Last September a striking story stole the headlines of newspapers and media outlets all across Ghana. Samia Nkrumah, the daughter of the nation's founding father, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, became the first female chairperson of a political party in the country's history as an independent state.
Source: The Standard
FIFTY-YEAR-old Anna Nyoni's married life has been a nightmare.
Voters often regard politicians with derision — so often, in fact, they may lose sight of the extent to which elected officials are role models for younger people. Indeed, new evidence suggests that when those politicians are female, they play a highly influential and positive role in the lives of young women.
Source: The Standard
WOMEN and Aids Support Network (Wasn) says it has unearthed several unreported rape cases of the disabled and young girls during an ongoing awareness campaign on sexual and reproductive health, which the organisation is conducting throughout the country.
Source: The Standard
A recent report: Baseline Study Report on the perceptions of Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Mbare, Harare, Zimbabwe by Medicines Sans Frontiers and the University of Zimbabwe, says lack of transparency and gaps within the judiciary system allows perpetrators to escape retribution.
The African Union (AU) has unveiled an ambitious wish-list of priorities for Africa that would give the continent a stronger global voice, boost democracy and encourage peace and security.
Source: AllAfrica.com
Twenty years after the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the promise of sustainable development will be revisited again at the 2012 Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development next June.
Source: RH Reality Check
African countries are too often lumped together as one big composite of grave statistics and chronic epidemics. Because of this, it’s especially important that the global development and reproductive health communities recognize and amplify those success stories that can be told. Especially when these stories are designed and driven by local efforts.
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.”