Kenya making big strides towards gender equality through law reforms

businessdailyafrica.com - Women entrepreneurs at a meeting in Mombasa last year. Kenya aims to advance women’s economic participation and self-reliance by creating a conducive environment. PHOTO | FILE Last week, Kenya’s candidate for the African Union (AU) Commission chair, Amina Mohamed, lost to Chadian Moussa Mahamat despite her candidature looking promising.

Last year, Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump despite a promising campaign. The question on many people’s minds is whether the world ready for women in political leadership positions?

The 2016 US election opened up a lot of case studies on women and leadership positions. I would not be in a position to comment on that ( whether there was a gender card in the two elections), however in today’s rights that show that Kenya is one of the countries in the world with good legislative environment when it comes to women.

We have to understand these efforts against the backdrop of the Kenyan society where a lot of African cultures are male-oriented. The situation is not the same in the West where there have been equal rights for men and women for a much longer time.

Kenya Can Lead the Way to Universal Health Care in Africa

ipsnews.net - Kenya Can Lead the Way to Universal Health Care in Africa Siddharth Chatterjee is the UN Resident Coordinator to Kenya.

NAIROBI, Jan 16 2017 (IPS) - Consider this: every year, nearly one million Kenyans are pushed below the poverty line as a result of unaffordable health care expenses.

For many Kenyan families, the cost of health care is as distressing as the onset of illness and access to treatment. A majority of the population at risk can hardly afford the costs associated with basic health care and when faced with life threatening conditions, it is a double tragedy-inability to access health care and lack of resources to pay for the services.

According to the World Health Organisation, a large percentage of poor households in Kenya cannot afford health care without serious financial constraints as most are dependent on out of pocket payments to pay for services. Nearly four out of every five Kenyans have no access to medical insurance, thus a large part of the population is excluded from quality health care services.

How to protect the Chibok girls from reliving their horror - BBC News

Writer Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani examines the challenges for the recently released Chibok girls. After being held captive by Boko Haram militants, safety should be the girls' first priority, and traveling to the United States should afford them that opportunity, as well as the chance at an education. However; overexposure from retelling their stories has made it difficult for many of the girls to process their experiences and experience the privacy and anonymity they need to shed the stigma of their experiences. Read on for more.

bbc.co.uk - To enable the 21 recently freed Chibok girls to avoid the stigma usually associated with Boko Haram captivity, a leader of Nigeria's Chibok community has called for them to be sent to the US to continue their education.

But other dangers may await the girls if they travel abroad.

Some of the 57 Chibok girls who managed to escape a few hours after the Islamist militants stormed their school in April 2014 and ferried them away in trucks, are already being educated in the US.

Some of them told me how pleased they are about their former classmates' release. They also considered it a good idea for the 21 girls to move to the US as they did.

"Maybe it will help them forget what they have been through in the past," Patience Bulus said.

"They will not be scared here in America, and they will forget about what happened with them," Kauna Yaga added.

But forgetting is one thing that these Chibok girls were not allowed to do until just a few months ago.

Read more

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Beyond Head Counts: How to Measure African Women’s Political Influence

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Christine Chung

Studies of women’s political participation tend to focus on totting up MPs and cabinet ministers. A pilot investigation into women’s leadership in African governments and legislatures adds two new indicators to look at their influence, not just the numbers.

Around the world, the percentage of women in parliaments has almost doubled in the past 20 years. But that still means only 22.8 percent of all national parliamentarians were women as of June 2016. Despite pockets of progress on gender equality and women’s participation in public and political life, many countries are slow to improve on women’s political empowerment. To get the measure of the problem and work toward a solution requires comprehensive data. The Women in Politics Map by the Inter-Parliamentary Union and U.N. Women provides some numbers and global rankings for women in executive government and in parliament at regional and national levels. But other data is harder to come by.

To address that gap, the International Republican Institute (IRI) recently launched a pilot study of women’s political leadership in Africa. “Women’s Political Empowerment, Representation and Influence in Africa” is an index of women’s representation and leadership at the legislative and executive levels across 29 countries. Women & Girls Hub spoke with IRI’s Director for Global Initiatives and Senior Adviser on Gender Michelle Bekkering and Senior Applied Learning Specialist Matt Baker about how the study is different and what’s still missing.

Women & Girls Hub: Why is this study important?

Michelle Bekkering: Often when we’re talking about numbers, we’re talking more about representation. How many women occupy seats in the parliament? How many lead executive ministries? How many heads of state, etc.? However, that does not sufficiently capture the true complexity of gender equality, especially when we’re looking in the field of women’s political leadership. One of the things we noticed early on was the sheer numbers are not really telling the story, but the numbers are so vital.

Matt Baker: That was the bulk of the time that we spent, collecting this data. We collected two new indicators, information that hasn’t previously been systematically collected on African countries: the percentage of women who head up committees in parliaments and the percentage of the national budget that’s headed by women ministers. In many cases, we had to resort to some pretty creative means to get that data.

Women & Girls Hub: Can you give us an example of those creative means?

Baker: In some cases, we were talking to multiple different CSO [civil society organization] activists on the ground to have them find the information that isn’t necessarily online and have them scan or fax some of the requisite documents to help us validate the information. We have a pretty good regional presence and so that enabled us to gather information in places which ordinarily would be quite challenging.

The Women’s Democracy Network has a number of chapters in Africa, so we had access to a number of women who were involved in politics as well as in civil society on the ground in many of the countries that we sampled. We started out trying to get information on every single country in Africa, including North Africa. In the end, we were able to get 29 countries out of the 50-odd in the continent. Even that, just over 50 percent, was a challenge.

Women & Girls Hub: What were your main takeaways?

Baker: The rankings in and of themselves are interesting, but they’re a snapshot in time, and much of the data was from 2014. It can tell us countries like South Africa, Rwanda, Cape Verde and Uganda were at the top end, while countries like Sudan, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia were trailing at the bottom.

The most interesting thing was our ability to look a little bit deeper at the interactions between the data that we collected. What we found out validates much of what’s in the academic literature, in terms of more women in parliament being actually associated with more women in leadership roles on committees. That was one of the new indicators we collected. Similarly, we noted that there was a positive relationship between the percentage of women who headed up ministries and the percentage of the national budget managed by women.

Traditional gender roles still appear to play a pretty strong role in terms of what portfolios the women lead. For example, in 20 of the 29 countries that we looked at, women headed up ministries of social development, welfare or those related to family and children. They’re a lot less likely to be heading up ones related to defense and foreign affairs and the like.

The other thing that was interesting was to look at how the levels of democracy in each country interact with the rankings. Once you include a measure of democracy – and we used a policy measure that’s commonly used – we equally weighted the four indicators on the one hand and the level of democracy on the other. That showed that the rankings definitely adjusted. For example, Rwanda, which performs relatively well in the index that doesn’t include a [democracy] measure, drops down drastically. Which is perhaps not surprising, but at least it validates the fact that there is an interaction effect between the level of democracy and performance in terms of women’s ability to engage in the political process.

Women & Girls Hub: What are your next steps?

Bekkering: Ideally, we would undertake similar studies in the other regions so we could have a great global mapping of where women’s legislative and executive leadership and influence lie, but what we’d like to do is add more indicators. For instance, once we were going through this current pilot study, we recognized that we were really looking at representation from a descriptive lens. To the extent where women were present, they were in these positions of leadership. We’d like to take that to the next level and really look at what is substantive representation. Having women in both the executive and the legislature, to what extent are they able to really shape policy, or to enact and influence reform that directly benefits women and children as a group?

That would require us developing new indicators to look at, again, beyond the descriptive numbers and looking more substantially at how are they exerting that influence.

The Push to Get Every African Country to Criminalize Marital Rape

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Rumbi Chakamba

The U.N.’s Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women states that ‘violence against women shall be understood to encompass … marital rape.’ But spousal rape is still not recognized in the laws of more than half the countries in Africa.

According to the World Health Organization’s 2006 study on domestic violence, the most common form of violence against women is perpetrated by their intimate partners. But in many parts of Africa, the rape of a woman by her husband isn’t considered a crime.

In several countries, including Senegal and Botswana, there is no legislation dealing with the issue of spousal or marital rape, while in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya and other countries, the law protects conjugal rights, stating that rape can only occur outside of wedlock. While governments continue to turn a blind eye to marital rape, say activists, many women remain vulnerable to sustained abuse as their country’s laws fail to protect them.

The 2014 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey shows that 8 percent of women surveyed said they had experienced sexual violence from their husbands within the past year, while 14 percent reporting having experienced sexual violence from their partners at least once in their lifetime.

A policy brief on marital rape produced by the African Population Health Research Center for the Kenyan Parliament in 2010 highlighted the stories of various victims in a bid to conscientize legislators on the need for policy change. One was the story of 28-year-old Sally (not her real name), who is a client of the Women’s Rights Awareness Programme, an NGO that provides shelter, counseling and practical and legal advice to survivors of gender-based violence in Nairobi. She reported that she resisted having sex with her late husband because he “had signs” of a sexually transmitted disease, but he would force her. After her husband’s death, Sally went to a clinic to get tested and found out she was HIV-positive.

According to the World Bank Research on Women, Business and Law, only 14 countries in Africa have legislation in place that specifically criminalizes marital rape. While it is possible for women to file complaints in most of the countries that do not specifically criminalize rape, in eight states husbands are exempt from facing criminal penalties for forcing their wives to have sex with them.

Until recently, Malawi was one of the African states where the law was silent on marital rape. Activists in the country have long been fighting to have the act recognized as a crime. In 2001, rights group Women in Law in Southern Africa-Malawi (WILSA-Malawi) drafted a bill on marital rape which sparked fierce public debate. But the debate was eventually shut down by a judge who said such a law would go against one of the basic foundations of marriage. “By entering into marriage, each spouse is taken to have consented to sexual intercourse with the other spouse during the existence of his or her marriage,” Supreme Court Judge Duncan Tambala told reporters at the time.

Now, after 15 years of campaigning, WILSA Malawi National Coordinator Mzati Mbeko says the group can claim a small victory with the introduction of the Marriage, Divorce and Family Relations Bill 2015. While the bill reaffirms conjugal rights in marriage, it also spells out exceptions where a spouse may refuse to have sex “on reasonable grounds.” According to the bill, those grounds include poor health, recovery after giving birth, recovery after surgery and “if he/she has reasonable fear that engaging in sexual intercourse is likely to cause physical or psychological harm to either spouse.”

The bill also states that a husband can be convicted of marital rape for nonconsensual sex if he and his wife are separated at the time. Though Mbeko touts the bill as a much-needed first step, he is also quick to say that it does not do nearly enough to address the full scale of the problem. “We can now push full throttle for the recognition of marital rape within the law as it [marital rape] is a form of gender-based violence,” he says. “With no law, it will continue and women will continue to suffer.”

But getting lawmakers to take a stronger stand against non-consensual sex within marriage means overcoming deeply ingrained patriarchal and cultural beliefs. Annie Banda, a gender activist in Malawi who has been lobbying for the country to pass a marital rape law, says that in private discussions with various parliamentarians, she has been told that marital rape is simply not possible. “When you are outside the meeting rooms, they will tell you there is no way that a man can rape his own wife,” she says.

In Botswana, too, the attitude toward sex in marriage holds that women give up their individual rights once they enter wedlock. Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior police officer in the Botswana Police Service confirms that he and his colleagues do not deal with marital rape cases. “We as the police cannot police in the bedroom,” he says. “How can you refuse to be with your own husband when you belong to him and expect us to intervene?”

Even in places where laws against marital rape exist, cultural beliefs make them difficult to enforce. South Africa was one of the first African countries to legislate against marital rape, in 1993, but research reveals that patriarchal attitudes still influence how the courts handle cases of marital rape. In its 2012 report on marital rape in South Africa, the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa documents one case where a judge dismissed marital rape charges because the husband’s “desire to make love to his wife must have overwhelmed him, hence his somewhat violent behavior.” In another case, the complainant was abducted and raped by her husband, who thought it was his right as she had not reimbursed him the lobolo (bride price) he had paid for her. In his ruling, the judge said that the defendant’s actions “though totally unacceptable in law … were shaped and molded by the norms, beliefs and customary practices by which he lived his life.”

Gender activist Annie Banda predicts a long road ahead in the fight to eradicate marital rape. “Marital rape is there, but people do not want to accept it,” she says. “The victims are complaining, but law enforcers still do not believe it is possible for a man to rape his wife, because of our culture.”

For Kinshasa’s Homeless Girls, a Life of Abuse and Servitude

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Didem Tali

Of the 25,000 street children in Congo's capital, the majority are young men. But while boys can make money through manual labor, girls often find that prostitution and exploitation are their only options for survival.

KINSHASA, Congo – When Cecilia’s parents died suddenly in 2009, there was nobody left to look after her. “I had some older siblings but they are all in Angola. Nobody asked after me,” she says. “They just abandoned me.” Only 8 years old at the time, she ended up living on the streets of the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), hungry, cold and afraid. So it seemed like a miracle when, after two weeks of homelessness, she was approached by a woman who offered to adopt her. “You are too pretty to be on the streets,” the woman had said to Cecilia. “Come home with me and I’ll make you my daughter.”

That was how she found herself working as a “domestic house slave,” says Cecilia, now 15. For six years, she was physically, verbally and sexually abused, sometimes by the six biological sons and daughters of her new “mother.” Then one day, the woman punched Cecilia so hard, she broke her front teeth. Cecilia ran away, back to the streets, where she has been living ever since.

Cecilia is one of 25,000 street children in Kinshasa, a figure that, according to UNICEF, has almost doubled in the last decade. The DRC’s high fertility rates combined with the ongoing urban sprawl of one of the biggest cities in Africa means the number of homeless children continues to increase, says the organization. It’s a problem across sub-Saharan Africa, where 200 million children are living in poverty, at risk of exploitation, abuse and disease. And in many places, those risks are disproportionately greater for girls.

“There are more boys in the streets of Kinshasa than girls – I would say a third of the street children are girls,” says Jean-Pierre Godding, a project manager at the grassroots charity Street Children of Kinshasa.

But, “girls are considered more ‘useful’ than boys. Families usually exploit girls as much as they can.”

For one thing, girls are more vulnerable to sexual violence, says Godding. “Boys can do small manual jobs to make a bit of money here and there. But girls in the streets often end up in prostitution.”

Those who don’t become sex workers might get pulled into domestic work. “Families tend to keep girls to run the household chores and help raise the other children in the family,” says Godding. “Many girls also marry young, which is another reason why they don’t end up in the streets as much as the boys.”

Chloe, 16, turned to prostitution when she ran away from home two years ago. “My sisters wanted to marry me off to an elderly man,” she says. “I’d rather be in the streets and do sex work than be an old man’s wife.” For Chloe, like so many other girls on the streets, rape, sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, violence and stigma are everyday realities. But even when their circumstances change for the better, it’s difficult for them to leave that world. “They usually have a ‘boyfriend’ who solicits customers for them in return of protection,” says Godding. “Their self-esteem and perception [of themselves] take a significant hit.”

Organizations like Street Children of Kinshasa can offer support for the city’s young homeless people, providing dorms, some education and food. Sometimes, the organization can trace the families of abandoned children and negotiate with them to reunify the family. It also offers micro-credit programs to help the families start small businesses and thus have better economic means.

But Godding believes keeping children off the streets means going back to where they came from. “The only way to permanently help out these girls is economic empowerment and development for the children and their communities,” he says.

According to Clemence Petit-Perot, a program director at the Children’s Radio Foundation, which uses radio and broadcast training in Africa to boost community dialogue and participation, giving street children temporary shelter, protection and education might be quick wins. But long-term solutions, she says, lie in changing public perceptions and mobilizing communities.

“Street children in Kinshasa and the rest of Africa suffer from intense stigma,” says Petit-Perot. “Most people see them merely as thieves or prostitutes. If there’s a crime [in a rundown area] the police and the community usually blame the street children.”

“A strong dialogue is the only way for communities to understand that street children are complex human beings with difficult decisions and challenges, rather than just shadows.”

Neither Chloe nor Cecilia see their situations as inevitable. Chloe wants to quit sex work one day and go to school. Cecilia loves clothes and dreams of becoming a fashion designer. But both know there is no easy path off the street.

“People tell me I am very good with fashion and styling. I would really love to go to fashion school and learn more,” says Cecilia, who makes sure to put on beautiful skirts, necklaces and bracelets every day. “But I don’t know if I can do that. I need to go to high school first.”

The names and personal details of some of the children have been changed to protect their identities.

This story was reported with the support of an African Great Lakes Fellowship from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

How Nurses and Cheap Morphine Made Uganda a Model for Palliative Care

This article originally appeared on the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about issues that affect women and girls in the developing world, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Grainne Harrington

Uganda’s underfunded health system struggles to effectively treat the country’s growing number of cancer patients. But for the terminally ill, a small hospice organization has come up with a homemade pain relief treatment that has revolutionized end-of-life care.

KAMPALA, Uganda – Roselight Katusabe sets off for work in the morning with her usual tools: patient notes and a pen, some gauze dressings, and a suitcase full of morphine. Katusabe is a palliative care nurse at Hospice Africa Uganda (HAU), an NGO based in Kampala, which focuses on home care. The bottles of morphine she brings to her patients have revolutionized the way terminally ill people spend their final days in Uganda. And it all began at a kitchen sink in the hospice, where for 17 years healthcare workers made up the solution for thousands of patients.

“It’s easier to make than a cup of coffee,” says Dr. Anne Merriman, the British founder of HAU. Merriman, a palliative care specialist and former missionary doctor, developed her own formula for affordable oral morphine while working in Singapore, and brought it to Uganda in 1993. At the time, the most commonly used analgesic for severe pain was codeine. Commercial injectable morphine was expensive and only available in hospitals on an “as needed” basis, which Merriman says left patients in pain. To make HAU’s cheaper, oral solution, “all you need is accurate scales to weigh the [morphine] powder, then all you do is add distilled water, a preservative … and then we add a dye to show the strength,” says Merriman.

These days, the formula hasn’t changed, but the kitchen sink has been replaced by a modern laboratory. Since 2011, the hospice, in partnership with the Ugandan government, has been manufacturing its morphine solution for the entire country, free of charge.

In Uganda, where the underfunded health system struggles to provide even basic care, morphine is the key to pain relief and a better end of life for thousands of cancer patients. HAU’s homemade approach makes the drug affordable: While other countries buy injections and tablets from pharmaceutical companies, a 10-day supply of oral solution costs just $2.

And by pioneering a system that allows nurses to administer morphine, Uganda has led the way in palliative care for cancer patients in low-income countries.

On this day’s rounds, Katusabe is delivering a bottle of Merriman’s formula to Agatha, a 38-year-old battling stage-four breast cancer, at her home in a slum in Kawempe, northern Kampala. The nurse takes out a brown bottle and a dosing syringe, shows the patient how much she should take and gently answers her questions. When asked what difference the hospice has made to her life, Agatha pauses. She cannot express it in words, she says.

The palliative care Agatha is receiving is unique in this region. Uganda was the first country in the world to let specially trained and registered nurses administer morphine, a job previously reserved for doctors. This development, too, was largely due to Merriman and her NGO. When HAU was founded, the country was going through one of the worst AIDS epidemics in the world, and widespread immunodeficiency led to a rise in many types of cancer. The minister of health at the time immediately agreed to Merriman’s plan to introduce her cheap morphine solution, but doctors were far more reticent, fearing it would lead to addiction and overdose.

“The doctors said we were bringing in euthanasia,” says Merriman. “Many of those senior doctors would not let any of their patients have morphine. They said, ‘They’re going to be addicted.’”

As cancer rates continued to rise, Merriman realized her morphine wouldn’t get to the people who needed it unless the number of prescribers increased. Nurses were already allowed to administer another opioid drug, pethidine, to women in labor. In 1998, HAU began to lobby the Ministry of Health to widen the legislation so that nurses could also prescribe morphine. The change eventually went through in 2004. Uganda has an average of one doctor per 20,000 people but almost twice as many nurses, so allowing nurses to administer the homemade morphine solution has made affordable pain relief accessible from the capital right down to village level.

Merriman credits the Ugandan government’s progressive policymaking for bringing about radical changes in the way people with terminal illness are treated in the country. In the Economist’s 2015 Quality of Death Index, Uganda ranked 35th out of 80 countries, and was one of only two African countries in the top 50, along with South Africa.

But while it has made strides in quality of death for cancer patients, Uganda’s healthcare system still struggles to provide effective treatment that could improve their quality of life. Katusabe’s patient was diagnosed when her illness was at stage two. In many countries, this is early enough to hope for a good outcome, but Agatha first turned to a traditional healer for help – she didn’t seek medical treatment until her cancer was advanced.

The Uganda Cancer Institute says that 75 to 80 percent of cancer patients are diagnosed at stage three or four, when surgery and other curative therapies are far less effective. Part of this is due to a lack of awareness, despite a considerable outreach effort on the part of the Ugandan government and other organizations. Financial constraints also play a big part. Hospitals frequently run out of necessary drugs, Katusabe says.

And even when treatment is available, it’s often too expensive for most Ugandans. According to HAU, a four-week course of chemotherapy can cost from $900 to $1,000. Because of this, Katusabe says patients who know they can’t afford treatment will simply accept a cancer diagnosis as a death sentence.

In April, Uganda’s only radiotherapy machine broke down after years of disrepair. Replacing it will take over a year. In the meantime, patients who can afford it have been told to go to neighboring Kenya for treatment.

After leaving Agatha, Katusabe visits two cervical cancer patients who are going for treatment in Nairobi with HAU funding. The women are cheerful and hopeful that radiotherapy will help. But for many other cancer patients in Uganda, Katusabe and her plastic bottles of morphine are the best relief they can hope for.

African Women leaders gather in Nairobi, discuss empowerment

We were so encouraged to see this article about women leaders gathering in Africa to discuss women's empowerment around the world and especially in Africa. Kenya Amina Mohamed Amina Mohamed pointed out

Speakers also addressed at the African Women Leaders Symposium, organized by UN Women and Oxfam and held from August 24 to 25.

While we still have a ways to go -- if nothing changes, the United Nations predicts we'll only reach gender parity by 2133 -- we were inspired and hopeful by the inclusive and intergenerational approach taken by these leaders. Read below and click through for more from the Capital Ethiopia Newspaper.

capitalethiopia.com - “Before others empower us we must empower ourselves; it is a shame if we do not believe in the leadership of women,” Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Cabinet Secretary, Amina Mohamed, said.

“Half of the world is made of women and the other half is born by women,” Mohamed teased. “There are today two women leaders in Europe and just one in our continent. We need a proportionate number of women leaders,” she challenged women leaders during the opening session of the African Women Leaders Symposium, held in Nairobi, Kenya from 24-25 August.

“We must first accept each other. We go through stages where we can’t even trust women in leadership,” she cautioned.“It is a shame that this continues to happen. We should all strive to be women of substance. We have to vote for women. Ask yourself, why should anybodyelse do for you what you are not committed to do for yourself?” she posed.

Amina Mohamed, a woman of many first, is the first woman to hold the foreign ministry docket in Kenya. She said, women must also make individual contribution to change the status quo if at all the continent is to achieve the required gender balance.

Read more

Michelle Obama to visit Africa to highlight girls' education

As part of the Let Girls Learn initiative, first lady Michelle Obama is heading to Africa to focus on girls' education. With visits to Liberia and Morocco, the first lady will also be joining others; including Meryl Streep, Freida Pinto, and local teenage girls for a conversation about how best to educate girls around the globe.

Let Girls Learn was created last year by the first lady and President Barack Obama. Read on for more about Michelle Obama's visit and her efforts to help girls worldwide overcome obstacles and pursue educations.

yahoo.com - WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. first lady Michelle Obama will travel to Africa on Sunday with daughters Sasha and Malia and her mother as part of an effort to promote girls' education, her office said.

The upcoming, six-day trip will include visits to Morocco and Liberia. She will also visit Spain. The trip will highlight the work of Let Girls Learn, a U.S. government initiative launched by U.S. President Barack Obama and the first lady in 2015.

That project is part of "a U.S. government effort to address the barriers that keep over 62 million girls around the world out of school, particularly adolescent girls,” the first lady's chief of staff, Tina Tchen, told reporters on a conference call.

Michelle Obama will be joined by actresses Meryl Streep and Freida Pinto in Morocco, where they will talk to adolescent girls on the challenges they face in getting an education, her office said.

In Liberia, she will visit a U.S. Peace Corps training facility and a school along with Liberian President Ellen Johansson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female elected head of state and a Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Read more

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Woman President Shows Malawi the Way

Malawi’s President Joyce Banda took office during a difficult time economically and politically, in addition to being first woman to be head of state in southern Africa. She is a true leader, for her country as well as for women: Banda has appointed women to key positions since taking power, and even before taking office she spearheaded efforts such as founding National Association for Business Women.

She sat down with IPS News to discuss the link between women's empowerment and sustainable development, health care and education for women and girls, upcoming legislation that will empower and protect women, and much more.

ipsnews.net - Malawi’s President Joyce Banda knows a thing or two about women’s empowerment. After all she is the first female southern African head of state.

But she has not had it easy. Banda had a tough job fixing a sputtering economy after taking over from her predecessor Bingu wa Mutharika who died in office on April 5, 2012. In 2011 the country witnessed nationwide protests against Mutharika and the failing economy. The United Kingdom, Malawi’s largest donor, had suspended $550 million in aid after Mutharika expelled its ambassador for calling him an autocrat.

But she did succeed. Since taking office she has implemented of a number of austerity measures, which included selling the country’s presidential jet for $15 million and taking a 30 percent cut in her salary. She also embarked on a range of reforms that not everyone has agreed with. The most controversial has been cultivating closer ties with international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund, which is known for its heavy-handed austerity plans.

But in June, the World Bank said the country’s economy was recovering, with manufacturing expected to grow 6 percent and agriculture 5.7 percent.

In September 2012, the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute reported that since Mutharika’s increasingly autocratic rule ended, respect for democracy and human rights has returned to the country under Banda’s presidency.

Read more, including excerpts from the interview, here.

The all-female patrol stopping South Africa's rhino poachers

Across Africa, rhino poaching is up. However, one brave group of conservationists is winning awards and recognition for their success in protecting the endangered, iconic animals. Patrolling the Balule Nature Reserve in South Africa, the Black Mambas--an all-women group--are not only eliminating poaching across the reserve but are also building trust and making connections between the local community and officials trying to protect the wildlife. Read more about their amazing efforts at the link. theguardian.com - “The Black Mambas are winning the war on poaching,” insists Siphiwe Sithole. “We have absolutely zero tolerance for rhino poaching and the illegal wildlife trade. The poachers will fall – but it will not be with guns and bullets.”

Sithole and Felicia Mogakane are members of South Africa’s Black Mambas, the world’s first all-female anti-poaching unit that has captured the public’s imagination. But it’s their success in reducing rhino deaths and breaking down the barriers between poor communities and elite wildlife reserves that is their most powerful weapon in the war on poaching, and has seen them pick up their second international conservation award this week.

The two women have travelled to London to receive the inaugural Innovation in Conservation award from UK charity Helping Rhinos. The award recognises projects “with an inspiring and innovative approach” that have shown positive results in protecting rhino populations.

Since forming in 2013, the Black Mambas have seen a 76% reduction in snaring and poaching incidents within their area of operation in Balule nature reserve in the country’s north-east. As well as the famous big five of rhino, lion, elephant, buffalo and leopard, the 40,000-hectare private reserve is home to zebra, antelope, wildebeest, cheetah, giraffe, hippos, crocodiles and hundreds of species of trees and birds.

Read more here.

How the death of two Ugandan mothers is helping entrench the right to health care

Every day, an average of 16 women in Uganda die avoidable deaths during childbirth. And while neighboring Rwanda has decreased similar incidents, Uganda continues to struggle even as it promises free health services to citizens. Resources, salaries and staff training are in short supply, and even without user fees for health services patients are expected to pay out-of-pocket for some services--and are denied or delayed when they can't. It's a recipe that has led to many of the preventable deaths--deaths of infants and mothers that could have been avoided with prompt maternal care. The tragic deaths of two expectant mothers, Sylvia Nalubowa and Jennifer Anguko, are spurring calls for the Ugandan government to take responsibility--and to change the system to ensure meaningful rights to health care for all.

Respecting women's rights as well as the country's constitution and international agreements, the Centre for health, Human Rights and Development argues, includes the right to necessary maternal care.

Click through to follow the progress of this case through Ugandan courts.

venturesafrica.com - When Sylvia Nalubowa went into labour in Uganda’s Mityana district in August 2009, she was taken to a local health centre where she expected to have a normal birth, supervised by a midwife.

After she had delivered her first baby the midwife realised there was a twin on the way. The midwife recommended that Nalubowa be taken to the district hospital where a doctor could handle the second delivery.

But when she arrived at the Mityana District Hospital in Central Uganda, the nurses asked for her maternity kit. This is commonly known as a “mama kit” and contains a plastic sheet, razor blades, cotton wool or gauze pad, soap, gloves, cord ties, and a child health card. All mothers delivering babies in Ugandan hospitals and clinics are expected to bring their own “mama kits” when they go into labour.

But Nalubowa had used her “mama kit” at the first health facility when delivering her first child. The nurses would hear none of her excuses and demanded money to purchase the kit before they could attend to her.

Read more here.

Women’s Rights First—African Summit

Africa faces numerous challenges to the well-being of the more than 1.2 billion people who live there. The African Union has named 2016 the "African Year of Human Rights, with particular focus on the Rights of Women." Countless issues face Africa that need support, careful discussion, and action. But during the 2016 AU Summit held in Addis Ababa, Ethopia from January 21 to 31, women's issues were front and center.

Mahawa Kaba Wheeler; Director of Women, Gender and Development at the African Union Commission; gave an interview to IPS News detailing compelling reasons for emphasizing women's rights in the overall fight to promote human rights in Africa. She discusses economic disenfranchisement, lack of education, gender-based violence and more. Working to protect women and achieve gender equality, she argues, will help society as a whole thrive.

Women's disproportionate share of the adversity and barriers—combined with their immeasurable contributions to their communities—means that focusing on women is focusing on the community.

Read Kaba Wheeler's full interview at the link below. You can listen to a review of the summit here.

ipsnews.net - CAIRO, Feb 1 2016 (IPS) - Despite the enormous challenges facing Africa now, the leaders of its 1.2 billion plus inhabitants have decided to spotlight the issue of Human Rights With a Particular Focus on the Rights of Women in their 26th summit held in Addis Ababa on 21-31 January this year. Why?

In an interview to IPS, Mahawa Kaba Wheeler, Director of Women, Gender and Development at the African Union Commission (AUC), explains that time has come to act to alleviate the multitude of barriers to gender equality: “These include, among others, economic exclusion and financial systems that perpetuate the discrimination of women; limited participation in political and public life; lack of access to education and retention of girls in schools; gender-based violence, harmful cultural practices, and exclusion of women from peace tables either as lead mediators or part of negotiating teams of conflicting parties,” she argued.

Read the full interview here.