In Kyrgyzstan, Women Poised to Take Leadership Roles in Political Parties

As Kyrgyzstan prepares for parliamentary elections on Oct. 10, women candidates are getting ready for what they hope will be a strong run for representation in the new legislature.
Kyrgyzstan's new constitution mandates the elections that will fill all 120 seats of the parliament, which was dissolved in April after then-President Bakiyev fled the country. The country is considered a leader in Central Asia in women's representation; women made up 26 percent of the last parliament. This is due in part to the electoral code, which requires that at least every fourth candidate on parties' lists must be of the opposite gender. In practice, this means that for every three male candidates on a party list, the fourth must be a woman.
Political parties are dominated by men in Kyrgyzstan, and women often have a hard time gaining leadership roles because of cultural norms, lack of experience, and lack of role models and networks. Women are hoping to overcome some of these barriers this year.
To help address these challenges, NDI, with support from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, organized a series of training sessions for 24 women activists from eight political parties. After five days of intensive training, these women became master trainers, moving on to instruct women activists in different regions of the country to head party branch offices and develop women's leadership trainings programs within their own parties.
The training these master trainers provided, over five months, reached approximately 200 women throughout the country from such ideologically diverse parties as the Social Democratic Party, the Ata Meken, Ar Namys and the Green Party. Many of the participants are using what they learned — from the role of women in politics to party outreach to public speaking — in the current campaign.
"I wanted to be a political trainer because the issues of women in politics, and in society in general, are very close to my heart," said Tatiana Levina, one of the master trainers. Levina has spent the past five months training other women in the Ar Namys party to run in the parliamentary elections and is a candidate herself. "Within my family, all women — including my grandmother, mother and daughter — are very strong, independent women who like to achieve everything on their own and not be dependent on men." She hopes to be a similar role model for young women in Kyrgyzstan.
Susan Markham, director of women's political participation programs at NDI, traveled to Kyrgyzstan in August to assist the parties in their efforts to prepare women running for office. She led sessions designed to develop campaign messages and create strategic plans for their campaigns. "The participants were eager for the information and anxious to know how it might be used in the upcoming election," Markham said.
Markham also met with representatives of six political parties in one-on-one consultations about the role of women in party leadership, the status of women's party wings and the opportunities for women in the upcoming elections.
Although many of the 200 women trained by the master trainers are focused on the upcoming parliamentary elections, in the long run they will work on the continued development of women's wings within their political parties, the creation of a multi-party women's caucus in parliament and the training of women members of parliament.
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