Women's representation in local councils

In support of the National Council for Women’s (NCW) nationwide awareness raising initiative to promote community understanding and action about the role of the local councils, UN Women Egypt helped reach 35,000 women in 27 governorates, encouraging them to vote and/or run for candidacy at the municipal level to ensure their representation and participation in decision-making processes for local level development, and to ensure that gender-responsive development approaches are applied.

The 2014 Constitution established a 25 per cent quota for women in local councils, and thus provides space for at least 13,500 women across Egypt to partake in local development decision-making processes. Awareness raising initiatives focus on the Egyptian political system, electoral laws, electoral campaign management, the formulation of electoral programmes communication skills and persuasion of the electorate through the media and the means of social communication.

With each new Egyptian Parliament, the percentage of female parliamentarians increases substantially, currently standing at the record high of 15 percent. The efforts of the partnership between UN Women Egypt and the NCW are pivotal in raising women’s political participation at all levels. Through solid research, it has become evident that the political participation of women on the local levels has a direct positive correlation with the political participation of women on the national and international levels.

It is worth mentioning that this programme is being implemented with the generous support of the United States Agency for International Development ( USAID), the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) , the Spanish Cooperation, the Federal Government of Belgium, and the Embassy of Netherlands.