Source: Sudan Tribune
Of nearly 2,000 pupils taking their final primary school exams in Rumbek the capital of Lakes State this week, only 16% are female according to the Director of Examinations in the state ministry of education Marial Manesa Makoi.
Source: The New Times
The number of mothers giving birth safely, especially at health centres in Rusizi District, dramatically increased from below 50 percent to 84 percent last year, statistics from Gihundwe Hospital confirm.
Source: Times of Zambia
ZAMBIA Police Service Victim Support Unit (VSU) national coordinator Tresford Kasale has said Gender-Based-Violence (GBV) cases in the country have continued to rise.
Mr Kasale said in an interview in Lusaka yesterday that GBV cases were on the upswing in the country, mostly in high density areas.
Quotas for women seem to be the hot thing in the Middle East these days. Libya just announced a 10 percent quota for women in its new election law. Tunisia used a form of quotas to enhance women's participation in its recent election.
Enduring structural improvements in human rights are very difficult to achieve. Global indices suggest that the world is little different today from a decade ago. In 2002, Freedom House, a non-governmental organization in the United States, recorded that 85 states were “free”, 59 were “partly free” and 48 were “not free”.
At the APEC Summit this past September, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton argued that women are a great untapped economic resource. "There is a stimulative and ripple effect that kicks in when women have greater access to jobs and the economic lives of our countries," she told the delegates there.
The beginning of each year is usually a time of reflection. As 2012 begins, it is a good time to for us all to rethink women’s political, economic and social standing as a development issue.
Aberash Hailay’s ex husband Fisseha Tadesse who was convicted for gouging her eyes with a knife and sentenced to fourteen years in prison. His crime caused a great deal of commotion from the media and women’s rights activists for the last few months.
Vigilante gangs of ultra-conservative Salafi men have been harassing shop owners and female customers in rural towns around Egypt for “indecent behavior,” according to reports in the Egyptian news media. But when they burst into a beauty salon in the Nile delta town of Benha this week and ordered the women inside to stop what they were doing or face physical punishment, the women struck back, whipping them with their own canes before kicking them out to the street in front of an astonished crowd of onlookers.
The past century has seen an appealing transformation in women’s legal rights, with countries all over the world expanding scope of women’s legal entitlements.
Despite an increasing feeling of empowerment experienced by many Egyptian women during and after the revolution, they continue to be sexually harassed and abused by men in public on a daily basis, as recent coverage of events in Cairo—from “virginity tests” conducted by the military to male assaults on female protesters—illustrated.
At first Samira Ibrahim was afraid to tell her father that Egyptian soldiers had detained her in Tahrir Square in Cairo, stripped off her clothes, and watched as she was forcibly subjected to a “virginity test.”
Before we finally close the chapter on 2011, flipping a fresh page for a new beginning in 2012, let’s not forget that the unresolved issues of 2011 and other past years are still in need of solutions.
Women in Libya, like their counterparts in Arab nations that witnessed uprisings, have been discovering the impact of the Arab Spring.
Women around the world are acting with dignity and determination to overcome the abuses that they frequently face. That’s according to the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who has been discussing the challenges the world body faces in 2012.
It was a busy, successful year for UNFPA, UN Population Fund, as it continued to work in 2011 with partners to address universal access to reproductive health, including maternal health, treatment for obstetric fistula and family planning, and to improve the lives of women and young people around the world.
Source: Sunday World
ON the 20th anniversary of the global 16 Days of Activism campaign on gender violence, Shuvai Nyoni Kagoro of Gender Links asks whether "the millions of dollars spent in cash and human time" have significantly reduced the violence women and other marginalised groups face "because of their gender".
Source: Amnesty International
Have people's human rights improved throughout 2011 as a result of the uprisings in MENA?
There is no doubt that many people across the region in 2011 suffered gross human rights violations on an extreme scale. For those in - for example - Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Bahrain, the protection of human rights may still seem a distant prospect.
Source: The Herald
Every government budget is a statement about the government's real values and priorities.
A government can have many national plans, gender plans, gender policy statements, a State Plan of Action on Gender, etc but these often exist as shelf papers if no resources are allocated for their implementation.
Source: Daily Nation
Up to about five years ago, it was a crime to insult the modesty of any woman under the Penal Code introduced in 1930, and even under the Indian Penal Code which it replaced.