Sierra Leone Passed a Law to Put Women in Power. Now Comes the Hard Part
When Aminata Sesay decided to run for the Port Loko District seat in 2023, she knew it would be tough. She did not expect to be shot at.
The retired nurse had returned from the United Kingdom to enter the race, only to find her native Sierra Leone a “bloody and violent” electoral climate, just as friends and family had forewarned it would be.
As she would later find, this is the norm for women in politics across Africa, compounding the financial and political strains already obstructing their paths to power.
The First Gambit
Before even achieving the nomination, the first hurdle women face is the choice to set aside their political independence by joining a party in hopes of financial support and political backing. After having done that at the outset of her campaign, Sesay says the APC leadership then announced that the party was not in the financial position to provide support to all candidates.
From then on, she had to battle doubts about her candidacy even being considered for the party’s primary and come up with her own money.
“Having to cover the costs on your own puts a huge strain, especially when there is no structured support from the party. You are expected to prove yourself financially before anything else, and that can be overwhelming,” she said.
The Law of Small Numbers
Regardless, Sesay had entered the race with high hopes. Sierra Leone had set itself at the vanguard of Africa’s push for gender equality by enacting the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) Act that year, which promised to level the electoral playing field for women.
The Act resulted from years of sustained advocacy and political lobbying. To build support, a caucus of 19 female parliamentarians had to crisscross Sierra Leone to shape the bill and its political messaging.
Then came the real test: convincing 196 skeptical male colleagues in parliament to pass it as presented. But by the time a majority of that number had agreed to support the bill, it had been watered down to the lightest shade of itself, with critical details omitted. For the women involved, though, a law passed was a qualified victory and better than nothing.
In fact, the act helped Sesay win the All People’s Congress (APC) primary, compounding her strong campaign. It set a GEWE quota, mandating political parties to field 30 percent female candidates during each election cycle. Women’s rights advocates hailed the clause, and the act as a whole, as a watershed moment for women’s political representation, with the European Union’s (EU) elections observation mission calling the quota was “a positive development.”
A new electoral system emphasizing proportional party representation accompanied the GEWE quota, replacing the first-past-the-post model used in previous polls. Under the new system, voters cast ballots for political parties rather than individual candidates. The party leadership would then assign candidates to take up the seats the party had won, selecting those candidates from the lists party leaders themselves had drawn.
The new system’s intent was to pressure parties to assign more women to the seats said parties had won. But the 2023 elections laid bare the plan’s weakness, as political leaders made easy work of circumventing the quota. Women made up just 32 percent of candidates in that race.
In many cases, female candidates were placed lower on the parties’ primary lists, behind their male counterparts, making them less likely to win.
Critics of the law, including civil society groups such as the 50-50 Group Sierra Leone, say its electoral quota provisions are flawed in both design and effect.
Their main concern is that as the law fails to mandate directly reserved seats for women amounting to the core 30 percent representation it aims to achieve. Instead, it relies on proportional allocation, to the detriment of genuine female representation, allowing political parties to nominally comply with the letter of the law while subverting its spirit by placing women in unwinnable list positions.
The effect is that parties have continued preserving male advantage instead of creating a competitive field.
Still, out of the 135 seats contested, women candidates won 41, increasing their representation from 14.5 percent in 2018 to about 30.4 percent in 2023–the highest in Sierra Leone’s history. According to a 2023 UN Women annual report, the share of female local councilors increased from 18.7 percent in 2018 to 34 percent after the 2023 elections.
This milestone, according to Ellen O. Pratt, the executive director of the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women Empowerment, was the result of clear laws, robust implementation, and steady intentionality. “Quotas work best when they are part of a broader push for inclusion, which is what Sierra Leone did,” she said.
A Deadly Gamble
Despite the electoral gains, advocates worry that the law has done little to address the harassment, intimidation, and electoral violence women still face in Sierra Leone. They argued that instead of female candidates being questioned about their policies, they were frequently subjected to slander, with insults focusing more on morality or personal relationships.
According to UN Women, the country’s 2023 electoral cycle saw 202 recorded violence incidents specifically targeting women, with more than 68 percent of victims reporting the abuse directly.
Similarly, the EU mission observing those elections reported the significant incidence of gender-based insults and online harassment disproportionately targeting female aspirants to “shame” them out of the race. In several districts, the mission reported that “political thugs” followed women candidates, in some cases forcing them to seek refuge in local police stations to escape mobs of rival supporters.
Pratt, noted that while Sierra Leone’s 30% quota is a result of clear laws and intentionality, the data hub shows that women still occupy less than one-third of parliamentary seats, and the nation has yet to see its first woman president.
Though finally victorious in her first political endeavor – she is now MP for Port Loko District – Sesay faced as much harassment as any other female candidate. In fact, her experience was deadly. A gunman fired at her vehicle while she was en route to a campaign event. While unharmed, the whole ordeal was so traumatizing, she says, that anyone in her shoes would have wanted to quit.
Sesay had not expected the violence and hostility she received from rivals – least of all her own ex-husband with four kids who ran against her.
“There are so many grueling challenges,” she said, “that will make you want to regret why you even contested in the first place.We may have one of the region’s most progressive gender laws, but politics in Sierra Leone is still difficult for women.”
Sesay nodded slowly, reflecting on the real risks she and so many women have taken to exercise their basic right to political participation – and the real threat they seem to pose for doing so. “People will push boundaries that you didn’t think they would, all in the name of politics, and that sadly creates a very toxic political environment for women to compete.”
Drawing on her experiences, Sesay has begun pushing for amendments to the GEWE law that would enhance electoral violence protection, ensuring future elections are safer and fairer for women.
“While the law has been impactful to some extent, issues of electoral violence, harassment, and intimidation remain serious obstacles for women in politics,” she noted. “This is why we are working to see how the law can be further strengthened to ensure that these barriers, which continue to limit women’s participation in Sierra Leonean politics, are properly addressed.”
But if the fight for parity and position has taught Sesay anything, it is that combating violence will take a critical mass of women in office, far beyond what the GEWE law has achieved. She and her counterparts will, therefore, have to fight the battle on both fronts.
A Continental Conundrum
Sierra Leone’s challenges with gender quota laws are not an isolated case. Across the 41 African countries that have enacted some form of gender quota laws–at the local level, the national level, or both–the results have been highly uneven. In countries like Rwanda, South Africa, Namibia, and Mozambique, the laws have led to increases in women holding seats, while in Kenya, Nigeria, Mali, and Somalia, progress has been nearly non-existent.
According to the 2024 Africa Barometer report, women’s representation across African parliaments rose by just one percentage point between 2021 and 2024, from 25 to 26 percent. Another report by International IDEA warned that at the current pace, Africa would not meet the goal of equal political participation anchored in the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, and it could take until 2100 before African countries achieve gender parity.
Advocates say the situation underscores the lack of political will among parties to assign women electable positions–indicating that despite legislative progress, women do not fully enjoy equal participation in political life.
For Pratt, the problem runs deep.
“Across Africa,” she said, “we see that quotas don’t automatically change outcomes [just] because they are written into laws. On average, women’s representation is still around the mid-20 percent.” “So what we see is that putting in legislation is an important step, but for quotas to work, women need access to funding, which remains the major deterrent, making it difficult for women to turn quotas into seats.”
Dr. Tanya Garnett agrees. A professor at the University of Liberia who specializes in gender and development studies, she added that the challenge facing gender quota laws across Africa centers on enforcement, as political parties often find ways to circumvent or dilute the requirements.
According to Dr. Garnett, without clear sanctions, such as rejecting non-compliant party lists, quota laws risk remaining symbolic at best.
“We have to hold those political parties accountable to enforce gender quotas, and there need to be penalties,” she said. “And if not penalties, there have to be incentives for encouraging women to participate, even if those incentives come from voters that want to see women in politics.”
“Without follow-through, quotas remain words on paper rather than mechanisms for real change. This is why I think quota laws should be guided by legal frameworks that are paired with practical enforcement to truly transform political representation,” she said.
Where Does Sierra Leone Go from Here?
If the 50-50 Group Sierra Leone has its way, the GEWE law will see major changes in the near future–and they would cut across the branches of government.
“Neither the Parliament nor the Executive has been subjected to a mandatory minimum 30% representation,” the group said in a critique of the bill in 2023. “We are hopeful that in the not-too-distant future there will be a revision of the act to ensure a mandatory requirement for all government actors as a sign of true commitment to women’s equal representation at all levels of decision-making.”
But supporters of the law have erred on the side of pragmatism, countering that the law as it is represents a breakthrough in Sierra Leonean politics, which for centuries has been dominated by men. They note that the quota framework, even within a proportional representation system, has already delivered measurable gains, increasing women’s representation in parliament.
“In this view, the party-list system is not inherently flawed but rather a transitional tool that allows political parties flexibility while gradually normalizing women’s presence in leadership,” they added.
But the question remains, “a transition to where?”
For Sesay, the debate over how women are elected is just as important as the 30 percent quota itself. Indeed, a leading advocate of the GEWE law, her stance on its quota system is ironic.
While acknowledging that the law has ushered more women into parliament, herself included, Sesay believes this has come at the expense of local representation and the competitive spirit of democracy. By limiting the direct bond between elected officials and their constituents, the law shifts power away from candidates and the people, and toward party leadership.
Sesay says she prefers the first-past-the-post system originally in force, where candidates ran for specific constituencies, describing it as a more direct and accountable form of representation. “I personally think it is what is best for us,” she said, adding that it creates a clear line of responsibility between voters and their representatives. “The people know exactly who is representing them, and the MP knows exactly who they are fighting for.”
Sesay’s stance–and that of some civil society groups, signals an appetite to overhaul a law still hailed as a major feat for women in Sierra Leone and across the continent. But the path towards a more ideal configuration for women’s access to power–and the destination itself, however, remain unclear.
In either case, the number of women in power in Sierra Leone has risen–and, with it, the cost of retreat.
