MANSAM-SORD Women's Political Candidate Identification & Training Initiative

Following Sudan's 2019 revolution, the Constitutional Declaration signed on 4 August 2019 mandated that women hold at least 40% of the seats of the 300-member Transitional Legislative Council (120 seats), a provision credited to sustained lobbying by the 'No to Women's Oppression' initiative and MANSAM (Women of Sudanese Civic and Political Groups).
To help fill that quota, MANSAM and the Sudanese Organisation for Research and Development (SORD), with UNDP core funding, ran a six-week identification exercise in early 2020, sending 11 teams to 110 cities, villages and displaced-persons camps across 17 of Sudan's states. The exercise identified 1,070 women willing to stand for public office, two-thirds of them 40 or younger; participants cited discriminatory social norms (32%) and patriarchal systems (14%) as the main barriers to running.
The initiative built durable civic infrastructure - a vetted, geographically broad pipeline of candidates - and was later extended to support women seeking state-level office and government posts. But the Transitional Legislative Council itself was never seated: repeated delays were followed by the October 2021 military coup, and the process collapsed entirely with the outbreak of civil war in April 2023, so the 40% quota was never tested against real seats. Separately, when the transitional cabinet was announced in September 2019, women held under 25% of posts, illustrating that even where a strong quota exists on paper, competing political interests can still limit women's share of actual power.
This case is included as an honest example of high-quality preparatory work whose ultimate political goal was overtaken by events outside its control - a caution that identification and training pipelines, however well run, cannot by themselves guarantee institutional follow-through in a collapsing transition.

Read the full analysis: https://sudan.un.org/en/49556-finding-sudan%E2%80%99s-future-women-political-leaders-1070-and-rising