“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.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
Boko Haram militants have released 82 schoolgirls out of a group of more than 200 whom they kidnapped from the northeastern town of Chibok three years ago in exchange for prisoners, the presidency said on Saturday.
Women in Zimbabwe have few political role models. Former vice-president Joice Runaida Mujuru made history in 2004 when she became the first – and so far the only – woman to join the country’s presidium, a standing executive committee. Today, out of 26 government ministers, only four are women.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
In the small maternity ward of a run-down health clinic in Delft, a half hour drive from Cape Town, the wooden benches in the waiting area are filled with young women and girls from the poor surrounding townships.
Botswana Democratic Party (BDP) Women's Wing has expressed gratitude at government's decision to sign the SADC Gender Protocol following the review.
Uganda and Tanzania trail behind the rest of the East African countries on the score card sheet when it comes to the implementation of gender policies and law, a new study reveals. The report titled: "The EAC Pilot Gender Barometer and Challenges in Information Gap" score card is largely based on how citizens perceive governments in terms of existence of laws and policies and their effective implementation.
Members of Parliament and human rights activists have asked government to enforce the laws in the mining sector to protect the right of women in the sector. The MPs and other stakeholders said women in the minerals sector face a lot of challenges, which need to be addressed
As part of the World Economic Forum on Africa 2017, we're recognizing six entrepreneurs who demonstrate the positive role women are playing in creating opportunities and preparing the region for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
Diane Shima Rwigara on Wednesday declared her interest to run for the Rwandan presidency, becoming the first female independent candidate. In her manifesto, the 35-year-old said she will work to eradicate poverty, champion free speech, and provide health insurance for all Rwandans.
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.