How Will Women (and Young Women) Fare in the 2023 Elections in Zimbabwe?
The elections in 2018 can only be described as deeply disappointing for the women’s movement, and its attempt to manifest the 50/50 intention of the Constitution. The combination of the First-Post-The-Post (FPTP) electoral system and the resort to the gender quota by the two major political parties resulted in fewer women being directly elected to parliament. Thus, while Zimbabwe can claim one of the higher percentages of women in parliament in SADC, this comes at the expense of women having full power to influence policymaking. For this reason, strong arguments can be in favour of reforming the Zimbabwean electoral system away from an FPTP system to one of Proportional Representation (PR), The arguments for this are covered in brief detail, following previous analyses (RAU 2020 (a); RAU 2020 (b)).
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