When Mandelena became a mother, she was only 16. During the prolonged dry season in Gwor County, South Sudan, her community saw crops failing and cattle dying. Children stopped going to school because of hunger and women and girls had to walk up to five hours every day to collect water.
In a tiny village in Egypt's southern province of Assiut, 16-year-old Amany Shamekh, who wants to be an artist one day, recalls how she was illegally circumcised with a razor blade."The midwife came to the house, my mother took off my underwear and the lady said 'hang in there'," said Shamekh who grew up in the village of Awlad Serag.
With fewer than 10 percent of children with disabilities in Africa attending school, the World Bank and USAID have created a new $3 million Disability-Inclusive Education in Africa Program Trust Fund to increase access for these children to primary school and to design and implement inclusive education programs across the region.
Girls with disabilities in developing countries are effectively unseen and unheard and are often not benefiting from international efforts to improve access to education in developing countries.
Kilindi — THE African Medical and Research Foundation (AMREF) Health Africa, Tanzania branch, has saved 3070 girls from female genital mutilation (FGM) in Handeni and Kilindi districts, respectively, between 2014 and 2016.
An entrepreneurship workshop aiming at providing women with necessary information and facilities for business start-ups was held this morning at the Council Room, City Council in Port Louis. The Minister of Gender Equality, Child Development and Family Welfare, Mrs Roubina Jadoo-Jaunbocus, the Lord Mayor of the City Council of Port Louis, Mr Daniel Laurent and other eminent personalities were present at the event.
As of 2013, an estimated 767 million people lived below the international poverty line of $1.90 a day [1]. How many among them are women and girls is still unknown, although research in various countries has shown that women and girls fare worse than men and boys on a range of factors that may predispose them to poverty, including having their own source of income, ownership and control of assets and decision-making within their households. Until now there has been no credible global estimates of the number of people living in extreme poverty disaggregated by sex.
A collaborative effort by UN Women and the World Bank aims to address the gender gap in poverty analysis. On 18 October, during a special event of the Economic and Financial Committee of the UN General Assembly, the organizations jointly unveiled the initial results of a global study on gender differences in poverty. The joint effort uses the Global Micro Database (GMD), which is a collection of globally harmonized household survey data developed by the World Bank’s Poverty and Equity Global Practice, covering 89 countries and representing an estimated 84 percent of the population in the developing world.
The results, presented by Senior Economist of the World Bank, Kinnon Scott, show that between the age of 20 and 34 years, women are more likely to be poor than men. The difference coincides with the peak productive and reproductive ages of men and women, and can be related to factors such as having young children in the household and the higher likelihood for women to leave the labour market in response to rising demands on the time they allocate to unpaid care work. Divorce, separation and widowhood also affect women more negatively than men. Divorced women in the 18-49 age group are more than twice as likely to be poor than divorced men in that same age group.
The research also showed that households with children are among the poorest, and that single parents with children, and predominantly single mothers with children, face a far higher risk of poverty.
The policy implications of the findings are clear—eradicating poverty will require greater attention to the vulnerabilities faced by women during specific periods of their lives.
“The greater likelihood of women not having an income of their own and the inequality in the division of unpaid care work, put women at a severe economic disadvantage compared to men, and at a higher risk of poverty,” says Shahra Razavi, Chief of Research and Data Section at UN Women. “Therefore, policy interventions to fight global poverty must pay attention to the specific barriers that women face”.
There is clearly a need for accessible, affordable and quality childcare services to enable both single parent families (predominantly single mothers), as well as other families with children, to combine their care responsibilities with income-generating work. “But it is also clear that many women with children will need social protection transfers to complement their earnings”, adds Ms. Razavi.
However, according to Magdalena Sepúlveda, former Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, “success or failure of social protection systems in addressing women’s poverty rests heavily on whether they are designed and operated from a gender perspective.” This would mean taking into account the multiple forms of discrimination against women and girls when designing and implementing such programmes.
Giving the example of conditional cash transfer programmes which have proliferated in Latin America over the past two decades, and have decreased overall poverty, but increased feminized poverty, Sepúlveda explains: “The conditionalities attached to these programmes have in fact placed additional demands on women’s time, hindered their access to formal labour markets, limited their possibilities to participate in education and training...or further deprived them of scarce leisure time.” Moving forward governments should “reconsider the use of conditionalities with a view to eliminating their negative gender impact …promote the co-responsibility of men caring for children and ensure links of social protection programs with complementary public services including child care services”.
Women’s disproportionate burden of unpaid work was highlighted by other experts at the high-level event as a major contributor of their poverty, and also poorer health. “Women’s agricultural work remains mostly unrecognized across South Asia, by governments, data collectors, employers, families, and by women themselves,” said Haris Gazdar, from the Collective for Social Science Research, Karachi, Pakistan. As a result, he added: “Women workers are unpaid or underpaid, and the price is often paid in terms of women’s health, and the health and nutrition of their children. We found in a rural region of Pakistan that women who had worked in cotton harvesting were more likely to be undernourished, and their children were significantly more likely to be stunted, compared with women who did not do this work.” The challenge therefore is not merely to intensify women’s market work but to ensure that such work does not take place at the expense of women’s own well-being, and the nutrition and well-being of their children.
With reference to the agrarian economies of sub-Saharan Africa, Agnes Quisumbing from the International Food Policy Research Institute, underlined the importance of women’s individual land rights as a critical area of intervention, as they impact social and intra-household gender dynamics.
The findings of the research will feed into the first issue of UN Women’s new flagship report, Gender Equality in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to be launched in February 2018. The report will examine how far the global community has moved in turning the new development agenda into tangible progress for women and girls, and what is needed to bridge the remaining gaps between rhetoric and reality. The results of the UN Women-World Bank research will also be published in a forthcoming brief .
On a bright April afternoon last year, the Njala University campus in southern Sierra Leone was brimming with prospective nurses, teachers and social scientists. After their lectures, three students and two teenage friends approached a sowei – the head of a female secret society – to ask for bondo (more widely known as female genital mutilation, or FGM).
At the invitation of the Government of Sudan, I visited Sudan from 18 to 25 February 2018. The objective of the visit was to gain first-hand knowledge of the situation, assess the challenges of addressing conflict-related sexual violence in Sudan, and establish constructive dialogue with national authorities in this regard.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
The law passed in the Muslim country earlier this month fails to define domestic violence or explicitly outlaw marital rape
Source: CNN
One hundred and ten girls remain unaccounted for after a faction of Boko Haram raided their school in the northeast Nigerian town of Dapchi, Nigeria's Ministry for Information said in a statement Sunday.
Source: Human Rights Watch
Police and armed gangs killed at least 37 people in Nairobi between September and November 2017, during the second phase of Kenya’s presidential election, Human Rights Watch said today. Kenyan authorities should urgently investigate these killings and all others documented during the entire elections period, and ensure that all of those found responsible for unlawful killings are held to account.
The African Development Bank has called on African countries to make science, technology and innovation (STI) policies inclusive and place women and girls at the centre of STI programmes.
Source: allAfrica
Political parties in Cameroon have set an ambitious goal ahead of this year’s polls — to put women in at least 30 percent of elected offices.
Buchanan — The Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia or AFELL on Friday, February 23 launched a project "promoting and protecting the Rights of women, children and indigent person" through its legal aid clinics.
After decades of working in HIV and Aids programmes in Tanzania, Dr Yeronimo Mlawa knows it too well why women are more prone to HIV infection than men.
Despite campaigns by different stakeholders on safe motherhood initiatives, Chitipa District Council has registered 65 home deliveries and nine deaths of pregnant women in six months.
AN initiative advocating for safe delivery was launched in Kigoma region yesterday, where it was discovered that only 47 per cent of women give birth in health facilities.
80% of all HIV positive women in the world live in sub-saharan Africa. This is the only region in the world where more women than men are living with HIV — scholars have referred to this phenomenon as the “feminization of HIV.”