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Good practice

Senegal's 2010 Gender Parity Law (Loi sur la Parité)

Senegal · Dakar · See the Senegal profile

Senegal's 2010 parity law requires alternating male-female candidate lists. Women's share of the National Assembly nearly doubled to about 43% in 2012, though leadership posts and enforcement in some regions have lagged.

22.7 %
Women in National Assembly (2007 (before))
42.7-43.3 %
Women in National Assembly (2012 (after))
2.7 %
Women mayors (after 2014)

Details

Maturity
Established
Promoter
Assemblée Nationale du Sénégal / Commission Électorale Nationale Autonome (CENA)
Period
2010–present
Keywords
electoral law, political representation, gender parity, local governance

Context

Senegal's Law No. 2010-11 (May 2010) requires all candidate lists for national, regional and local elections to alternate strictly between male and female candidates, aiming for a 50/50 split -- among the first gender-parity laws of its kind in sub-Saharan Africa.

Results

In the July 2012 legislative elections, women's share of the National Assembly nearly doubled, from about 22.7% (33 of 150 seats) to 42.7-43.3% (64 seats); 2014 local elections showed a similar jump, from about 16% to roughly 47% of council seats (an estimated 14,000 of 29,787 elected local officials).

Conclusions

Numeric parity did not translate evenly into power: CMI research found only 2 of 14 Assembly committees chaired by women despite their near-43% seat share, and only 15 of 557 mayors (2.7%) were women even after the 2014 local elections; enforcement has also been uneven, as illustrated by the 2014 Touba case where an all-male list was ruled non-compliant but granted a de facto exemption.

Implementation

Implementation detail (cost, timeline, staffing, conditions for success) is not yet available for this practice.

Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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