An assessment of women’s political participation: the case of bonga town administration, kaffa zone, south nation nationalities and peoples regional state, Ethiopia

Abstract

Women face multi-faceted challenges to participate in leadership position due to different factors. The purpose of this research was to examine women's possibilities to advance to leadership positions. This thesis is based on the hypothesis and figures that there are less female leaders than male leaders, both the local and national levels. The objective of this study was to assess women‟s political participation in case of Bonga town administration. It also aimed to analyze the level of current women leadership and representation position, describe different forms of political participation, and assess factors that affect women participation in decision making. In order to meet these objectives, quantitative and qualitative research methods were used. The data was collected by interviewing, focus group discussion and conducting questionnaires for women to explore the current gender practices in the town administration and assessing the factors for low representation of women in political leadership position. Consequently, non-probability purposive sampling and probability simple random sampling was used to select the respondents and discussants of the study. The quantitative data was analysed by descriptive statistics and the qualitative data was analyzed by narration. The findings showed that women are highly underrepresented in higher level positions due to the factors such as educational gap, socio cultural attitude, and male dominancy, lack of recommendation, policy gap and organizational culture the major ones. Due to this women are unable to get role model and less confidence for the leadership position. Thus, in order to minimize the existing gender gaps in decision making place, the town administration needs to implement affirmative action at all of leadership level, giving quota number for women at entrance stage as well as clearly needs to set the criteria while assigning employees at different leadership positions.