The Burkina Faso National Assembly has adopted a law that requires a 30 percent quota for women on political party candidate lists. (Related story: “Women Gain Ground in Burkina Faso Assembly,” May 19, 2009.) Passage of the measure on April 16 was a landmark day for a number of groups in this West African country of about 14 million that have been working to bring women into the political process. But it was just one step in an effort that started long before the bill’s passage and is far from over.

Aminata Kassé (pictured at left), a former member of the Senegal parliament, has spent the past five years working as NDI’s resident director in Burkina Faso, where women’s representation on local councils has risen to 35 percent across the country. Kassé discusses NDI’s work in the country.

Could you explain what sort of work NDI has been doing in Burkina Faso?

For the past four years NDI has been working directly with political parties, and over the past three years we’ve been working with Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, to promote women. One goal of our program is to increase the number of women elected and another is to help women after they are elected.  There were 6,400 women elected in the last elections in 2006, so we wanted to help them advance, in part by taking full advantage of the political changes and opportunities created by Burkina Faso’s political decentralization, which gave more authority to local governments.

Have you noticed any change in policies because of the increased number of women serving in the commune, or regional, councils?

It’s very localized—you see improvements in people’s lives more often in the big cities, where the governments have the most finances. The small cities don’t really have much money, so it’s harder to see changes. But there was one commune called Dano, where a cleanup brigade organized by the mayor, who is a woman, helped to clean up the city. She invited poor women to participate in the brigade and she even offered them a small income to take part. There were also some improvements in Bobo with sewage and water policies.

It is important to note that for most of the councilors, this is the first time they have been elected to public office. One of the major changes we’ve noticed is that now that they have become councilors, they are moving up within the government—becoming mayors, deputy mayors, and presidents of local government committees. This has convinced the rural population that women are capable of occupying positions of leadership. The women councilors have participated in the creation of local development plans and were instrumental in integrating women’s concerns, such as the need for microcredit, access to clean water, and access to markets that sell locally-grown produce.

How many women overall has NDI worked with?

We work with 14 political parties, and all 14 have different women’s wings. In addition, we worked with 1,600 women who were local councilors, and then in eight communes we did follow-up work with elected women. But the big challenge now is to help the political parties recruit and train new women candidates to respond to the new law. Using a new Sida grant, NDI will follow-up with a number of parties to finalize and help them carry out action plans for recruiting women. In addition, NDI will provide training programs for local women candidates in 2011 and legislative candidates in 2012.

Could you tell us more about this next phase?

Sida did an evaluation that showed that NDI’s assistance really helped increase the number of women involved in the political process, the number elected and the level at which they served.  

Next we will focus on how to involve women leaders in democratic governance in ways that take into account the needs of the most marginalized women—those that are the poorest. In Burkina Faso, as in a lot of countries in Africa, there’s a huge emphasis on policies that reduce poverty, which makes it important for candidates and elected officials to address this issue.  So we’ll work at the local level and also with parliamentarians on how they can develop follow up measures to carry out the government’s program to fight poverty. For example, NDI will provide a grant to a coalition of organizations that monitors the government’s implementation of its Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers Program (PRSP) by analyzing how the needs of poor women are addressed. We also want to work with civil society groups to advocate for implementation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women.  This convention, adopted in 1979 by the UN General Assembly, is often described as an international bill of rights for women.

How do you find the people that actually take part in the program?

In November we held a series of meetings on the promotion of women, and the president of one of the major political parties spent a whole day with NDI to talk about how to increase women’s participation. The engagement was extremely strong. It’s the same at the high levels as at the local levels. In Burkina Faso, there are not very many offers of training — especially not for women – so the programs are popular. NDI offers training to elected women councilors on accounting and budget management, roles and responsibilities in the decentralization process, and leadership skills as well as candidate training on how to secure a party’s nomination, fundraising, and communicating with the media. We work with opposition parties just as much as we work with the presidential movement or the ruling parties, so the parties have a lot of confidence in the work that NDI does because we work with everybody.

What was the effect? How do NDI programs help improve people’s lives?

Where we see most of the results is at the local level. We worked with eight different communes and then did follow-up work with these eight. You can see on a daily basis the work that local councilors undertake to help improve the conditions of life in their communes. There are only 23 women mayors out of hundreds, and you can really see how they develop initiatives on sanitary programs and other areas that help the population on a daily basis. Also, local councilors have found public funding for women’s groups, organized vaccination campaigns, and raised awareness on girls’ education and the importance of obtaining an identity card in order to vote.

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Published on May 19, 2009