Aili Mari Tripp

The Global Impact of Quotas On the Fast Track to Increased Female Legislative Representation

Quotas have become an important mechanism through which women today are entering legislatures worldwide. This study shows that the introduction of quotas has helped overcome constraints on womens representation posed by economic underdevelopment, cultural influences, and even electoral systems. This study also demonstrates that the introduction of quotas offers the most explanatory power for womens representation today, together with electoral systems that allow for greater candidate turnover (i.e., party-list proportional representation systems). The majority of studies explaining womens legislative representation prior to 2000 focused on electoral systems, cultural considerations, and the strength of leftist political parties. Since the mid-1990s, however, an increasing number of countries have introduced gender quotas, which this article incorporates into older models in cross-national multivariate analysis.

The Changing Face of Authoritarianism in Africa: The Case of Uganda

As African countries moved toward electoral democratization in the 1990s, many countries remained basically authoritarian, but incorporated some democratic innovations to one degree or another. Thus, the rules for authoritarian regimes changed in fundamental ways so that such regimes differed markedly from the autocracies of the earlier post-independence period. Post-1986 Uganda is used in this paper to show how authoritarianism has softened under Yoweri Museveni when compared with the earlier regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. However, as we also see in the Ugandan case, most rulers have only gone as far with political reforms as they have felt they have needed to in order to satisfy domestic and donor pressures. Enormous constraints on civil and political liberties persist. The article examines the nature of semi-authoritarian regimes using the case of Uganda.

Political Reform in Tanzania: The Struggle for Associational Autonomy

The concepts of democratic reversal and the erosion of liberties make little sense in electoral democracies like Tanzania that have never attained democratic liberties in the first place. As critical as elections are to democratization, a more important locus of the struggle for political reform in Africa has been associations that seek to establish and maintain their autonomy from the state. In Tanzania, where the democratization process was stalled after multiparty elections and the government showed little inclination to deepen the democratization process, critical social struggles continued in such areas as womens organizations, the media, and nongovernmental organizations over issues pertaining to political and civil liberties.

The politics of autonomy and cooptation in Africa: the case of the Ugandan Women's Movement

State responsiveness to pressures from womens movements in Africa has been limited. However where inroads have been made associational autonomy from the state and dominant party has proved critical. The womens movement is one of the most coordinated and active social movements in Uganda and one of the most effective womens movements in Africa more generally. An important part of its success comes from the fact that it is relatively autonomous unlike womens movements in earlier periods of Ugandas post-independence history. The womens movement in spite of enormous pressures for cooptation has taken advantage of the political space afforded by the semi-authoritarian Museveni government which has promoted womens leadership to serve its own ends. Leaders and organizations reflect varying degrees of autonomy and cooptation. Nevertheless the womens movement has had a visible impact on policy as a result of its capacity to set its own far-reaching agenda and freely select its own leaders. (authors)

The New Political Activism in Africa

Until the 1990s, it was unheard of for an African woman to run for the presidency of her country. To be sure, Africa had a few female rulers earlier in the twentieth century, but none had been elected. Empress Zauditu, for instance, ruled Ethiopia from 1917 to 1930; Queen-regents Dzeliwe Shongwe (1982–83) and Ntombi Thwala (1983–86) reigned over Swaziland; and Elizabeth Domitien of the Central African Republic was appointed as Africa’s first female prime minister, serving in 1975– 76. It was only in the 1990s, however, that significant numbers of African women began aspiring to positions of national leadership. In the 1990s, women ran for president in Kenya and Liberia, while others sought party nominations for the presidency in Angola, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Nigeria, Sa‹o Tome and Principe, and Tanzania. Although all were unsuccessful in their bids for power, these women set important precedents in their respective countries. The first woman to become an African head of state in a nonmonarchical regime was Liberia’s Ruth Perry, who chaired her country’s six-member collective presidency, the Council of State, in the mid1990s. In 1994, Uganda’s Wandera Specioza Kazibwe became Africa’s first female vice-president. Rwanda and Burundi elected female prime ministers in the mid-1990s, and Senegal chose a woman prime minister in 2001. By the end of the 1990s, legislative bodies in Ethiopia, Lesotho, and South Africa had all appointed female house speakers, while those in Uganda, Zimbabwe, and South Africa had female deputy speakers. Aili Mari Tripp is associate professor of political science and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of its Women’s Studies Research Center. She is the author of Women and Politics in Uganda (2000) and Changing the Rules: The Politics of Liberalization and the Urban Informal Economy in Tanzania (1997).

Women’s Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

Womens movements in Africa represent one of the key societal forces challenging state clientelistic practices the politicization of communal differences and personalized rule. In the 1980s and 1990s the authors witnessed not only the demise of patronage-based womens wings that were tied to ruling parties but also the concurrent growth of independent womens organizations with more far-reaching agendas. The emergence of such autonomous organizations has been a consequence of the loss of state legitimacy the opening-up of political space economic crisis and the shrinking of state resources. Drawing on examples from Africa this article shows why independent womens organizations and movements have often been well situated to challenge clientelistic practices tied to the state. Gendered divisions of labor gendered organizational modes and the general exclusion of women from both formal and informal political arenas have defined womens relationship to the state to power and to patronage. These characteristics have on occasion put womens movements in a position to challenge various state-linked patronage practices. The article explores some of the implications of these challenges. (authors)

Women and the Changing Urban Household Economy in Tanzania

Women in Tanzanias largest city, Dar es Salaam, used to be described as ‘relatively inactive’ as regards paid work or self-employment. 1 One study undertaken in 1971 found that only one-fifth of urban women were either working for wages (13 per cent) or earning their own sources of income (7 per cent). 2 The situation could not have been more different in the late 1980s, with as many as 66 per cent in Dar es Salaam being self-employed. Although about the same proportion of women were in some kind of paid employment as during the previous decade, it appeared that since then many of them had been leaving their place of work to farm and to engage in small income-generating projects, known as miradi midogo midogo or shughuli ndogo ndogo in Kiswahili 3 .

Women in Movement Transformations in African Political Landscapes

Since the mid-1980s and especially after the early 1990s, womens organizations have increased exponentially throughout Africa as have the arenas in which women have been able to assert their varied concerns. Women are organizing locally and nationally and are networking across the continent on an unprecedented scale. They have in many countries been aggressively using the media to demand their rights in a way not evident in the early 1980s. In some countries they are taking their claims to land, inheritance and associational autonomy to court in ways not seen in the past. Women are challenging laws and constitutions that do not uphold gender equality. In addition, they are increasingly moving into government, legislative, party, NGO and other leadership positions previously the nearly exclusive domain of men. In these and other ways women have taken advantage of the new political openings that occurred in the 1990s, even if the openings were limited and precarious. This second generation of activism is markedly different from the earlier post-independence generation of womens mobilization. The reasons for these shifts are varied: the rise of multi-partyism and demise of military rule; the growing influence of the international womens movement; shifting donor strategies; the expansion of the use of the cell phone and the Internet in the late 1990s; coupled with a significant increase in secondary and university educated women. The article explores the major changes in womens mobilization in Africa by contrasting the current womens movements with those that emerged after independence.

The Women's Movement in Uganda History, Challenges, and Prospects

Aili Mari Tripp and Joy C. Kwesiga, eds. The Womens Movement in Uganda: History, Challenges and Prospects. Kampala: Fountain Publishers Ltd., 2002. Distributed by African Books Collective Ltd., The Jam Factory, 27 Park End St., Oxford 0X1 1HU UK. xiii + 235 pp. Photographs. Bibliographies. Appendixes. Index.

Expanding 'Civil Society': Women and Political Space in Contemporary Uganda

27.95. Paper. In its thirteen thematic chapters, this book discusses the challenges and successes of the womens movement in Uganda. Most of the authors are Ugandan women scholars who draw on their own extensive research and on literature not available outside of the country to analyze the impact of the movement in various spheres. The work serves as an excellent contribution to the literature on African women, providing readers with a new and exciting body of information regarding women in Uganda today, both rural and urban. The individual authors examine the roles of various womens organizations and their impact on the themes under discussion. At the same time, they successfully balance the often opposing themes of Ugandan women as victims and as active agents of change. The first two chapters provide an overview and history of womens activism throughout Uganda, the variety of organizational structures, and womens efforts to overcome archaic and patriarchal practices as they make their voices heard from the household to the national level. Chapters 3-11 then focus on specific areas in which the womens movement has played a powerful role in advocating for change: education, health care, women with disabilities, the economy, agriculture, conflict resolution, land issues, religious institutions, the media, and literature. Perhaps the most dynamic chapters are the three that address themselves to economic empowerment, agricultural production, and efforts to guarantee womens ownership of land. The final chapter of the book is a very helpful summary of research on women in Uganda compiled by Margaret Snyder. all chapters conclude with excellent bibliographies that will be useful for historical and contemporary research alike. This volume does not an attempt to be comprehensive, but the editors are to be commended for selecting topics that are relevant not only to the situation of women in Uganda in the twenty-first century but also the situation of women throughout the continent. The book would be highly appropriate for courses on current African issues, on women in international development, or on the history and status of women in Africa generally. …