Benin's Reserved Parliamentary Seats for Women (2019 Electoral Code Reform)

Benin's electoral code was amended in November 2019 to expand the National Assembly from 83 to 109 seats and reserve 24 seats exclusively for women candidates, one per constituency, on top of the ordinary party-list contest for the remaining 85 seats.

In the April 2019 election, only 6 of 83 members elected (7.23%) were women. Following the reform, the January 2023 election returned 28 of 109 members (25.69%) as women, an 18.5 percentage-point jump, according to IPU Parline and UN Africa Renewal. Of these, 24 women won reserved seats and 4 more won ordinary, non-reserved seats outright, according to Beninese outlet Banouto's constituency-level tally.

The April 2019 election that produced the reforming legislature was itself non-competitive, as new candidacy rules excluded all opposition parties, prompting Freedom House to downgrade Benin from 'Free' to 'Partly Free' amid protests and an internet shutdown; the 24-seat reform therefore passed through an opposition-free assembly. In the resulting 2023 cohort, 21 of the 28 elected women belonged to the two ruling-coalition parties versus 7 for the opposition, roughly mirroring the ruling coalition's overall 81-of-109 seat dominance, raising a question of whether the reform served gender equality alone or also the ruling coalition's legitimacy-building. Only one post-reform election has been held, so the reform's durability is not yet evidenced.