Mary Ayen Majok
Member of Parliament and chair of the National Legislature’s Committee on Gender, Peace and Reconciliation, South Sudan
South Sudan’s most recent peace agreement was signed in September 2018, and according to Mary Ayen Majok, chairperson for the committee on decentralized governance and states’ affairs and the acting speaker for the Council of States, women played a key role in establishing the country’s independence. They “put pressure on the government of Sudan and on the international community,” she said, to ensure that women’s rights and quotas on women’s political representation were considered important issues.
“We marched to the SPLM [Sudan People’s Liberation Movement] secretariat, and we met the leadership of the party, telling them that we want our representation to be increased from 25 to 35%, and the president listened,” she said. Though all signatories on behalf of parties to the conflict were male, seven of the 17 civil society signatories were female.
Majok moved around a lot as a child due to her father’s work — that’s when she started to see the inequality among different communities. When the Second Sudanese Civil War broke out in 1983, her family moved back north. But it wasn’t until Majok began studying at the University of Juba that she became politically active.
In Episode 7 of the Changing the Face of Politics podcast, Representative Bi-Khim Hsiao and Fauziya Abdi Ali also discussed women in peace and security in Africa.
Although she was a high-performing student, her family decided she should have an arranged marriage, which often means an end to schooling. Her story isn’t uncommon. In South Sudan, almost half of all girls are married before they turn 18. But Majok managed to convince her husband to let her finish her education. In her role as a member of the Parliament, she hopes to draw on her own experiences to help other women use education to escape a cycle of poverty.
“When you’re out speaking to women in the communities, you find that most of the challenges they face are the same: issues to do with forced marriages, issues of domestic violence, issues to do with them not being economically empowered and so their voices are not being heard,” she said.
We marched to the SPLM [Sudan People’s Liberation Movement] secretariat, and we met the leadership of the party, telling them that we want our representation to be increased from 25 to 35%, and the president listened.
Mary Ayen Majok, member of Parliament in South Sudan
After graduating, with a family and having been nominated twice as a political representative, she eventually joined the South Sudanese Parliament in 2011.
“Very few women were educated, very few women were helping the communities, very few of us were advocates. And I think that’s why the community thought, ‘We should push you to be where the decisions are made so that you can give us proper help,’” she said.
Majok sees positive change, too. “The women who are now in senior positions recounted how when they first started, men used to laugh at them. Nowadays ... they don’t laugh anymore. They take us seriously, and many of them are even our champions,” she said.
“We had a female vice president before the U.S., and now we have women in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and in the Defence [Ministry], so I think that yes, there are challenges in implementation, but there is also progress,” Majok said. ■
Changing the Face of Politics
You can listen to more inspiring stories of women in the podcast series “Changing the Face of Politics” hosted by the National Democratic Institute.
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The National Democratic Institute (NDI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works for democracy and makes democracy work. It supports women around the world to overcome the barriers to their equal and active political participation. NDI gratefully recognizes the generous contribution of Lynda Thomas for making the Changing the Face of Politics podcast series possible. The Institute also recognizes Devex as the Media Partner for the series.
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