Countries in Southern Africa have in the recent years seen an increasing number of women participating in politics, a development which is often cited as a positive indicator of the movement of women from the private sphere into politics, hence the public sphere. Targets for quotas on women’s participation have been set by the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and all the member countries including Lesotho are making efforts to reach the targets. Governments cite the quantitative increase in participation in the political economy by women as positive strides towards emancipation of women. The paper describes the nature and effect of the increasing role of women in the public sphere and its benefits for women at the grassroots. The paper documents the increasing representation of women in politics and argues that the entrance of women in the public sphere still remains exclusive. This study sees a contradiction between the increasing participation of women in the public sphere and existence of factors that limit effective representation of all women. There still exist legal, cultural and administrative constraints that limit their effectiveness. The increasing role of women in the democratic processes sphere, though a good development, may not directly lead to improvements in
addressing issues specific to certain groups of women such as those in the rural areas and in the informal sector. The political arena is still structurally bottlenecked that even those women who break into this sphere remain frustrated by it