“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.
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.
Nasaro Kiriambu, 55, cuddles her two-year-old grandson, Fabian, in a small white tent at Eldume camp in Baringo County, in western Kenya. Kiriambu arrived at the camp in March, along with her own six children, after her village was attacked by a neighboring community on a revenge mission. Nine were killed, including her daughter-in-law, the boy’s mother.
Source: News Deeply
Two year ago, during Liberia’s Ebola outbreak, Mamie Tarr began hemorrhaging. When she arrived at the clinic, clutching her abdomen and complaining of intense pain, health workers at first suspected Ebola. In fact, without telling her family, the 30-year-old had visited a backstreet abortionist who used a combination of herbs, chalk and a rusty syringe to terminate her five-month pregnancy.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
Kenya is looking to amend its anti-trafficking law so that foreign victims of human trafficking found on Kenyan soil are not treated as criminals but given greater protection, the government's chief legal adviser said.
Source: The Monitor
This week, one woman's denouncement of domestic violence and action to seek divorce on those grounds made fodder for local media and social media.
Source: Angola Press
The National Assembly Wednesday joined the worldwide solidarity campaign for gender equality, "He for she".
Source: Daily News
All women have in-born leadership character. What needs to be added is talent promotion, and this mostly should be done to African women, who work hard but earn very little," says a political scientist and human rights activist, Prof Ruth Meena.