This article is part of the Forus March With Us campaign, one month of stories with women activists and organisations fighting for gender justice.

One of Zambia’s major challenges over the years has been the inclusion of women and the youth in the running of the country’s political landscape.  

With a fear of intimidation very real in the people’s day-to-day lives, human rights lawyer, activist and member of the Youth4Parliament, Ruth Kay Kangwa founded the “Girls Gone Political” movement. 

“For a very long time, I was the only female leader among my male colleagues at the Youth4Parliament. We focused on grassroots mobilization to increase the participation of youth in general but we only had 1.8% representation in parliament. That’s how I chose to focus on young women, to encourage them to join political and governance spaces.”    

The movement has brought many young women into the political sphere and voting processes, yet closing the gender gap remains difficult and here’s why: 

“Electoral violence against women is real, not only in Zambia but in Africa in general. Harassment and corruption in candidate-based adoptions are also a reality. There are stricter educational requirements for women who are candidates during elections. We also have traditional barriers that really hinder women’s participation. We are coming from a patriarchal tradition which still believes that a woman's place is in the kitchen and this has a huge effect when we try to close the gap in political spaces,” Ruth explains.  

With the little representation young people have in official political bodies, the power dynamic remains unbalanced. 

“When women succeed in getting a place in the political milieu, they forget that they broke a barrier to get into a patriarchal system. They forget that it is important to create inter-generational collaborations to groom the young women coming up and prepare them for these positions. Older women cannot forget to pass on the baton. This leads to inequality among men and women and puts women at the end of the chain of power. We can shift this by really practicing representative democracy which focuses on ensuring that there is quality and quantity representation of all groups in society. This will lead to better, more responsible and more accountable societies”. 

Let’s change the slogan to “equal power between men and women” instead of the widely used “power to the people”.