“Europeans should not wear clothes made by exploiting garment workers,” Lola Sanchez Caldentey, a member of the European Parliament, boldly declared yesterday. She was speaking at an event commemorating the victims of the 2013 Rana Plaza disaster, when the eight-story building collapsed in Bangladesh, killing over 1,100 garment workers.
UN Women will launch a publication titled “Shaping the international agenda: Raising women’s voices in intergovernmental forums” at a high-level event in New York on 2 May, 2017.
Savings groups popular in rural areas of developing countries - in which people pool money for saving and borrowing - empower women, increase business investment, and provide greater access to financial services, according to a new three-country study released in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Patricia Munabi is the Executive Director of Forum for Women in Democracy (FOWODE), a women’s rights organization in Uganda. From 2010 - 2012, FOWODE was supported by UN Women’s Fund for Gender Equality to implement gender-responsive budgeting at a local and national level in Uganda.
Source: DAILY NATION
Hundreds of rights campaigners from 150 women's organisations from 35 African countries converge in Nairobi on Wednesday to discuss, among other things, how far governments have delivered on gender equality and empowerment of women and girls.
The Economic Commission for Africa on Thursday participated in the International Telecommunication Union’s Girls in information and communication technologies (ICT) celebrations in Addis Ababa, with ECA professionals joining other distinguished guests in training and sharing personal stories with girls from various Ethiopian schools on how they made it in a male-dominated field.
Source: Times Higher Education
This week, we hosted a series of events in Lagos to mark the centenary of Soas, University of London. We are using the centenary celebrations to promote the critical role of education in contributing to female empowerment in Africa, including a panel discussion on closing the education gap on that continent, and leveraging female education to improve development.
Knowing what she knows today, Zeynab Bile Abdinoor would have done things differently.
Source: News Deeply
In Angola, lawmakers are working on updating the country’s 130-year-old penal code, inherited from the Portuguese colonial government. This includes a proposed change that has taken many by surprise: making abortion completely illegal – with no exceptions for rape, fetus malformation, or when the mother’s life is in danger.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
Women are likely to be elected for the first time to some of Kenya's powerful governor positions after making historic gains in party primaries this week, experts said, heralding a political breakthrough for the patriarchal society.
Police inaction, insufficient shelter space, and ineffective investigation and prosecution often leave domestic violence survivors in Algeria at risk of further mistreatment despite a new law criminalizing spousal abuse, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
The 59-page report, “‘Your Destiny is to Stay with Him’: State Response to Domestic Violence in Algeria,” found that domestic violence survivors face an uphill struggle to obtain justice and personal security. They face social stigma, economic dependence on the abusers, a shortage of shelters, lack of an adequate response from the police, the prosecutors, and the judges in investigating abuse, and judicial hurdles such as unreasonable evidentiary requirements. Algerian authorities should increase support for domestic violence victims, including directing police and prosecutors to investigate and prosecute cases, and increasing shelter capacity and protection orders to prevent abusers from inflicting further harm.
“I [felt] discouraged …the school was very far, I had to climb the stones,” Lucia (not her real name) told me last year as I talked to her about her school experiences. Lucia lives in the hilly city of Mwanza bordering Lake Victoria, well-known as Tanzania’s rock city. As we drove in the area interviewing girls and visiting secondary schools perched high up amid the boulders, I remember thinking this cannot be an easy climb for these children.
But climbing stony hills to get to remote schools is not the only hurdle school children face in Tanzania. We found multiple barriers that prevent many adolescents from getting a secondary school education, including financial problems and insufficient schools and teachers. In particular, though, we found out that government policies and practices specifically discriminate against girls.
Indigenous knowledge is critical in generating local innovation and in fostering sustainable entrepreneurship. In many rural communities, more women than men use indigenous technology at home and commercially in getting small scale, localized commercial projects accomplished.
Women in rural areas are marginalized in making choices of decent jobs and have generally been besieged by social norms that they have low ability to combine work, family and personal life, therefore getting them confined to unpaid household work. Women tend to be clustered in fewer sectors than men; in agriculture, they tend to be mostly involved in subsistence production despite the availability of other (but mostly non-traditional) commercial farming opportunities.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
A cheap and widely available drug could save the lives of one in three of the 100,000 new mothers who bleed to death after childbirth every year, mostly in poorer countries, according to the first study of its use in postpartum haemorrhage.
In a trial of 20,000 women, researchers found that the drug, called tranexamic acid or TXA, cut the number of deaths due to post-partum bleeding by 31 percent if given within three hours. The treatment costs about $2.50 in most countries, they said.
“I have seen girls become pregnant, become victims of violence and become HIV-positive, and I don't want to become one of those girls,” said 13-year-old Lydia Mwelwa, a student at Kabulonga Basic School in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital.
“I’m happy they have taught us in school how we girls can protect ourselves,” she added.
Election of women members of Parliament by adult universal suffrage is unconstitutional, Dickwitington Kimeze and Sisimuka Uganda, a non-governmental organization, claim in an April 18 petition filed at the Constitutional court.
Norah Chepkulul, a single mother of two young sons, stands outside her home, a grass thatched hut surrounded by cactus-like euphoria trees on the dusty Maasai Mara road in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
She has just finished milking her four cows and has asked the boys to keep an eye on the goats corralled in the little compound.
A few years ago, a single mother taking sole responsibility for her family would have been a rare sight among the pastoral Kipsigis and Maasai communities. Traditionally, in the predominantly herder societies men are the decision-makers and managers of land and stock.
Giving women in Africa access to caesarean sections could significantly reduce this number but don't have access due to weak health systems.
Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) disproportionately affect women and girls. Female genital schistosomiasis (FGS) alone causes severe pain, bleeding, and lesions in more than 16 million women and girls in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Buikwe — Hundreds of girls some as young as ten years at Kiyindi Landing Site in Buikwe District are forced into prostitution to fill the family neglect gap, a study has shown.