Rwanda tops the list of number of women in parliament

As the world prepares to celebrate International Women's Day (8 March), Rwanda has once again in the spotlight as a country to emulate because of the country's commitment to women in government. This clip from the Sydney (Australia) Herald is representative.

I can see why many outsiders praise Rwanda. Only 16 years after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has risen from the ashes to become a gender-equality trailblazer. Women enjoy many rights previously denied to them, including the right to own land, to open a bank account and to start a business. The government see women as critical partners to alleviate rural poverty and diversify the economy, moving from dependence on agriculture to a more knowledge-based one. To promote the role of women in politics, the constitution reserves 30% of the seats in parliament for women. The ruling party (Rwandan Patriotic Front, RPF) placed many women at the top of its lists of candidates. It has also appointed numerous women to senior government posts.

Yet, a few words of caution are in order even as women's visibility in politics is at an all-time high, their ability to shape the future of the country, ironically, has not improved. Rwanda's parliament has limited influence. Power is heavily concentrated in the hands of President Kagame and his close advisors. Parliamentarians – be they male or female – actually have very little power to legislate on behalf of their constituents. They have little room to develop policy or even to debate openly; space for free and open political expression is limited.

Female political representation and more progressive laws have not translated into a significant improvement in the lives of the poor. Some 90% of Rwandan women are peasants who rely on subsistence agriculture. Few have benefited from the country's progressive gender policies or relatively high rates of economic growth. The gap between the living standards of some wealthy urbanites and most rural dwellers is actually increasing. Post-genocide policies favour the urban elite, many of whom are (Anglophone) Tutsi who returned to live in Rwanda after the genocide. The vast majority of Rwandan women (and men) who survived the genocide remain extremely poor, politically marginal and, in many cases, traumatised by what they lived through. Increasing levels of authoritarianism actually stifle any attempts to address growing inequalities.

This leads to a final point: female parliamentarians and cabinet ministers do not function independently of party politics. They do not, by virtue of their sex, automatically prioritise gender equality over the ruling party's political agenda. Rwanda's post-genocide government understandably seeks to maintain peace and security. It does so in part through a policy of national unity and reconciliation. It has banned references to ethnicity from public discourse: Rwanda is a land of all Rwandans and there no longer are any Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. Though these are arguably laudable objectives, the government uses this policy as a tool to suppress dissent and silence criticism. The RPF expects parliamentarians and other public figures to toe the party line. Those who do not are accused of "ethnic divisionism" or promoting "an ideology of genocide" and relegated to the sidelines or worse, jailed or "disappeared". Even aid donors are loth to criticise the government, which does not hesitate to play the genocide guilt card against them.

We should not confuse the largely symbolic achievements of gender equality with concrete progress in most women's lives, nor allow a gender lens to obscure recognition of the growing social and political inequalities in Rwanda under an often authoritarian and repressive government.