JULLY 2021

Theme: Men and Women Inequality

Topic on discussion: Respecting women’s rights:

 In Somali cultural practice women and men have no equal opportunity; women employment opportunity is not the same as men because they are weak and not strong enough to do assigned tasks or cannot keep time do to household chaos. Women’s political participation is limited, elders do not select women as clan candidate to represent in the government, so their chance to be politician or to be clan candidate in the parliament either state or federal is limited. If she marries a man from another clan the elders from her own clan say she is member of the family she married from and elders from the man she married say she belongs to anther clan, so she has narrow space in political participation and it is limited clan elders to select her or support her candidacy. Also she rarely gets support from elders or her own community even if she marries a man from the same clan of her. When it comes to decisions related community issues women has no space and not invited to attend; in case they attend a meeting to discuss community issues they have no say and if they try to contribute their idea not respected and ignored their opinion. In the household man is the breadwinner and all family decisions are up to him, and incase the women is the source of income of the family some educated women got the power to contribute family decisions. And in terms of family inheritance historically women’s share of inheritance was denied or they had no hope to claim inheritance either their parent alive or dead; by the way most of the parents ignore to give women inheritance. But at the present time women claims to get her inheritance after the death of her parents where some women don’t.