Sustaining Women’s Gains in Rwanda: The Influence of Indigenous Culture and Post-Genocide Politics

In 2003, Rwanda elected 48.8 percent women to its lower house of parliament, giving it the world’s highest percentage of women in a national legislature. Women achieved this dramatic increase, up from 17.1 percent just a decade earlier, in the aftermath of violent conflict. Five years later, in the first real test of women’s gains, the September 2008 parliamentary election powerfully reaffirmed Rwanda’s top global ranking for female legislative representation. In that election, women earned 56 percent of seats in the lower house. The combined numbers of women in the lower house and the Senate made Rwanda the first country to have a majority-female legislature.1 Though women made remarkable gains in 2003, their 2008 success was even more dramatic because it demonstrated that women in Rwanda can sustain their gains from one election cycle to the next.