Source: UNDP
Less than one percent of rural communes in Mali have electricity.
Source: UNDP
"In my job, men have no objections to women making the decisions ," says Sona Nadian, 37, from Bissau.
Source: New Times
About 800 women, mostly single mothers, who were raped during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and conceived through the ordeal, have appealed for support to raise the children who are now in their late teens.
Genet Tesfaye is a young, married mother of one living in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa. A potter by trade, Genet has been contributing more and more to her family’s income through her craft.
Source: Daily Monitor
The First Ladies summit scheduled to take place in Tanzania from July 2 to 3 reminds me of the folk tales about wicked stepmothers.
The term wicked has been stamped on the forehead of some First Ladies across the continent and this sweeping generalisation has become universally accepted. This why I want to call upon the selected few who are going for this meeting in Dar es Salaam to go back home and rally as many women as possible to take on their husbands in polls for the coveted seats in the presidential palaces.
Let us go back to the summit which is expected to be attended by US First Lady Michelle Obama and is set to bring together at least eight spouses of African Heads of State who will be sharing progressive ideas.
The meeting, whose theme is Investing in Women, Strengthening Africa, will focus on the important role that First Ladies play in promoting women's education, health and economic empowerment in their countries.
The meeting will also focus on the crucial role that First Ladies play in promoting women's education, health and economic empowerment.
Other matters of interest will be entrepreneurship through training and technology, providing opportunities and improving agricultural outcomes for female farmers and life-saving collaboration to combat cervical and breast Cancer.
Education will also feature on the agenda list thus the state of literacy, access to education and teacher training as well as the need to invest in women's economic empowerment and health in general. However, these should not just remain in the boardrooms of five-star hotels but should be realised in their home countries.
Male-dominated politics
Why did I introduce the wicked stepmother theory? Well, perhaps because most mothers are known to be loving and kind while the former has a negative connotation. Many a times, First Ladies have made news for the wrong reasons like alleged murders, property grabbing, and milking State coffers dry among others. They have also been accused of doing everything within their means to ensure their husbands remain in power including using public and State funds.
Lest I forget to mention, they are at times linked to whipping their husbands' opponents into shape. Just ask the Zimbabweans. Others are known for lavish holiday and shopping trips abroad. Swaziland's citizenry can relate well with this.
Some have been accused of using their foundations to divert donor aid allocated to non-governmental organisations to their personal use.
Population and development in the Arab region were issues discussed this week in Cairo, during a three-day conference that ended with a declaration highlighting the need to empower women, promote gender equality, and step up efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals.
Source: UN News Centre
Two senior United Nations officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have condemned the recent cases of rape of young girls in the eastern province of South Kivu as "unacceptable" and called for an end to such abuse.
Calls were made on June 26 for concerted efforts to stop discriminatory practices against widows. One of the most vulnerable groups in society, widows, was once more under reflection in the Littoral regional capital, Douala.
Source: This Day
For long, women in our country were extremely restricted in terms of political appointments. This is in spite of the Beijing Declaration in 1995 where leaders and governments were pressured to allot a reasonable number of offices in decision-making to women. However, we are currently witnessing a quiet revolution with the deployment,
Source: AllAfrica
In a move to further promote girls' education, the Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) Rwanda Chapter, in collaboration with Plan Rwanda, have launched a new project dubbed Operation Days Work (ODW) in Bugesera and Gatsibo districts.
One of the priorities of the project is to sensitise the public about the need and importance of equally giving the girl-child a chance to have an education.
"Among other mechanisms we are going to use in ensuring that this project achieves its main objective is to establish youth committees in schools that will act as a channel through which students' challenges, especially girls, will be heard so that appropriate solutions are devised," said Juliana Karamaga, FAWE officer in charge of the project.
She explained that the decision to have the project implemented in the two districts is not that it is only important for those specific districts but that it was where its partner, Plan Rwanda, is currently operating.
Karamaga observed that although the perception by parents that boys are meant to go to school while girls remain at home to engage in domestic work is gradually phasing out, there were still cases where girls are limited to a certain level of education and yet their brothers advance higher.
When Eunice Namugerwa, an 18-year-old living in Kampala’s Kisenyi slum, decided to start a business to support her family last August, she scrawled three ideas down on a bit of scrap paper: a piggery, a fashion boutique and a chicken farm.
The revolution that ousted dictator Ben Ali in January 2011 brought new, hard-won freedom to the Tunisian people. However as the country discovers whether secularism and growing political Islam can co-exist, some women are enjoying greater liberty to practise their religion while others are concerned that their rights may be eroded.
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter says religious leaders, including those in Christianity and Islam, share the blame for mistreatment of women around the world.
Source: Vanguard
When news spread that Oyinlola Diana Rotimi, a 400 level student at the Department of Agricultural Extension and Rural Development, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, allegedly attempted to flush her child down the toilet, there were criticisms and counter-criticisms.
Source: Tanzania Daily News (Dar es Salaam)
THE plan to become a mother is often a positively fulfilling experience. However, many women suffer and even die as a result of motherhood.
Bogaletch Gebre knows exactly what women in her Ethiopian community are going through. Along with her sisters, the women’s rights activist was a victim of female genital mutilation (FGM) when she was a child in a part of Ethiopia where the practise was carried out on every girl.
Position paper calls for freedom from violence, equality in capabilities and resources, and women’s voice to be the cornerstones of a stand-alone gender equality goal.
Sometimes it does seem there’s a war over women’s bodies, and nowhere does this seem more dangerous than in the large number of regions where abortion is illegal, unsafe and life-threatening.
United Nations Deputy Secretary-General Jan Eliasson today called on all partners – Governments, the private sector, civil society, the media, and ordinary citizens – to help fight human trafficking, stressing that ending this scourge requires action on all fronts.
Source: New Times
Chantal* begun her menstruation periods when she was in primary school. She remembers refusing to go to school for about five days.