"Democracy is the best friend of
women," argues Aminata Toure, a former justice minister and prime
minister of Senegal, who advises the current President, Macky Sall.
Toure is an example of a particularly successful Senegalese woman who
worked for the United Nations for many years before entering politics.
In a meeting at her stately
residence in Dakar, the capital, she describes how in her youth only
five or six women served in parliament. Now there are 65, which is 43
percent of the parliament.
This is greatly due to a law
passed in 2010 that mandated political parties to have gender parity in
their election slates. Senegal now has the third highest percentage of
women in parliament in Africa, after Rwanda, which passed a similar law
in 2003, and Seychelles.
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