Source: The New Humanitarian
Sixteen-year-old Inna won’t be returning to school in Cameroon, even though coronavirus restrictions have eased. During the lockdown, she was married off to a 55-year-old cattle herder. Her father said he didn’t want one more mouth to feed.
“My father complained [that] instead of me eating his food and occupying his space, I better get married,” Inna* told The New Humanitarian in April at her home near Ngaoundéré, in the Adamawa region. “My father told me that marriage is my ticket to heaven – not education.”
Source: CNN
Early on Sunday morning, the mutilated body of a 42-year-old woman was found in Eersterust, a middle-class township in Pretoria, South Africa.
Source: The Guardian Nigeria
Al-Mu’minaat Organisation has urged women to take the upbringing of their male children seriously, noting that untrained male children are the one on rampage with violence against females.
The National Amirah of Al-Mu’minaat, Hajia Nimatullah Abdulquadir, who made this call recently, said the group is seriously worried about the increasing incidence of rape cases in the country, describing it as a rape of the nation itself.
For many years, Rose's clothing store was the destination of choice for Lagos women in search of a new outfit for a party or occasion.
She traveled regularly to textile hubs in Turkey to source high-quality fabrics for her clients and her children helped out in the family business on busy days during December festivities.
Sixteen-year-old Inna won’t be returning to school in Cameroon, even though coronavirus restrictions have eased. During the lockdown, she was married off to a 55-year-old cattle herder. Her father said he didn’t want one more mouth to feed.
Source: Thomson Reuters Fondation
The coronavirus pandemic has put Kenya's goal of ending female genital mutilation (FGM) by 2022 in jeopardy, campaigners against the practice warned, amid reports of "mass cuttings" involving hundreds of girls being held while schools are closed.
Source: Premium Times
The Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) has declared a state of emergency on the increasing rate of sexual and gender-based violence in the country.
The NGF chairman, Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State, said this via a communique sent to PREMIUM TIMES on Thursday.
Mr Fayemi, who has signed the Sexual Violence Against Children (compulsory treatment and care for child victims of sexual violence) bill into law, said the Ekiti State has maintained a zero-tolerance to all forms of sexual violence.
Protesters in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, have staged a demonstration against police brutality, demanding justice for the victims of extrajudicial killings.
The rally on Monday came days after a police watchdog said officers were involved in the killing of at least 15 people since authorities imposed a coronavirus curfew in late March.
Source: African Feminism
Growing up, I was taught that menstruation was a private affair. I learnt that no one was supposed to know when I was on my period. Everything about how I handled myself during my periods had to be discreet. Nobody was supposed to see my pads; I was to handle them like contraband goods. In-fact supermarkets still wrap pads in newspapers for secrecy.
Source: Daily Nation
Widowed and with four children, Ms Florence Atieno has been living positively with HIV for 10 years now.
Before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country, Ms Atieno, who lives in Nyalenda slums in Kisumu County, could easily access her antiretroviral therapy drugs (ARVs).
As a registered client at the Kisumu County Referral Hospital, she would pick up her drugs on a monthly basis.
Source: AlJazeera
Large numbers of Nigerians are taking to social media to demand "justice" after a series of high-profile cases of violence against women sparked outrage in the country.
The rallying cries #JusticeForUwa, #JusticeForTina and #JusticeForJennifer have reverberated among internet users in the country, with celebrities also joining virtual campaigns inspired by the Black Lives Matter protests sweeping the United States.
Source: openDemocracy
My name is Zaza*. I am a sex worker. I am a lesbian and I am HIV positive. I work in the bushes along Baden Powell Drive, a road that goes past Khayelitsha in Cape Town, South Africa.
It was only when 17-year-old Eva Muigai was in her final trimester that her family discovered she was pregnant. Muigai, a form three student who lives with her family in Gachie, Central Kenya, had spent her pregnancy wearing tight bodysuits and loose-fitting clothes that hid her growing baby bump.
Images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of African-American George Floyd, who then died, have sparked protests from Amsterdam to Nairobi, but they also expose deeper grievances among demonstrators over strained race relations in their own countries.
Source: ICIR Nigeria
OBY Ezekwesili, a former Minister of Education, says the culture of impunity embedded in the affairs of Nigeria has aided and normalized sexual violence against women where perpetrators go unpunished.
Source: The Guardian
Covid-19 school closures have exposed children around the world to human rights abuses such as forced genital mutilation, early marriage and sexual violence, child protection experts say.
Globally, the World Bank estimates that 1.6 billion children were locked out of education by Covid-19. As schools in England and around the world prepare to reopen this week, NGOs warn that millions of the world’s most vulnerable children may never return to the classroom, and say that after decades fighting for girls’ education the pandemic could cause gender equality in education to be set back decades.
In Tanzania, girls sent home from boarding schools where they were being protected from FGM have already been cut. In the Sahel region, where early marriage is widespread, Unicef worries that many girls will never return to school.
The Dutch charity Terre des Hommes runs a safe house for girls in Tanzania, protecting them from FGM.
“The community has taken advantage of this situation of Covid-19 and where children are now back at home they are cutting their girls. They know it is against the law but they are not afraid. We had one mother who was jailed for a year after carrying out FGM but for her she is happy. She is locked up but her girl is cut.
“Many girls have been cut, including girls we had managed to keep safe through the cutting season, which began in October last year. Some girls escaped and they ran to our FGM centre; we had several girls just turn up. For these children, school is a safe place.”
The Tanzanian government is now sending back small numbers of pupils, starting with those who have exams in early June.
In west and central Africa alone, 120 million children were sent home after schools shut, and some had to make dangerous journeys over hundreds of miles on their own.
Andy Brooks is Unicef’s child protection adviser in west and central Africa and has worked on issues of child exploitation for 30 years.
He says one major concern for girls is that being out of school for a prolonged period of time puts them at risk of early marriage. “Secondary education is a major delayer of early marriage. In this region of west and central Africa, four out of 10 girls are married before 18. If you look at the countries of the Sahel – Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso – it’s six out of 10.”
Brooks says there are fears for those who never return. “It’s a real worry that girls won’t come back … [because of the Covid-19 outbreak] the financial stresses might be even harder and families will be looking for girls to get married earlier.”
However, the pandemic may offer an opportunity to help some children, he says. “There is a phenomenon in the Sahel area, where many children are sent across borders to be with Qur’anic teachers and learn Arabic. There are hundreds of thousands of [these] children across the region, known as almajirai. They live away from home and the outcomes for these children are very poor; they often end up begging on the street.”
The sudden closure of schools put many children in danger by sending them on long unaccompanied journeys home, says Brooks.
“When [the schools] were closed suddenly children were roaming around trying to get home … Over 7,000 moved just from Nigeria to Niger; [we think] about 30,000 of them are on the move. It is an awful moment for vulnerable children but Covid has kicked open the door to this situation that wasn’t sufficiently known about. It could be an opportunity for change.”
Since the Covid-19 lockdown, some state leaders in Nigeria have called for an end to the poorly regulated Qur’anic schooling system.
In their recent framework for safely reopening schools, Unicef, the World Bank and the World Food Programme stated: “The adverse effects of school closures on children’s safety … are well documented. Being out of school … increases the risk of teenage pregnancy, sexual exploitation, child marriage, violence and other threats.”
The UN refugee agency has warned that school closures risk “reversing small gains recently made in expanding access to education for refugee children”.
Even before coronavirus shuttered schools, fewer than half of school-age refugee children were enrolled, while only one in four were attending secondary school.
In Bangladesh, aid groups had been preparing to launch a pilot programme that would allow Rohingya refugee children in the settlements to start learning from the Myanmar curriculum for the first time in hundreds of informal learning centres.
Babu Nisa, a refugee teaching assistant at one of the centres, told UNHCR that her students were “very upset” when they heard it would be closed as part of the lockdown.
Likewise, in Latin America, groups working with refugees fear Covid-19 will make finding school places even harder for displaced children.
Underlying fear of the resurgence of the Covid-19 virus also hangs over students who are returning to education, and, as in Europe, keeps some at home even when schools reopen.
Eric Hazard is campaign and policy director for Save the Children in Africa. He points to the known risk of sexual violence that girls face when not in school. “We know what happened during the Ebola crisis. There was an increase in children who dropped out of school, in particular girls. Over 11,000 girls in Sierra Leone became pregnant. We need to pay serious attention to the secondary risk [of lockdown] in terms of violence and sexual abuse against children.”
In the rural Zimbabwe district of Wedza, a new electric-powered motorcycle is helping bring income to poor women and easing the burden of looking after families.
On May 13, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC Alliance), carried out a flash protest against the government’s failure to provide relief food or funds to the people in the Warren Park suburb during the COVID-19 national lockdown.
Source: Standard
Covid-19 is an unprecedented pandemic in scope and impact. Every facet of human life bears the strain, loss and change occasioned by the pervasive nature of the global emergency. Covid-19 has unfortunately further worsened pre-existing inequalities, discrimination and marginalisation of women and girls in more ways than one.