Campaign School to Increase Women's Participation in Politics

The National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), which is a non-profit organization working for the promotion of democracy worldwide, organized the Campaign School for Women Parliamentary Candidates in Jordan between March 28th -April 1st 2005, with the aim of teaching women running in elections crucial campaigning skills, which would increase their chances of success. This campaign falls under NDI’s Win With Women Global Initiative, which seeks to insure women’s effective participation in the political lives of their countries. The Campaign School, which targeted women of diverse political backgrounds in the Middle East, attempts to overcome the specific challenges, restrictions and obstacles impeding women's full-fledged political participation. However, NDI's sessions, which dealt with campaign fundraising and how to utilize the media effectively to promote one’s campaign, presented tools and advice that were feasible in Western contexts but were hardly applicable to several Arab societies, especially those governed by emergency laws, as many of them are at present. The idea of holding public fundraising events or going door to door to garner financial support is not a practical solution in most Arab countries. In Egypt, for example, it is impossible since parties’ and NGOs must seek prior governmental permission to undertake public fundraising, which is severely restricted by law. Furthermore, questions of how to surmount media-bias and official media endorsement of incumbent politicians, when the government owns all radio and TV stations, as is the case in most Arab countries, were not properly addressed. On the other hand, other NDI sessions dealing with strategic planning for campaigns and political advocacy were more relevant to the Arab contexts as they presented universal, common sense tactics for designing an effective campaign and increasing one’s constituency. The overarching themes of these sessions attempted to install inner confidence in women participants as equal political players, to enforce a culture of strategic and logical approaches to campaigning either for candidacy or for a particular cause, and to improve the participants' communication skills in order to enable them to widen their support network. While such training courses are helpful they cannot begin to address the real difficulties facing women candidates. In order to truly promote women's political participation in the Arab world, several pre-conditions need to be set in place such as a mandatory quota system. But given the controversy that surrounds the constitutionality of a quota system, electoral laws under which candidates run on party lists have the potential of increasing women' s participation. However, the advantages of such a system can only materialize if political parties are willing to endorse women candidates. Nonetheless, campaign programs for women are extremely beneficial given that the world’s average of women’s political representation, whether in legislatures or in high government positions, constitutes a mere 15 % of the total.