Chapter 1. Introduction

Politics remains a male-dominated, even dangerous realm. As a consequence, research and policymaking has expanded its focus beyond opening up political spaces to improving conditions for those women already operating in them.

Political violence often intensifies before, during and after elections. This includes gendered electoral violence (GEV), which aims at deterring women active in politics from campaigning freely and winning elections. Gender scholar Mona Lena Krook argues it ‘is a distinct phenomenon involving a range of harms to attack and undermine women as political actors and exclude them as a group from public life’. Similarly, a report from the International Center for Transitional Justice defines GEV as ‘acts perpetrated by men against women with the aim of devaluing, demeaning and de-humanising them and their specific identity as women so as to promote men’s dominance in electoral politics thereby influencing electoral choices and outcomes’. However, perpetrators of GEV can also be women. Scholar Rebecca Kuperberg describes this phenomenon as ‘all acts or threats of violence resulting in physical, psychological, or symbolic harm or suffering to women involved in, or associated with, politics’. This report builds on these definitions, specifying the intentional and victim-centred perspectives of violent acts and their impacts, and it draws on these supplementary overlaps.

GEV encompasses several interconnected, often concurrent, types of violence – a continuum of violence – some of them less well recognised than others:

• Physical violence, including assault, torture and murder.
• Sexual violence, including sexualised insults, sexual harassment, groping and rape.
• Economic violence, including property damage and denial of financial resources.
• Psychological violence, including intimidation, in-person/online harassment, blackmail and disinformation campaigns.
• Semiotic violence, including the use of words, body language or images to attack, injure, subjugate or silence women – online and offline.

More recently, GEV has been brought to the forefront of global gender agendas, with prominent examples including the National Democratic Institute’s 2016 #NotTheCost campaign aimed at ending violence against women in politics; the Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s 2018 report on GEV; and the Inter-Parliamentary Union’s 2021 brief on sexism, harassment and violence against women members of parliament (MPs). In addition, UN Women/UN Development Programme (UNDP) issued a guide to preventing such violence in 2018, while books such as Mona Lena Krook’s Violence Against Women in Politics and Elin Bjarnegård and Pär Zetterberg’s Gender and Violence Against Women Actors have helped push scholarly boundaries.

Against the above backdrop, this report details how the global phenomena GEV manifests in African contexts, drawing on the research presented to provide a comprehensive series of policy recommendations for mitigating and preventing gendered electoral violence in Africa. In doing so, it not only foregrounds perspectives too often marginalised in mainstream debates, but fills a number of important knowledge gaps in the literature. These shortfalls have arisen due to a number of reasons.

1. First, relatively little research has been conducted into African experiences compared to perspectives from the West, Latin America and Asia.
2. Second, a few notable exceptions aside, most of the existing research focuses on the national rather than sub-national level. This is despite estimates – based on surveys in Côte d’Ivoire, Honduras, Tanzania and Tunisia presented in a 2018 National Democratic Institute report – that 66.7 percent of violence against women in political parties takes place at the municipal level, compared to 22.2 percent at the regional level and 11.1 percent at the national level. Moreover, in research from 2023, scholar Sandra Håkansson points out that the local level is characterised by tight-knit communities living in close proximity, with perpetrators of violence often fully aware of where women active in local politics live. It is also worth noting that local politics tends to focus on development issues directly relevant to community livelihoods, making it a key arena for contestation.
3. Third, unless it explicitly adopts a gender lens, research on electoral violence in Africa tends to focus almost exclusively on men’s perspectives. By contrast, the research underlying this report hones in on women active in local politics, as well as the gendered social and historical norms and political structures enabling GEV. Going further, it examines how gender intersects with categories such as age, ethnicity and party political affiliation, which influence women’s exposure to gendered electoral violence.

The basis for this report is the Swedish National Research Council-supported ‘Making Politics Safer: Gendered Violence and Electoral Temporalities in Africa’ research project, which explores how local-level GEV unfolded in Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe. The project foregrounds the narratives of women active in politics and conducted 134 semi-structured interviews with women politicians about their exposure to and coping mechanisms for GEV. In addition, the project interviewed more than 30 organisations and institutions working on gender and democracy issues in the three countries, using the information gleaned to map what laws, policies, programmes and structures are in place to support women facing GEV.

Data was collected in relation to the 2022 national elections in Kenya, the 2023 elections in Zimbabwe, and the 2024 elections in Ghana. Despite overlap, these three contexts differ in a number of respects:

• Degree to which elections are free and fair: In this regard, 2023 data from the Mo Ibrahim Index rated Ghana at 77.7%, Kenya at 64.2% and Zimbabwe at 22.5%. The index measures election irregularities as well as election violence in the most recent national elections.
• Electoral violence trajectories: Kenya and Zimbabwe have experienced longer trajectories compared to Ghana, although the latter has experienced increasing frequent and severe electoral violence in recent elections.
• Level of women’s national-level political representation: As data provided by NAI Policy Notes attest, the respective levels stood at 15% in Ghana (as of 2025), 23% in Kenya (2022) and 33% in Zimbabwe (2023).
• Quotas for women in politics: While Kenya and Zimbabwe have legislative quotas at both the national and local level, the former country only has compliance at the local level. Ghana adopted an affirmative action bill in 2024, with targets set for equal representation at the national – but not sub-national – level (The Global Database of Gender Quotas External link, opens in new window.).
• Women’s level of representation at sub-national levels: In Ghana, just 4.1% of district assembly members are women (some of them appointed). In Kenya and Zimbabwe, by contrast, the equivalent figure in the county assemblies is 35.2% and 32.1% respectively (only 8% of these women in Kenya and 13% in Zimbabwe are elected, however, with the remainder nominated).
• Likelihood of women running for office being subject to criticism or harassment: Afrobarometer data from 2021–2023 shows 42%, 53% and 57% of women running for office in, respectively, Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe report that they are somewhat likely or likely to be criticised, called names or harassed by others in the community.

Two or three local research sites were selected in each country based on differences in the strongholds of the ruling and opposition parties; urban and rural contexts; and formal and informal settlements. This breadth allows for a nuanced picture of how GEV manifests between and within country contexts, and what the implications of this might be for other African settings.

The findings demonstrate that women active in local-level politics are routinely exposed to the various forms of GEV outlined above, with age, ethnicity, marital status and party political affiliation standing out as the most important intersecting factors. More specifically, women who are younger, from marginalised or minority ethnicities, unmarried or single, and/or affiliated with a non-dominant political party find themselves at greater risk of GEV. Such violence impacts both the intended target and their family members, often leading to severe psychological consequences and driving women to quit politics. Nevertheless, many women remain undeterred from pursuing their political work. The findings also show how, in the absence of more formalised support structures, politically active women are forced to devise personal coping strategies. Given this, it is imperative that effective multi-actor, multi-sector structures are put in place at multiple governance levels.

The questions guiding the subsequent sections of the report are:

• What is the form and nature of sub-national GEV in Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe?
• How does GEV impact women active in local politics in Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe?
• What measures are in place to mitigate local-level GEV in Ghana, Kenya and Zimbabwe?
• What recommendations for Nordic and African policymakers arise from the research?

The remainder of the report proceeds by detailing the three case studies in turn: firstly Ghana, followed by Kenya, and lastly Zimbabwe. A concluding section offers some overarching insights, as well as a series of policy recommendations.