposefully selected to support the study. Inferential statistics were also employed to analyze the quantitative data. Questionnaire survey was administered by women employee and women member of the administrative council. The study result shows that although there is improvement in the participation of women in political leadership, their representation in different leadership position especially at the higher level position is very low. There are different factors behind this. Socio-cultural, economic, political, psychological and inappropriate implementation of policies and strategies are among the major factors. Finally, the study concluded by providing possible recommendations that, to increase the participation of women's in political leadership position, much work should be done to solve influencing factors such as empowering women economically, working on the perception of the societies and men political leaders, creating conducive political environment for women, develop women confidence on themselves by using different mechanism and properly implementing the stated policies, strategies, programs and packages to solve those factors hindering women participation and gender inequality.
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