Source: The New Times
Even the healthiest pregnancy can pose serious health consequences such as infection, obstructed labour, high blood pressure, and severe bleeding. The use of a midwife is key to a healthy and safe pregnancy and childbirth but they often work in decrepit health facilities and lack required resources, supplies and equipment.
Source: Daily Trust
Eminent figures like Desmond Tutu, Bill and Melinda Gates, Aliko Dangote, Rupert Murdoch, Mo Ibrahim, Ted Turner and François-Henri Pinault among global business, civil society and religious leaders are calling for urgent action and resources to rescue the abducted schoolgirls of Chibok, Borno state.
Source: NPR
As Rwanda began to rebuild itself from the ashes of the 1994 genocide, something unexpected happened: Women began playing a much more influential role on many fronts, including politics.
Source: Vanguard
OPINION
ON Monday, April 14, 2014 over 200 young female students of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State were abducted by Boko Haram members, sending shock waves across the globe. It is believed that the gunmen took the girls to the Sambisa forest near the Cameroonian border.
Source: Times of Zambia
GOVERNMENT will revise pieces of legislation and the administration strategy to ensure women have access to economic resources including rights to ownership of land.
Source: The New Times
INTERVIEW
Jeni Klugman is the Director of Gender and Development at the World Bank. Last week she was in Rwanda to attend the Oxford Human Rights Conference on Women and Poverty. She also visited adolescent girls and women empowerment projects around Kigali.
Source: allAfrica
Lafia — Dozens of wailing female personnel of the police and Nigerian Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) in Nasarawa State, today, joined dozens of other women on the street of Lafia, chanting "Bring Back Our Girls", to add a voice the worldwide protests to free the abducted girls of Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok in Borno State.
Source: Capital FM
Nairobi — Nancy is a 12-year-old girl from the Maasai community living in the western Rift Valley. Earlier this month, she ran away from her family home in Kajiado County just before she was due to undergo Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).
Source: News24
THE United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has called for the immediate release of abducted school girls in Chibok, Borno State.
Source: Daily Independent
Six of the 10 countries that carry most of the burden of maternal deaths in the world are from Africa. This was highlighted from the newly-published report, "Trends in maternal mortality estimates 1990 to 2013".
Source: The New York Times
ABUJA, Nigeria — A second kidnapping of schoolgirls in Nigeria's northeast by Islamist militants put new pressure on the country's troubled government, which had been hoping to showcase its emergence as Africa's largest economy this week but instead has been forced to confront its failure to contain a growing insurgency in its north.
Source: AlertNet
Nairobi — Pregnancy-related deaths in Ethiopia have fallen by nearly two-thirds, making it the African country that has most successfully lowered its maternal mortality rate thanks to its lifesaving investment in female health workers and girls' education, Save the Children said on Tuesday.
Source: UNAIDS
Maternal deaths have decreased by 45% since 1990 according to a new report released on 6 May by the Maternal Mortality Estimation Inter-Agency Group. Entitled Trends in maternal mortality: 1990 to 2013, the report estimates that 289 000 women died in 2013 owing to complications in pregnancy and childbirth, down from 523 000 in 1990.
Source: Daily Independent
Abuja — The meeting of women stakeholders convened by the First Lady, Patience Jonathan, over the abducted girls of a secondary school in Chibok, rose on Monday morning with a unanimous declaration that contradictory narratives given by the major actors showed that no girls were abducted.
Source: Daily Independent
Lagos — One of the unique features of this year's Women of Destiny Conference, organised by the Daystar Christian Centre, Lagos, last weekend, was the move to lend a feminine voice to the agitations of Nigerians for the release of the over 200 girls abducted over two weeks ago in Chibok, Benue State.
Source: Think Africa Press
ANALYSIS
The Nigerian Islamist sect has kidnapped 234 school girls. Why?
Less than 24 hours after an explosion ripped through the Nyanya Motor Park in Nigeria's capital, Abuja, reports of another act of terror filtered in from the country's north east
Source: allAfrica
PRESS RELEASE
Supporters will rally at the Embassy of Nigeria on May 6, 2014 to pressure idle government officials to take measurable actions to save the newly estimated 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram militants in the northeastern Nigerian village of Chibok.
Source: DW
Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for the abduction of more than 200 schoolgirls, a day after President Goodluck Jonathan ordered a three day shut down of the capital Abuja during the World Economic Conference.
Source: DW
Islamist group Boko Haram has claimed responsibility for kidnapping more than 200 teenage schoolgirls and is threatening to sell them. The girls have been held for three weeks.
Source: The Guardian
Islamist militants' leader threatens to sell the more than 270 girls abducted in north-east Nigeria on 14 April.
The leader of Nigerian Islamist extremist group Boko Haram has said that more than 270 schoolgirls snatched from their dormitories were "slaves" whom he planned to sell in the market.