Afghanistan: More women voters registering, but overall numbers still low

The number of women signing up to vote in Afghanistan's national elections has increased, but overall registration remains slow given that the ballot is scheduled for later this year, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) has announced.

A UNAMA spokesman reported yesterday that women comprise 22 per cent of the 320,770 Afghans who have registered to vote since the process began at the start of December. Up to 10 million people are estimated to be eligible to register to vote.

This is up from mid-December, when only 70,000 people had registered, just 13 per cent of them women. Bamiyan continues to have the greatest proportion of female voters, with women making up 43 per cent of all who have registered in that city.

Voter registration so far remains restricted to 52 centres in Afghanistan's eight major cities - the capital, Kabul, Bamiyan, Gardez, Herat, Jalalabad, Kandahar, Kunduz and Mazar-i-Sharif. Spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva told a press briefing in Kabul that registration would be progressively extended to provincial and rural areas once security conditions there have improved.

A civic education process is underway to try to show Afghans the importance of registering to vote. Almost 20,000 face-to-face meetings about voter registration have been held, and there have been thousands of other community mobilization events and local briefings, according to UNAMA.

The spokesman stressed the importance of local community and political leaders backing the process as a means of encouraging others to register.