The Organization of American States (OAS), through its electoral cooperation department and the international women’s commission, under the coordination of the former president of Costa Rica, Laura Chinchilla, will exhaust a work agenda to contribute to the elaboration of a roadmap on the empowerment of women in political leadership.
Chinchilla coordinates the political participation of women in the High Level Group formed by the General Secretariat of the Organization of American States (GS/OAS) to promote the implementation of the recommendations of the Electoral Observation Missions (EOM).
She will visit the country from the 8th to the 11th of this month. The OAS executive expressed her enthusiasm to collaborate with the Dominican Republic to achieve greater participation of women in political rights, empowerment and participation of women in politics.
She assured that she is invited to work on these issues here, where she recognizes that there is progress and important steps have been taken, but at the same time there are changes in laws and regulations that fail to translate into practice.
Asymmetries continue to occur, Chichilla indicated, in an interview for this medium, prior to his visit to the Dominican Republic this Sunday.
“The fact that the Dominican Republic has invited us to work in this country is an excellent sign of the political will that exists,” he said, specifying that this is not only happening on the part of the government authorities, but also of the electoral authorities, the parliament and the parties, in the interest of moving forward on the issue.
challenges
Chinchilla reiterated that in recent years the Dominican Republic has taken important steps in terms of women’s political participation and a recent example is a quota closer to the parity range to run for positions of popular representation.
However, he maintained that these changes have not yet been translated equitably and therefore gender asymmetries continue in electoral contests.
He stated that in this first visit, the agency seeks to know exactly where it is and what progress has been made, in order to then work with the authorities and political parties in the Congress of the Republic, and “have a roadmap of how we are going to move forward”.
She indicated that challenges have been identified in determining how political parties will allocate more resources for the empowerment and training of women.
In addition, achieve greater transparency in gender equity indicators and the issue of political violence. He argued that areas to be developed later will also be discussed, because there will be continuity of actions. During her visit to the country, Chichilla will meet with the authorities of the central government, with the Vice President of the Republic, with the Chancellor, with the Ministry of Women, the JCE, the TSE, Congress commissions. the Mayor and representatives of civil society.
IN POINTS Tracking
The OAS is in charge of committing the resources for this type of visit, said Chinchilla, who specified follow-up with technical teams as an important point.
Support
OAS executive Laura Chinchilla maintained that, based on her experience, facing the pending challenges to improve the political participation of women does not all refer to financial resources, because in many cases it has to do with legal reforms and in others the will policy to apply them.
regional leadership
Chinchilla explained that in the Latin American region there are “enormous challenges” in terms of culture that is very marked by the patriarchal figure, but it must be recognized, as global reports point out, that Latin America is one of the regions where there is more progress in participation women’s politics.
advances
He stressed that Latin America is the third region in the world in political participation in parliaments and there are several countries that already have 40% participation in congresses and others with 50% women.