From All Africa via IPS

As Burundi heads towards the 2015 general elections, and despite a quota of 30 percent women’s representation in parliament, women in this southeast African nation feel that they are yet to have a significant say in the management of their country.

Bernardine Sindakira, the chairwoman of Synergy of Partners for the Promotion of Women’s Rights (SPPDF), a Burundian coalition of women’s rights organisations, tells IPS that the country’s very traditional culture still considers women as “homemakers” as women are educated to play this role from young. “A hen doesn’t crow when the rooster is there,” says a Burundian proverb.

“We’ve got so many woman engineers at building sites, doctors, heads of organisations, business women, security women, and so many others.” — Marceline Bararufise, Burundian Member of Parliament

“This has long kept her in the position of being unable to [ensure] her empowerment and have the place she deserves in the country’s management,” says Sindakira.

This country is still recovering from a 12-year ethnic-based civil war after the 1993 assassination of the country’s first democratically-elected president, Melchior Ndadaye. Almost 300,000 people died in the Hutu-Tutsi violence and the conflict “had a very negative impact on women and young girls who experienced rape and other forms of sexual violence,” according to a 2011 Global Network of Women Peacebuilders report.

According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, after the 2010 elections women in Burundi held 34 out of 106 seats in the lower house, about 32.1 percent, “as well as a significant rise in the upper house to 46.3 percent, due to a considerable degree to its quota system.”

But according to a 2011 report by the Global Network of Women Peacebuilders “the law does not specify the quota for women in other decision-making bodies. Thus in the top three offices i.e. President, First Vice President and Second Vice President, there are no women.”

Read more at All Africa