Contested claims of victory during Côte d’Ivoire’s 2010 presidential election—the first in a decade—triggered widespread post-election violence that lasted into 2011 and left over 3,000 people dead and thousands displaced. While men and women alike were affected by this violence, research by the Organisation des Femmes Actives de Côte d’Ivoire (OFACI) found that women were often the first victims of violence as they were more likely than men to be home caring for children. The presence of their children also meant they had more difficulty escaping from a threat.

Besides being more vulnerable to general post-election violence, women were also targeted with specific forms of violence. In focus groups following the post-election violence, NDI and its partners, the Regroupement des Acteurs Ivoiriens des Droits Humains (RAIDH) and the Côte d’Ivoire section of the Western Network for African Peacebuilding (WANEP), heard from women who said that because of the abuses they had suffered during the post-election violence, they did not plan to participate in the 2015 elections. Women said they were afraid to participate, even as voters, at higher rates than men out of fear that it would draw repercussions and a repeat of the violence they had seen or experienced in 2010-11.

During Côte d'Ivoire’s national elections in 2015, the citizen observer group Plateforme d’Observation des Élections en Côte d'Ivoire (POECI) made violence against women in elections a primary focus of its observation. However, in the run-up to the election, in which it monitored the voter registration process specifically, as well as the general pre-election environment, POECI’s observers did not observe any significant VAW-E. While this does not indicate there was no violence against women, it was an encouraging sign for women who were afraid to vote because of the violence in the previous elections.

POECI released a report during the pre-election period in which it documented its findings, demonstrating how its data countered the prevailing assumptions that there was going to be violence, and the perception that participation in elections was inherently dangerous for women. Although an observation that collects no measurable data on VAW-E may seem like a wasted effort, the POECI observation and report was an important gauge of the environment for women who might otherwise have chosen not to participate: the lack of data on violence can be just as meaningful for women considering the dangers of political participation as the presence of data.

On the day of elections, October 25, 2015, POECI deployed observers systematically throughout the country to observe the voting process using a parallel vote tabulation (PVT). For the observation, POECI stationed 755 observers directly at polling stations, and deployed a further 119 into the field as mobile observers, who were not fixed at a polling station. By using PVT methodology, POECI was able to identify trends that affected the different procedures on election day, from the opening of the voting process to the tabulation and announcement of results. POECI’s election day observation showed that the election was conducted in a peaceful fashion overall.