She Leads workshop in a small village near Yangon. Credit: Charlotte England. All rights reserved.On Sunday 8 November, Myanmar is expected to hold the closest thing it has had to a democratic general election in over fifty years. Two hours outside of Yangon, Myanmar’s gridlocked, etiolating former capital, villagers still have little idea how to vote, but most know who they want to vote for. A dusty toddler is eating a strawberry ice lolly, a large red National League for Democracy (NLD) sticker is plastered on his small forehead, the party’s fighting peacock emblem stretching from tiny ear to tiny ear.
The raised wooden houses are sparsely decorated. Most people can’t afford surplus possessions here, but many have posters of Aung San Suu Kyi, the almost deified leader of the NLD, or her father, independence hero Bogyoke Aung San, on the wall.
A group of women — participants of a civil society initiative to empower women in the political process — have bussed in to show villagers how to correctly fill out a ballot. The volunteers are industriously cutting sheets of paper into strips printed with a choice of fruits instead of candidates. Their programme, She Leads, is the child of Burmese civil society organisation Yaung Chi Thit, but it is funded by the International Fund for Electoral Systems, and the British, Australian and Swiss Governments. All the sponsors have their logo stamped prominently on the women’s pristine white shirts.
