Additional information about gender quotas

Due to the current political unrest in Nepal, the government, parliament, cabinet, and king are no longer in working order. Instead, an interim constitution has been issued, a Constituent Assembly has been elected, and the work of creating a new government, parliament, and cabinet has started.

Given the combined one-third quota for women in the constitution, and the 50 % quota in Schedule 1 of the electoral law, circa 17 % of the nomination places for the elections to the Constituent Assembly in the FPTP-system were reserved for women.

The Local Self Government Act has, because of this, not been put into practice and the local government structures is now about to be changed into a federal system.

In 2007, an Interrim Constitution was promulgated and an election of the Constituent Assembly was held in 2008 after a decade of considerable political instability. . The new Constituent Assembly elected in November 2013 was tasked to finalize the drafting of the new constitution within the first year of its mandate. Amid fears that the number of women to be elected in 2013 CA elections would be decreased significantly, only a small decrease was noted from an earlier 33% to 30%.

In 2015, a new Constitution was finalized. The 2015 Constitution, revised in 2016, provides gender quotas both in the form of reserved seats and legislated candidate quotas (see boxes above). The electoral system and the quotas which applied to the PR elections for the House of Representatives were (50 %) for women and the other half distributed among minority groups (EU EOM 2017). The Constitution requires that at least one third of the Federal Parliament (the HoR ) are comprised by women. An overall imperative is that the entire legislature including the Provincial Assemblies shall be comprised by at least 30 % women (EU EOM 2017).

In the 2017 election, women comprised only 146 of 1,944 candidates for the HoR (7,5%), and for the Provincial Assemblies, there were only 240 female candidates from 3,238 candidates (7,4%). Of these, only six women wereelected frin tge 165 First-Past-The-Post constituencies for the HoR. Parties had to nominate at least 50% women in their PR closed lists (EU EOM 2017).