ABSTRACT
Two trends have continued to dominate political debate and practice on the state and states of democracy in Africa. The first is the continued focus on formal electoral politics as the principal, if not the sole, locus of politics in both academic literature and in more popular debate. And the second is the persistence of a continuum of gendered inequalities, discriminations and violence across African societies despite the growing inclusion of women within these formal electoral structures. The project of engendering democracy has to be deeper and wider than just adding women to existing political structures and processes and expecting gendered transformations to follow. While not downplaying the importance of these formal structures or indeed the importance of more diverse representation within them, focus and attention also needs to spread to the many other sites and spaces of everyday politics in which the discussions, deliberations, negotiations, bargaining and decision-making which take place have immediate impacts on peoples’ daily lives.
