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Benin and Senegal represent two successful cases of democratic transition in Africa. They also represent two different paths to that end. This article explores the role of political parties in facilitating these different and successful paths to democratic transitions. In Benin, political parties and political leaders relied on the prevailing patterns of ethno-regional cleavages to structure their strategic interactions, mobilize electoral support and organize competition in legislative and presidential elections. In Senegal, an incremental pattern of institutional reform helped the ruling party retain power while enabling fragmented opposition groups to participate in competitive elections. In the long run, this helped opposition groups develop an effective electoral coalition to defeat the ruling party in presidential and legislative elections and bring about a turnover in government.

This article explores reasons for the success and failure of small‐scale enterprise programmes for rural women in the Sahel sponsored by a Malian NGO. The CILCA Mali programme has assisted projects in rainfed crop production, vegetable production, sheep fattening, poultry raising, and soap and textile production based on a revolving credit scheme operating both for collective and individual loans. They have also placed heavy emphasis on training village women, on helping make viable village women's organizations, on health and sanitation activities and on preschools. Their eclectic approach, with its underlying emphasis on economically viable microenterprises in agricultural, animal husbandry and manufacturing activities, has been quite successful. It seems that the project has benefited village women both in terms of status and in terms of family welfare. The ‘integrated’ approach to development which tries to do everything simultaneously has often been criticized. in this case, though, the many non‐economic activities seem to have been important assets reinforcing the success of the micro‐enterprises. The generalist/technician character of the women's technical team and their back‐up from the rural technical institute are also factors in CILCA‐Mali's success. CILC A‐Mali may be seen as a useful example of what can be accomplished for and with village women in the poorest circumstances and the worst possible climatic conditions by a microenterprise strategy embedded in a broader village system approach.

Electoral systems as endogenous re-distributive institutions (Tsebelis, 1990) help to define the rules of the game. In this manner they have an important impact among regional, class, ethnic, gender, and other sub-groups of the general population on the distribution and variation in outcome of who is nominated for, and elected to, national office. In particular, there is a well-established and growing literature on the impact of electoral systems and electoral system reform on the representation of women in national legislative bodies (Darcy, Welch, and Clarke 1994; Matland and Taylor 1997; Caul 1998; Rule 1987; Matland 1998). In general, these studies have concluded that more women are elected in proportional rather than in plurality or majority electoral systems. However, a major difficulty in interpreting these findings is created by the historical, cultural, economic, and institutional differences among cases chosen for comparison.