Women have been urged to support the Building Bridges Initiative report as it has a lot of benefits for them.
The call came from Ijara MP Sophia Abdi who on Thursday said women are major beneficiaries of the "progressive" report.
The document was officially handed to President Uhuru Kenyatta and former Prime Minister Raila Odinga on Wednesday.
Sophia, the first woman elected MP in Northeastern since Independence, said the 214-page report has a solution for the inequalities that women have experienced for decades.
She said if the proposals are implemented, the country would attain the elusive two-thirds gender requirement. The legislator spoke at Bothai during its elevation to a subcounty. She called for the protection of the gains already made and their expansion in the constitutional changes.
This was in reference to the BBI report proposal to scrap the 47 woman representative seats in the National Assembly and their replacement with an equal number in the Senate. However, Sophia said a closer analysis of the report indicates a win for women.
The report, compiled by a team chaired by Garissa Senator Yusuf Haji, proposes the election of 94 senators, two each from the 47 counties. One of the two senators will be a woman.
The MP said women from the region have for a long time encountered several hurdles when seeking elective positions. They now have a reason to be happy as the BBI report has a solution.
“I fully support the report. The chairman, who is our elder and son, together with his team have done a tremendous job. At least we have something progressive. My caution is that we should not tamper with what we already had negotiated for. We have gained as women and we should aspire to have more,” she said.
The report seeks to delete Article 98 1 (a) of the Constitution which states that the number of elected senators should be 47. It also proposes the scrapping of 16 nominees by political parties.
Another recommendation to cure gender imbalance in the National Assembly is to have a 360-member House, 290 of them elected at the constituency level and 70 filled by political parties on the strength of actual votes cast per county and distributed among youths, people living with disabilities and women.
Of the 70 seats, 35 will be women's. This will increase their numbers in the bicameral Parliament as they also stand a chance of being among the 290 elected on a first-past-the-post basis.
- mwaniki fm