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.
Source: AllAfrica
Hauwa Haruna said the man who raped her young daughter lived nearby in an inner-city slum in Jahi area of Abuja. Once, the man asked the 12-year-old to fetch water for him, but when she did, he took her to a security post where he worked as a guard and raped her. The attacker threatened to kill the girl if she screamed.
Source: The Monitor
Employers and commercial building owners face a fine of up to Shs1 million (about UShs36 million) for failure to allocate breastfeeding spaces under a proposed law which seeks to give infants a two-year protection.
The Breastfeeding Mothers Bill of 2019 tabled in the National Assembly makes it compulsory for all persons who own, lease or rent buildings holding at least 50 people to provide a lactation room.
Source: The Monitor
Employers and commercial building owners face a fine of up to Shs1 million (about UShs36 million) for failure to allocate breastfeeding spaces under a proposed law which seeks to give infants a two-year protection.
The Breastfeeding Mothers Bill of 2019 tabled in the National Assembly makes it compulsory for all persons who own, lease or rent buildings holding at least 50 people to provide a lactation room.
Source: World Bank
In developed countries, some women, especially young women, are increasingly complaining about the extreme medicalization of childbirth. Some decide that they do not want to know the sex of their child, while others choose to give birth at home, with a midwife and no epidural.
Source: World Bank
In developed countries, some women, especially young women, are increasingly complaining about the extreme medicalization of childbirth. Some decide that they do not want to know the sex of their child, while others choose to give birth at home, with a midwife and no epidural.
Source: English Forum
Over the years, African countries such as Kenya and South Africa have made many reforms and amendments in their education policy to ensure that higher education remains available for all genders.
Source: allAfrica
In late 2018, Sierra Leone's First Lady, Fatima Bio, opened a national campaign "Hands Off Our Girls." Her campaign made big promises to reduce child marriages and teenage pregnancies in the country, in part to tackle the spike in teenage pregnancies following widespread rape during the Ebola crisis. Reflecting on this campaign, President Julius Maada Bio stated: "We have wasted a lot of time in restricting the potentials of women and girls."
Source: Daily Nation
Oscar-winning Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o made historians sit up last week when Channel 4 television showed her documentary, "Warrior Women", about the fearsome but virtually unknown Agoji females from West Africa’s past.
Source: The New Humanitarian
London & Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo — When TNH visited the town of Dekoa in Central African Republic last March to investigate the situation of women and girls who had brought allegations of rape, sexual abuse, and exploitation against UN peacekeepers from Burundi and Gabon in 2015-16, few if any of them knew the status of their claims. Now, an internal UN draft report obtained by TNH reveals a litany of mistakes made by investigators that may explain why so many cases have been dismissed and why, according to UN data, there hasn't been a single prosecution.
Source: UNFPA Press Release
The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Regional Office for West and Central Africa is organizing a regional consultation on Gender-Based Violence in humanitarian settings in West and Central Africa.This regional consultation will be held at the Pullman Hotel in Dakar, Senegal, from 28 to 29 October 2019. It will bring together gender-based violence coordinators in countries in crisis, members of the Regional Working Group on Protection (RWGP) as well as bilateral partners and donor countries.
Source: United Nations Press Release
Pace of Change Too Slow, Says Secretary-General as Civil Society Briefers Spotlight Abandonment, Sidelining of Women Activists