Source: All Africa
A number of wives in Tanga region, have complained that their husbands hide their voter's identity cards to prevent them from voting in the forthcoming general election. This, indeed, is unthinkable as husbands are not expected to be this foolhardy.
Source: All Africa
Public Relations Officer in the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology yesterday stated that about 50% to 60% of girls that are currently pregnant are those who do not want to be in the school system.
Source: All Africa
Women and children are bearing the brunt of a malnutrition and hunger crisis in Mauritania, while tens of thousands of Malian refugees face food shortages due to a lack of funding, the head of the United Nations World Food Programme said on Wednesday.
Source: All Africa
The under performance of some female politicians has undermined the credibility of prospective female candidates for state powers both in Liberia and Africa at large.
Source: News Fulton County
African Union Commission leader says advances are at risk from 'enormous challenges'
Source: Business Ghana
A conference of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in collaboration with the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding (WANEP) opened in Accra on Tuesday to review the implementation of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) 2000 in West Africa.
Source: All Africa
The first ever mission of Ethiopian women business entrepreneurs to Scandinavia visited Norway earlier this month.
SOURCE: All Africa
Sometimes the technical words we use to describe a problem mask its true nature.
Such is the case for the hundreds of thousands of women who die during pregnancy or delivery each year across Africa. For them, the official cause of death may be recorded as postpartum hemorrhage or uterine rupture. Similarly, for the alarming number of newborns who perish, their mothers may be informed the cause was asphyxia or birth trauma.
Yet in each of these cases, the underlying cause of death is actually something far more fundamental: lack of access to basic health care. The vast majority of the mothers and newborns who die in Africa are lost to preventable health problems. They would have survived had they lived in a wealthier community with more doctors, hospitals and resources.
Unfortunately, this picture is representative of a much larger crisis in maternal and newborn health. According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, 800 women worldwide die each day of preventable complications related to pregnancy and delivery. And every day, 7,400 newborns die, most also from avoidable causes.
It is a gross injustice whenever the joyous occasion of birth instead is a preventable death. But there is reason for optimism. Over the past generation, global efforts have significantly reduced maternal mortality, and newborn deaths have declined as well.
New data released this week confirm that countries across Africa are making progress battling maternal and newborn mortality. For example, since 1990, Rwanda has reduced maternal mortality by more than 75%. Further, since 1990, several African countries including Rwanda, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania and Uganda have reduced under-five mortality by more than half.
Progress comes at an important time. Last month, world leaders gathered at the United Nations headquarters in New York to adopt an ambitious set of Sustainable Development Goals for eliminating extreme poverty and building a prosperous, healthy planet. These goals, which call specifically for further reductions in maternal and newborn deaths, have the potential to accelerate progress even further if we stay focused on what works to save lives.
Simple interventions go a long way. These include exclusive breast-feeding, keeping a newborn's umbilical cord wound clean and dry to prevent infection, and promoting skin-to-skin contact between newborns and their mothers to regulate the baby's body temperature and breathing.
Meeting women's health needs is just as important, and a newborn's well-being is closely tied to her mother's. Providing women with greater access to family planning and other essential services, as well as nutritious food, can help to ensure that women and their children stay healthy and strong enough to contribute to the development of their families and communities.
We also need to help countries strengthen their primary health care systems so that more women and newborns have access to quality services and vital medicines before, during and after delivery. Countries and international donors can do this by increasing funding levels for primary health care, collecting better data on where gaps in services are greatest and by training more front-line health workers to deliver basic education and care to people and places that have little or none.
If we take these steps, I believe that we can end most preventable maternal and newborn deaths — as well as eliminate the health disparities within and among countries so that every child has the chance to prosper — within a single generation.
This is the message I took with me to Mexico City this week, as experts from around the world came together to discuss how to align their efforts at the Global Maternal Newborn Health Conference.
While in Mexico, I thought about young women like Sarah Briton, who I met recently in Malawi after she gave birth to her first child, a healthy baby boy.
Late in her third trimester, Sarah made the five-hour journey to Malawi's capital city, Lilongwe, where she could stay in a home near a women's clinic to ensure that she and her baby had access to lifesaving care when she went into labor.
Sarah wasn't willing to accept the idea that her and her baby's lives could be cut short simply because they were born in extreme poverty. She knows that progress is possible, and she's ready for it to begin with her and her family.
Many women across Africa undoubtedly share Sarah's story. If we're willing to match their commitment with our own, we can help guarantee a healthier, brighter future for women and children everywhere.
SOURCE: Turkish Weekly
Africa risks backsliding on human rights if it does not address the challenges it faces, the head of the African Union Commission (AUC) said Wednesday.
"Despite all the efforts to promote and protect human and peoples' rights in Africa, including women's rights, the continent continues to face enormous challenges, which if not urgently and adequately addressed, may erase the human rights gains recorded over the preceding decades," AUC Chairwoman Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma said in a statement.
SOURCE: CNN
Rehema Mayuya has caused quite the scandal. It started when she convinced her 56-year-old husband, Thabit Yusuf Fundil, to return his 13-year-old bride. Ever since, Mayuya's relationship with her husband's family has been strained.
SOURCE: All Africa
The world will have to prioritise the health and wellbeing of women and children if it is to meet Sustainable Development Goals, the wife of one of the world's richest men has advised.
Speaking at the Global Maternal and Newborn Health Conference (Global MNHC) in Mexico recently, Ms Melinda Gates, from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said that newborns had been the forgotten community of the development agenda.
SOURCE: Global Press
Domestic violence is common in Kenya, but there are no government-run shelters for violence victims. A few privately run shelters are trying to cater to at least some of the need, helping battered women and children file reports with police and offering them legal aid. One former abuse victim has opened one such shelter and plans to set up another under a group she founded, Okoa Dada.
SOURCE: All Africa
The First Lady of Rwanda, Jeannette Kagame has called on global communities to change their attitude towards women, as a way of giving them a chance to contribute to innovative technology so as to bridge the digital divide today.
SOURCE: The Guardian
Nearly two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women, a proportion that has remained stubbornly unchanged for the past 20 years, according to a global report assessing progress towards gender equality, published on Tuesday.
Of the 781 million adults over the age of 15 estimated to be illiterate, 496 million were women, the World's Women 2015 report found. Women made up more than half the illiterate population in all regions of the world.
SOURCE: Thomson Reuters Foundation
Thousands of female farmers in Tanzania, Malawi and Uganda could escape a life of poverty if better policies were adopted to bridge a yawning gap in agricultural productivity between women and men, according to a World Bank and United Nations report.
The study by the World Bank and UN Women measured the economic costs of female farmers in the three east African countries having less access to land, labour, fertiliser, crop choice and machinery that made them less productive.
SOURCE: VOA
Women around the world are living longer, are better educated and are marrying later than has been the case over the past 20 years, but millions remain illiterate and many have been victims of domestic violence, a U.N. report issued Tuesday said.
Men outnumber women by 62 million, a result of enduring natural selection processes. But by old age, those differences disappear as women represent 54 percent of the population over age 60. Globally, life expectancy has risen over the last 20 years, with women living to an average of 72 in 2015, up from 64 in 1995.
SOURCE: All Africa
Aisha Buhari, wife of Nigeria's president, has promised to advocate publicly for legislation against child marriage.
At an interactive session to mark this year's International Day of the girl Child, she told parents to keep their daughters in school for at least 12 years.
"No single girl will be left behind in my movement to get every girl into school," Buhari promised during an advocacy visit by adolescent girls.
Source: Al Jazeera
More than 45,000 people shelter in Malakal "Protection of Civilians" (PoC) camp, which sprawls near the Nile River in South Sudan's tortured Upper Nile State.
Source: Al Jazeera
More than 45,000 people shelter in Malakal "Protection of Civilians" (PoC) camp, which sprawls near the Nile River in South Sudan's tortured Upper Nile State. The majority of PoC inhabitants - over 25,000 - are women and girls. They are protected by a barbed-wire fence, a muddy berm, and 1,500 United Nations peacekeepers.
Source: All Africa
Minister of Gender Children and Social Welfare, Patricia Kaliati says her ministry will continue lobbying for support from various ministries to ensure that women and youth in the country have access to farming needs in order to maximize their production.