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Weeks ahead of parliamentary elections Africa Uncovered visited Rwanda and found out how women are leading the way in the country's economic and political reconstruction.
The Rwandan capital Kigali is a city that is being rebuilt and leaving its past behind. Mud huts are making way for gleaming new office blocks.
However, still prominent on the skyline is the pockmarked and bullet-ridden Rwandan parliament building, bearing the scars of the battle for the capital in 1994 and the country's brutal civil war and genocide.
Five years ago, the building became famous for something other than war as Rwanda elected 39 women to its 80 member chamber of deputies, giving it the highest percentage of women parliamentarians not only in Africa, but across the world.
Rwandans go to the polls in several weeks time to vote for a new lower house of parliament, an electoral test that will indicate to some extent if women are truly shaping the country's future or if the result was largely down to constitutional changes.
The country's 2003 constitution implemented a target set by the UN of 30 per cent female representation in parliament but even allowing for this the results were unexpected. As well as the 24 reserved seats, women won a further 15.
"It is not only numbers. It is also the quality of those women we are electing to take those positions and also for the common women, women at the village level this gave them a certain message, a message that women can do," Oda Gasinzigwa, of the National Women's Council, says.
Dr Aisa Kirabo Kacyria, one of the 2003 intake and now the mayor of Kigali, was previously a practicing vet and through her work had developed close ties with the local rural community.
She believes that these experiences helped her and fellow female MPs to bring something new to Rwanda’s parliament.
Empowerment important
"We were forced to think deeply about what we are going to change the status of the Rwandan women in the village, out on the streets, their security, their health, their reproductive health, their production," she says.
"So it's like we have come to parliament to represent these women and our yardstick is the livelihood or the status of the Rwandan woman."
The UN has praised Rwanda as a beacon for female development in Africa – a continent where politics is, more often than not, the domain of ageing men.
Female literacy has risen from 10 per cent before the genocide to 50 per cent and the empowerment and education of women are at the forefront of what the government calls its '2020 vision' - the movement to a modern, knowledge based economy by 2020.
The country's new era of equal opportunity has also coincided with unprecedented economic development.
The economy grew by six per cent in 2007, the 14th year of continuous growth since the genocide and an impressive statistic for a country which is still relies on subsistence farming.
Women have always played a role in agriculture but the events of the last decade have seen dramatic changes in the way they have been rewarded for this work.
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But it took the murder of 800,000 of their countrymen and women in just 100 days for the inequalities to be addressed.
"Culture is a very strong thing in any community …women were not allowed to inherit land equal to the men… for example you find that a woman was not allowed to open an account, that was the situation before genocide," Gasinzigwa says.
There is also, inevitably, a political origin to the rise of women. Rwanda is today controlled by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), the political wing of the rebel army which took control of the country in 1994.
Government initiative
The RPF holds more than half the seats in parliament and more importantly the office of president.
Paul Kagame now runs the country but many of the policies he has implemented were formulated as a guerrilla commander in the forests of Uganda and Northern Rwanda.
As minority Tutsi refugees unable to return to their own country, the RPF were acutely aware of discrimination. As a rebel movement they understood that empowering women effectively doubled their numbers.
"There were so many widows, and there were so many women who were poor because they had lost their husbands and property and all that so as we were trying to put things [back] together women were able to work together," Rose Kabuye, who spent four years fighting alongside the men, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, says.
Kabuye has shattered the glass ceiling that faced many women to become Kagame's head of protocol.
In spite of her achievements she still argues that women's movements cannot succeed without the backing of their government.
"Whenever women struggle on their own it hasn’t been successful, in Europe, in America, everywhere so it has to all go to what the leaders of the country want," she says.
"So the Rwandan leadership has accepted this and has put it in the constitution. This is not something that we should have done on our own and I do not think we could have managed it on our own."
Scepticism
But not everyone has seen the government's apparent empowerment of women in a positive light.
"The regime in Kigali since 1994 for the wrong reasons decided to use women as one of those areas to market the country," says Charles Kabonero, the editor of Umuseso, Rwanda's only English-language daily newspaper.
He argues the RPF had other reasons for sponsoring the change in the constitution.
"The ruling party here has always been first because people don't give it a hard time. It rarely feels like opposition. And if you look at our women they are really women who could never dream of opposing this system.
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| Women are now doing jobs that were once the sole preserve of men |
"I have no problem motivating women or bringing in some incentives that help them really get promoted but I always think we should do it differently. We would have them competing, we would have them going through on merit."
Whatever the RPF's motivation, women have not only achieved political representation but also positions of power in the government. Nine of Rwanda’s senators and a third of its ministers are now women.
The public has also come to accept women in these roles.
Aisa Kirabo Kacyira gave up her post as an MP in 2006 to successfully become Kigali’s mayor. She believes the only thing holding women back now is themselves.
"We are risk averse in a way. That is why we wish sometimes to stay within the same arena that we are used to and jumping out of that arena means you are taking a risk," she says.
"And you may make a mistake, but I've learned that making mistakes is part of the deal. If I am to progress sometimes I have to get out of what I am used to."
'Good lesson'
As economic empowerment led to political power, the example of women in power is changing the way Rwandan women now see themselves. A new generation, for whom the past is another country.
"What we have learnt as women is that you can achieve anything if you really want to. For example riding a motor bike used to be for men, but if you feel you like it then you can do it too," Diana Mukakabera, a courier in Kigali, tells Al Jazeera.
"All I hope for now is that one day I will save enough to buy my own bike, so I could work for myself. I would love to be free to ride a bike that was truly mine, That is my dream."
Rwanda's record-breaking parliament has now closed and in two weeks time the nation will go to the polls to elect a new set of parliamentarians.
However, whatever the result, many feel that both economically and politically the country’s women have already proved their point.
"It's just like men, if you don't try men in positions of leadership you'll never know their capabilities so Rwanda has tried women in positions of responsibility and now the leadership is sure that, yes, they are capable," Rose Kabuye says.
"So I think this is a good lesson that other countries can also learn."
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