The Beijing Platform for Action includes a detailed set of recommendations to all sectors of the local and international communities to enhance women’s political participation and decision-making. The Platform for Action is destined to all those involved in the issues, whether local actors or international ones, and as such, builds on the realisation that improving women’s political participation is not simply a feature of one region of the world, and is not only a factor of wealth.

A review of the trends in the field of women’s empowerment indicates a diverse progress report from different parts of the world. There are numerous difficulties still to be resolved. Targets set by the UN for a 30% (eventually to grow into a 50% women’s participation) have only been achieved in very few countries, but achieving these targets has not provided a miracle or instantaneous gender-equality and impacting context. But the trends also indicate that a great deal has been achieved already over the past few years, not the least of which is the use of the Platform for Action as an important tool in the strides towards enhancing women’s political representation, as well as in the realisation that women’s involvement in politics is an important prerequisite for democracy. The review of trends also highlighted important vacuums: the lack of information, whether in terms of statistics or analysis of women’s positions in different areas of political involvement (e.g. the judiciary, local government, and the private sector to name but a few); the tendency to collect such information from the developed world, and then to compare whatever little is available elsewhere only with the developed world and not necessarily with similar contexts elsewhere in the developing world.

Most of the recommendations of the major international conferences on this issue have built on and furthered the Platform for Action. The Inter-Parliamentary Union’s New Delhi Declaration forms the framework for further dialogue, whereas the UNDP Governance and Sustainable Growth and Equity has highlighted, in a number of ways, the remaining areas of need. All together, the international meetings indicate a strong global commitment to the Beijing Platform for Action from a number of different sections of the international community: whether governance actors, parliamentarians or women in development experts.

The challenges facing women’s de jure equality are not of a uniform nature, and vary according to social or cultural circumstances, economic situation and political context. Yet, they are challenges, which have remained with us for a long time and as such, are not new, except for the ones concerning access to technology. The positive side of this is that developing means to combat them is also progressing and beginning to give results - female education for example, is faring better in some poorer countries than it was elsewhere. One of the important realisations here reaffirms the point made earlier, which is that poverty or wealth alone do not necessarily overcome de jure challenges, but more a combination of aspects such as the critical mass of women in politics, traditional notions of women’s roles, the role of the media, and access to technology, among others.

Good governance practices differ and have no specific blueprint. The commonalties of such practices include aspects of mainstreaming gender concerns in all areas of governance, collating and analysing of gender desegregated information, setting up specialised institutions or government bodies to implement and monitor progress and developments, to name a few. More can also be done, with the development of clear criteria as to how women make an impact, sharing experiences in this field from both men and women, and designing programmes for women, with men’s needs and their involvement as objectives from the start.

As far as developing criteria for impacting, a number of aspects need to be kept in mind, one of which is the change that is brought about, or the difference that is made, as a result of having women in politics. These changes are diverse and range from changes in perceptions, to discourse on and about women, coverage of women in general and politicians in particular, as well as changes in legislation, policies and institutions. Examples of these changes, which are not documented on a regular and analytical basis, tend to concentrate on some parts of the developed world only.

The most important lessons learned from these experiences are that further critical and information-gathering work still needs to be done, and particularly in the area of women impacting on and in politics. Also, a number of organisations need to work together since there would not be a situation where even many would be sufficient. It is also important to acknowledge that women are different and their style of politics may well be different to men’s, but that nevertheless, it is remains crucial to look realistically at women politicians as imperfect creatures and therefore not to judge them too harshly or differently.

What still remain as areas of need - particularly for international organisations are a critical appraisal or stock-taking of what has been achieved thus far and own contributions (or lack thereof) to that end; taking steps to fill in the information vacuum; developing consistent and co-ordinated monitoring mechanisms; as well as developing remunerative mechanisms on an international level for countries which show a high number of women in political positions, score well in terms of criteria of impacting, and reap the benefits of gender mainstreaming.