Source: Huffington Post
MARRAKESH, Morocco, June 28 (Reuters) - U.S. first lady Michelle Obama, her mother and daughters Sasha and Malia were joined by Meryl Streep in Morocco‘s Marrakesh on Tuesday on a six-day tour to try to promote girls’ education.
Source: The Commonwealth
The Commonwealth will launch the first ever resource in East Africa to provide legal benchmarks on dealing with cases of violence against women.
Source: The Point
A three-day West Africa Food Security Network (WAFSN) Regional planning meeting recently ended at the Lemon Creek Hotel in Bijilo.
Held on theme: “promoting regional partnership to strengthen food sovereignty and sustainability,” the three-day forum was hosted by the National Alliance for Food Security (NAFS), and the International Food Security Network (IFSN). It brought participants from the IFSN international secretariat, Senegal, Ghana, Burkina Faso and The Gambia.
Source: The Africa Report
Growing women underrepresentation in governing boards of Ghana's oil and gas sector has sparked concern over worsening gender disparity after several policies failed to sufficiently protect women's rights and inclusion.
Source: Daily Observer
In today’s edition of Observer Archives we bring a position that the current Vice President Isatou Njie Saidy took when she was the Executive Secretary of Women’s Bureau on March 2nd 1994.
Source: Ventures Africa
According to the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), almost 70 million children, mostly in Africa, may die before 2030 and some 750 million women will have been married as children before that time. This prediction is due to millions of children’s lives that are blighted, for no other reason than the country, the community, the gender or the circumstances into which they are born.
Source: The New Times
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) has urged African countries to increase investment in family planning to benefit girls and women.
Source: US News
If prostitution becomes legal in South Africa, Nosipho Vidima, a 30-year-old sex worker, knows exactly what she’ll do. She’d start her own business called The Pleasure House, a classy operation staffed with an office administrator trained in finance, a group of prostitutes earning minimum wage – and maybe even an Italian chef.
Source: IPS News
Seventy-three-year-old Dorcus Auma effortlessly weaves sisal fronds into a beautiful basket as she walks the tiny path that snakes up a hill. She wound up her farm work early because today, Thursday, she is required to attend her women’s group gathering at the secretary’s homestead.
SOURCE:World Bank
Fatick, a three-hour drive from Senegal’s capital Dakar, is one of the regions hard hit by poverty. In a small community made up of mud brick homes and thatched roofs, we met Mariame Aidara’s family of eight children. Her husband has been out of work for two years now and the cash that she’s receiving from the government is helping buy food, pay for medical bills, and cover school supplies for her family.
Mariame is one of the beneficiaries of a conditional cash transfer program that was established by the Government of Senegal in order to provide a safety net for the country’s most vulnerable households. She and other beneficiaries receive 25,000 West African CFA Francs, the equivalent of $50 every quarter for five years on the condition that she ensures that her children attend school.
Establishing a National Social Safety Net System
Senegal has established several safety net programs for its poorest households, ranging from free school lunches, food assistance, support to the elderly and persons with disability, and cash transfers for the chronically poor. All of these programs were designed to improve the lives of poor households, help them invest in their human capital, and protect them from shocks. But until recently, these programs had been limited in scope and not always effective in targeting the most vulnerable.
In 2014, the International Development Association (IDA), the World Bank Group’s fund for the poorest, approved a $40.5 million credit to support the government in establishing a national social safety net system. The project supported the design of an important tool to integrate existing safety net programs – the National Unique Registry. The registry combines geographical targeting with a community-driven process to identify the poorest households. It then conducts a proxy-means test to evaluate their poverty status. Mariame for example, was pre-identified by a community committee in Fatick, and the test confirmed her status as a potential beneficiary of this optimized system.
The information about the poorest households collected by the registry can be used to target beneficiaries for social programs – including the government’s national conditional cash transfer program that Mariame benefits from, as well as the universal health coverage program, the national nutrition program, and productive programs. By early 2016, there were over 280,000 households in the registry. Of these, around 180,000 are already benefiting from the national conditional cash transfer program.
Additional tools were also developed to improve the overall system and the impacts on extreme poverty. In an effort to secure cash transfers and make them more accessible, an innovative payment mechanism was set up. Since April 2016, some 30,000 households have been receiving their cash transfers through mobile phones via a mobile payment operator.
Adapting the National Safety Net System to Respond to Crises
The World Bank is part of a Social Protection Inter-Agency Board that’s working to link safety net programs with humanitarian response efforts. Development practitioners are now looking at how cash transfers can be used more strategically as a common tool in responding to humanitarian crises. In Senegal, $11 million additional financing was mobilized (through the Adaptive Social Protection Program, supported by theUK’s Department for International Development) to adjust the current social safety net system so it can be used to respond to regular crises.
Adjustments include temporary interventions to address periods of crises for vulnerable households and prevent negative coping mechanisms that jeopardize their future and that of their children, as well as connecting the poorest households to programs that help increase their productivity and diversify their source of income, making them more resilient to future shocks.
The National Unique Registry now includes households who are potentially vulnerable (in addition to the most chronically poor who are current beneficiaries of the conditional cash transfer program), so that they are easily identified during crises. An emergency contingency plan that includes an early warning system is also under construction. The early warning system will trigger a pre-defined set of temporary interventions and a financing strategy to respond to specific shocks or crises.
"Everyone deserves a better life. For a country that has had its fair share of climate-related and economic shocks, a robust safety net system can help the poorest invest in their children’s well-being, build resilience in the face of a crisis, and develop a sustainable livelihood – all of which are critical to breaking the cycle of poverty," says Aline Coudouel, Senior Economist on Social Protectection and Labor for the World Bank.
Source: Human Rights Watch
Today is International Widows’ Day, when countries around the world recognize the violence, discrimination, and ostracism millions of widows face, and celebrate their important contributions.
Source: Human Rights Watch
Elizabeth is a vivacious secondary school student at Lusaka Girls School in Zambia.
Source: UN Women
While men make up most of those using or trafficking drugs, women are often the invisible participants and victims—one out of three drug users is a woman, and only one out of five drug users in treatment is a woman. [1]
Source: Malawi News Agency
(FAWEMA) has stated the need for parental engagement in promoting education especially for girls in the country.
Source: New Era
To provide sanitary pads to primary school girls in rural areas, along with comprehensive education, Sister Namibia is hosting a SisterPad Quiz Night tomorrow night at the Franco-Namibian Cultural Centre (FNCC).
Source: The New Times
Rwanda today joins the rest of the world to mark International Widows’ Day, with the national focus on addressing the plight of widows and widowers in the country.
Source: The New Times
Involvement of East African women in the region’s integration agenda is very important and must be enhanced, regional lawmakers have said.
Source: The New Times
As much as there is a growing understanding of the need to empower women, there is also some perception among some men that women empowerment could mean infringement on their rights.
Source:The Wire
When Clarisse’s husband died of malaria last year in the Cameroonian city of Douala, she was kicked out of their home by his family and forced to marry his brother.
Source: Fast Company
Welcome to Libya, where life goes on amid political and economic turmoil.