| More women, less men | | Print | |
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More women, than men will rule in Rwandan parliament, as the preliminary election results show. Women have taken 44 out of 80 seats. Local post-genocide constitution ensures a 30% quota for female MPs, however current results broke the record. It is the second parliamentary elections since the genocide of 1994 when some 800,000 minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered by Hutu militias in just 100 days. President Paul Kagame was instrumental in establishing the Tutsi-led 's Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) - the rebel force which took power and ended the genocide. The BBC's Geoffrey Mutagoma in the capital, Kigali, says the Liberal Party and the Social Democratic Party have conceded defeat. In the outgoing parliament, 48.8% of MPs were women - the world's highest rate. It is now set to be at least 55%. One of the voters expressed her opinion, why she voted women to parliament: "The problems of women are understood much Berger by women themselves, men, especially in our culture used to think that women are there to be in the house, cook food, look after the children... but the real problems of a family are known by a woman and when they do it, they help a country to get much better." |