Assessment of 17th Round’s Women MPs’ Performance in Parliament

FEFA's Women and Youth Division, following its previous meetings, this time held a meeting to evaluate the performance of Afghan women representatives in parliament in relation to women's political participation. In this session, in addition to members of women's political rights advocacy group – FEFA, women parliamentarians, women's rights activists, and representatives of civil society totaling 61 people participated. Evaluation of meaningful presence of women representatives in parliament, the number of public/general meetings, the agenda discussed on women in general/public meetings, laws, procedures, regulations discussed on women, functions of the Commission for Women and Human Rights of Wolesi Jirga, and finally comparison of the performance of current women representatives with two previous rounds of the parliament were among the topics discussed during the meeting. Participants termed insecurity issues, economic affiliations/dependencies, low level of literacy of the clients, individual movements and dispersed voices, no presence of women representatives in the administrative board, bad culture and customs, male dominancy, over expectations of the community from female parliamentarians and finally lack of party support as the main challenge for women representatives. In addition to all these problems, the women representatives believed that the current parliament has clear dissimilarities with the parliament of two previous rounds.