Project overview

The Women and Democracy Initiative is based at the Dullah Omar Institute at UWC. We identify as feminist, taking an intersectional approach to our work on realising social justice through active political participation of the public in the context of a participatory and deliberative democracy. It is in this context that we use womxn with an X to be more inclusive and cognisant of gender as being non-binary.

This project on tracking feminist governance aims to increase a political focus on realising womxn’s and gender rights through infusing systematic feminist analysis and strategy into questions of governance and leadership. The project aims to increase public pressure on political office bearers and departments to be more responsive to a feminist agenda for political leadership that embodies the values of the Constitution towards realising womxn’s civil, political and socio-economic rights and gender justice.

The reports produced provide a feminist analysis of the track records of key departments and ministers in the 2019/20 financial year. The ministers’ track records are based on publicly available information and the departments are assessed based on the 2019/20 Annual Performance Plans and Budget Vote Speeches.

The analysis forms part of an ongoing project on feminist governance and is envisaged to provide information against which to hold Ministers and departments accountable and to advocate for feminist governance that speaks to the lived realities of womxn.

The team: Alicestine October; Motlatsi Komote; Vivienne Mentor-Lalu; Sam Waterhouse, Saamiyah Alli

*In addition, we relied on previous research conducted for this project by Zukiswa White.

Disclosure of funding: The research was supported by funding from the Open Society Foundation – South Africa, the Ford Foundation and the Heinrich Boell Foundation – the views and opinions expressed are those of the Women and Democracy Initiative authors and do not reflect the positions of our funders.