Source: Al Jazeera
Across Kenya, students are starting to speak out and challenge a problem they say plagues the country's campuses.
Source: UN Women
UN Women in partnership with Oxfam and the Born to Lead campaign, on Thursday 30th January 2020 launched a research report titled “Our Search for Peace: Women in South Sudan’s National Peace Processes, 2005-2018.”
Source: IPS
Dr. Anne-Maria Brennan loved science as a young girl. But instead of encouraging her, those around her made attempts to steer her in the “right direction”. “The right direction was in nursing, teaching and secretarial courses. I was told that girls do not study physics,” she tells IPS.
Source: The Guardian
Zimbabwe has recorded an unprecedented number of women reporting being forced to exchange sex for employment or business favours.
Source: Inter Press Service
Rape victims who have been successfully reintegrated into their communities assemble in a "peace hut" near Walungu, South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation
Ugandan doctors are giving new mothers artificial intelligence-enabled devices to remotely monitor their health in a first-of-its-kind study aiming to curb thousands of preventable maternal deaths across Africa, medics and developers said.
Source: VOA
By Moki Edwin Kindzeka
Civic groups, political parties and the government are pleading for the women of Cameroon to vote in next week's local and parliamentary elections, despite threats by separatist groups who have vowed to disrupt the polls.
Source: New Zimbabwe
The Organisation For World Peace
ZIMBABWE is currently facing its worst food shortage in over a decade, leaving almost 8 million people food-insecure. The country, once the region’s breadbasket and rich in fertile crops, is currently plagued by widespread drought and flooding.
Source: Nyasa Times
Ministry of Lands, Housing and Urban Development director of administration Duncan Chione has said the new land law which came into effect in 2018 is still facing resistance because men continue to grab land from women.
Source: IPS News
Mbabane — When 14-year-old Nomcebo Mkhaliphi first noticed the blood discharged from her vagina, she was shocked. Confused, she turned to her older sisters for advice.
"My sisters told me that they were experiencing the same every month and that they used fabric, toilet paper and newspapers as sanitary wear," recalls the now 45-year-old Mkhaliphi. She had to follow suit and use these materials because she had no money to buy sanitary pads.
Source: Daily Nation
Opinion
By Kamau Maichuhie and Moraa Obiria
The changes in government announced on Tuesday by President Uhuru Kenyatta have raised a ray of hope for a gender balanced public service.
In the fresh changes, Mr Kenyatta appointed Betty Maina as Industrialisation Cabinet secretary and 15 new chief administrative secretaries (CAS) -- eight are women.
Source: Daily Nation
They gather and sit in a circle under a tree at a trading centre in Kalpunyany village, Baringo County, one of the remotest areas in Kenya.
They are deliberating on a thorny issue that continues to face the region -- female genital mutilation.
Source: allAfrica
Women in the region are spending long hours doing necessary but unquantifiable work, leaving them with little or no time for work that is economically productive and earns them money.
Source: UN Women
Today, in post-civil war Liberia, less than 10 per cent of the population has access to electricity. While the country tries to rebuild its infrastructure, women solar engineers are pioneering efforts to provide affordable and clean energy by installing and managing solar lamps in their communities.
Rural Liberian women, trained as solar engineers over a six-month period by Barefoot College in India, with support from UN Women, are promoting renewable solar energy that reduces dependency on expensive and polluting fossil fuels, like kerosene. The solar lamps are lighting villages and communities, enabling longer work and study hours, and bringing greater security to many, especially at night time.
Infrastructure across Liberia, including electricity installations, was destroyed during the country’s protracted civil war (1989-2003).
Totota once had access to the national power grid, but during the civil war, electrical cables were damaged and looted. Now battery-powered lamps are the main source of light for many vendors working after dark.
While Liberia works to rebuild its power grid, many communities rely on privately owned generators to access power for their homes. Cables, such as the one above, are connected to a private generator in Peace Island, Monrovia, locally known as "540" because most residents are former soldiers or members of armed groups who were paid $540 to lay down their weapons during a demilitarization campaign after the civil war.
UN Women and Barefoot College in India collaborated on bringing solar electricity to African villages by training rural women to become solar engineers. In 2011, 26 women from 16 villages in Liberia, South Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda were selected to participate in six months of training on building, installing and maintaining solar lamps and panels.
In Liberia, solar engineers install a solar panel on the roof of a village house, bringing electricity to this home for the first time. Most villages lacked electricity, resulting in widespread use of kerosene fuel, which is neither cheap nor healthy for humans and the environment. Solar energy is providing an affordable and sustainable alternative.
With the installation of solar panels and lights in his home, 57-year-old Anthony Sorbor of Todee Community has electricity for the first time and no longer worries about finding money to buy candles or kerosene. The cheaper and sustainable solar lamps allow Anthony and his family to do evening chores and his children to study after dark.
Women gather in a “Peace Hut” in Margibi County. Spread across the country, long-affected by the deadly civil war, the Peace Huts are safe spaces where women come together to discuss and resolve community disputes. UN Women is supporting more than 16 Peace Huts across the country. At the Peace Huts, women mediate problems, run projects and businesses, and advocate for women’s rights. With solar lamps installed, Peace Huts are more secure at night and can function in the evening hours after the day’s work is completed.
Built with support from UN Women, this Peace Hut in the village of Todee also serves as a workshop space and warehouse for the women solar engineers. Since the Liberian solar engineers returned from their training in 2012, they have electrified over 425 homes and structures in the towns of Salayea in Lofa County, Banbala in Grand Cape Mount County, Juah Town in Grand Bassa County and Bahr Town in Montserrado County.
Jubilant women of Juah Town sing during one of their regular adult literacy training sessions held at the Peace Hut. With solar panels installed in the Peace Hut, adult education classes can be run at night, providing more opportunities for local women to attend and acquire basic math and literacy skills.
The recently launched flagship programme initiative on Women’s Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Energy by UN Women and UNEP builds upon experiences such as these and aims to increase women’s entrepreneurship, leadership and access to, and productive use of, sustainable energy
Source: Malawi News Agency
Lilongwe — Women activists have said they are investigating allegations of female students being coaxed into sexual acts with lecturers in exchange for grades.
Source: Foreign Policy
When SP le Roux began to think about the sexual violence epidemic in his home country of South Africa, he put his background as an electrical engineer and inventor to work. The first invention le Roux ever made was a collar that learns the normal behaviors of endangered rhinoceroses and alerts anti-poaching officials when it detects signs of stress. It was designed to give endangered rhinoceroses a way to fight back against the poachers that threaten their survival.
Could the same technology be repurposed to protect women, too? With that mission in mind, le Roux designed high-tech underwear for women that, he hopes, can detect distress—attempts to rip the garment off, for instance—and automatically alert law enforcement.
The invention may seem odd, but the inventor represents an increasingly common trend: Le Roux is just one of many men across the continent who have turned their attention to violence against women. It’s in direct response to a problem that is growing so large as to be undeniable: South African police recorded an average of 114 rapes each day between April 2018 and this March—a frightening increase from previous years.
In Uganda, police officers and boda (motorcycle taxi) drivers have teamed up to form “safe ride,” a campaign to end violence against women in Kampala’s transport sector. And in October, more than a thousand police officers—mostly male—took to the streets of Pretoria, South Africa, to protest the spike in violence against women, holding signs with messages such as: “When you abuse a woman, you stop being a man.”
The conversation about engaging men and boys in the fight for gender equality got global attention in 2014, when the United Nations launched its He for She campaign in New York. But African activists say the strategy shift is particularly important close to home.
“In African contexts, there are cultural issues at play—men don’t want to be seen as ‘weak people,’” said Elias Muindi, a program officer for the Kenya MenEngage Alliance.
After Muindi’s older sister was murdered by her husband in 1997, Muindi co-founded the Margaret Wanzuu Foundation to fight gender-based violence. Today, Muindi says, his foundation is one of the 16 organizations that make up the Kenya branch of the MenEngage Alliance, a global network that works with men and boys for gender quality. “When men talk to other men, they can open up and share issues affecting them,” he said.
According to Muindi, economic hardship is one of the issues that most often affects men who are at risk for committing acts of gender-based violence. Sometimes giving basic financial support—a small business loan or a few household staples—to men and families in need, Muindi said, is all it takes to decrease the risk of violence. What Muindi outlined is supported by evidence: This year, researchers from the National Bureau of Economic Research released a paper analyzing the effects of unconditional cash transfers on households in western Kenya. One year after the cash transfer, researchers found, rates of physical and sexual violence in study households had fallen dramatically: When women received the money, rates of beatings fell by 73 percent. But when the men received the money, rates of beatings fell by a staggering 82 percent.
“It’s a new era, it’s a new strategy,” Muindi said. “We’re not bashing men—we engage men in a positive way. We affirm that men and boys can change and can create change.”
Increasingly, men around the world agree with this philosophy. Earlier this year, a study by British market research company Ipsos MORI, in collaboration with the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, found that a majority of men worldwide (three in five, or 61 percent), agreed that gender equality won’t be possible unless “men take actions to support women’s rights.”
But elevating male voices in the fight for gender equality is tricky.
Even the best intentions can backfire, reinforcing gender norms in which men’s perspectives are disproportionately valued. In Zambia, a report in Pacific Standard found, “bringing together men to talk about sexual violence had the unintentional impact of granting participants a sense of authority — and the effects were damning. The men, who reinforced their patriarchal attitudes about women as a result of these male-only spaces, felt encouraged to tell women how they should act, dress, and behave to avoid rape.”
There are other risks, too. Izeduwa Derex-Briggs, UN Women’s regional director for eastern and southern Africa, said the shift toward including men in the fight for gender equality has both pros and cons. “The majority of perpetrators [of violence against women] are men, and therefore men should be part of the solution,” Derex-Briggs said. “And men working for women has attracted interest from donors. But—and there is no data to validate this—I’ve found that women-led and women-owned NGOs are not getting as many resources as they did before. Now, those resources are going to NGOs owned by men. In some cases, those men used to work for women-led NGOs. Now they’ve started their own organizations, and they’re getting the grant money instead.” (Derex-Briggs said she is not aware of any watchdog groups that track donations to nongovernmental organizations on the basis of sex.)
And there’s traditional resistance. In 2007, then-Kenyan Member of Parliament Njoki Ndungu described the challenge of convincing male-dominated parliaments to take women’s issues seriously: “The motion to amend the sexual violence act had been introduced several times since independence and failed,” said Ndungu, who now serves on the Kenyan Supreme Court. “Each time, it was seen by the male members of parliament as giving too much power to women.” Kenya’s anti-sexual violence law only passed after certain sections, such as the one that would have criminalized spousal rape, were removed.
But despite these problems, most African gender equality activists agree that any sustainable solution to gender-based violence will involve men.
“Before, we used to focus on the victims without really resolving the problem,” said Aloys Mahwa, the country director for the Living Peace Institute, an NGO that targets male ex-combatants in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “It’s strong capital to use men to speak to other men. When we target men, we target the root cause of violence.”
Source: AllAfrica
Transgender activist Ricky Nathanson, who sought asylum in the United States after being brutalised by the Zimbabwean police, may have won her damages claim but she cannot return home.
In a month that saw Zimbabwean lawyers take to the streets to protest publicly against police brutality, a long-awaited judgment was finally handed down.
Source: Devdiscourse News Desk
African Women Conference commenced on Thursday in Marrakech, Morocco. The objective of this conference is to build a coalition to end gender inequality in Africa.
Source: The Herald
By Roselyne Sachiti
The world has been struggling with three problems which have been hampering developmental programmes in many countries, especially those in East and Southern Africa.
The three issues -- which are rates of maternal deaths, increased cases of gender-based violence and harmful practices, and failure to meet the family planning needs of countries -- have been a nagging headache keeping governments and development partners awake as they come pregnant with high costs.
Source: The Herald
The world has been struggling with three problems which have been hampering developmental programmes in many countries, especially those in East and Southern Africa.
The three issues -- which are rates of maternal deaths, increased cases of gender-based violence and harmful practices, and failure to meet the family planning needs of countries -- have been a nagging headache keeping governments and development partners awake as they come pregnant with high costs.