Happy Mother’s Day: Celebrating the Power and Inspiration of Mothers Everywhere

This Mother's Day, we've rounded up some news, commentary, and inspiration for you; all centering on mothers, motherhood, and the women who nurture, lead, protect, advocate for, and raise future generations.

Whether you're a mother yourself, are thanking and spending time with your own mother or the guiding women in your life, plan to honor mothers and great women who have supported and inspired you, or have a complicated relationship with motherhood and how (or if) it fits into your vision; we want to invite every woman to honor the strength, resilience, intelligence, and compassion that she and all the women around us bring to so many lives each day. Click through to enjoy the stories.

What Daughters Learn When Mom Is the Boss of the Family Business: A survey by global organization EY has found that women at the helm in family-owned companies helps other women—family members and unrelated women—to see themselves in leadership roles. Entrepreneur Magazine examines the effect, including the benefits of exemplifying leadership qualities, the rising tide of women leading companies or being considered for the top spot, the power of personal examples, and more.

The 50 Most Powerful Moms of 2018: Working Mother Magazine highlights fifty inspiring, powerful women who are leading the way while leading their families. The list amplifies some of the most important voices of the moment, honoring "women in power who raised their voices, gathered their communities, leveraged their status and demanded respect, safety, and equity for women in the workplace."

Employers Ranked on Maternity Benefits: A key to helping women succeed is providing for mothers and helping them continue to thrive in the workplace—paving the way for more secure futures for women while allowing companies to continue to benefit from their work, leadership, and insight; as well as helping them attract the best candidates. An annual ranking shows which companies do the best job prioritizing maternity benefits and family-friendly policies such as realistic maternity leave, flexible work schedules, and affordable child care—and areas that appear to be improving for working moms.

Motherhood Means Love: Mother’s Day Quotes From Around the World: The Global Fund for Women has collected a selection of quotes about mothers, motherhood, protecting one another, safety, the power of our voices and more from mothers across diverse backgrounds, cultures, and experiences. Share in the inspiration and unifying power of womanhood and motherhood; and celebrate mothers, women, and human rights all year long.

Image: Global Fund for Women

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Shelter Helps Stigmatized Young Mothers Build Happy Families in Sudan

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 Hannah McNeish

In Sudan, girls and young women who have children are often abandoned by their families and stigmatized in their communities. A shelter in Khartoum gives these mothers a home and works to help them build their families.

KHARTOUM, Sudan – Nour Hussein has been dreaming of happy families since she was a little girl, when she and her sister were put in Sudan’s largest institution for “lost” children. After her mother, who suffered from a mental-health illness, was placed in a psychiatric hospital, Hussein and her sister were sent to Mygoma, a state-run home in the capital, Khartoum. At around five years old, Hussein and some of the other children were transferred to private care homes. She moved again when she was 12 and eventually tracked down her mother six years later.

Although she got the chance to nurse her mother until her death, Hussein vividly remembers what it was like to grow up missing her. “Nothing in the world will give you anything like what a mother gives you, nowhere in the world,” she says.

Women and girls in Sudan who have children out of wedlock – even in cases of rape and incest – are often cast out by their families. “There’s no way to live in the community with your child without a father, especially if the girl is not married. The family doesn’t accept the child. They say, ‘Go away from this home until there is a father,’” says Hussein. “They will put the girl in the street, and police collect her and put her in an institution.”

There are many of these institutions, mostly government-run, dotted around Sudan, full of children whose mothers chose to have them instead of risking backstreet abortions. But mothers aren’t allowed to stay with their babies. To keep their children means to be ostracized from their communities; rejoining their families means having to leave their children behind.

So in 2010, Hussein and several friends from her childhood days in care homes set up the Shamaa shelter, a place where instead of abandoning their children, mothers could stay with them and work towards building a family. Since opening, the shelter has helped 815 women and girls, giving them a place to live in a quiet Khartoum neighborhood, and providing medical and psychosocial services during pregnancy, birth and the first stages of motherhood.

The women and girls can stay as long as they like – from a few months up to a year – while Hussein and her team look after them and their babies as they go through mediation with parents and partners.

In most cases, and only when the young mothers agree, Shamaa helps to arrange a marriage with the child’s biological father. If he is deemed unsuitable or is rejected by the girl or her family, Shamaa helps to find the girl a new partner from a pool of what the organization calls “volunteer fathers.” These men, whom Shamaa finds and heavily vets, agree to marry single mothers out of a sense of duty to care for a vulnerable child, which the Quran highlights as a great act of kindness.

“All these girls, we help them, and now they are inside our community and living with their families, with the real father or sometimes a volunteer father,” says Hussein. “We make families.”

Zara, a 30-year-old teacher with a 13-month-old baby, thought her life was over when she discovered she was pregnant and the father refused to marry her. “I was so afraid,” she says, adding that she was scared of her brothers. When asked how she thought they’d react, she switches from Arabic to English. “Maybe kill me,” she says.

Now Zara is about to start a new life outside the shelter with an engineer who started off as a volunteer father. “I love him,” she says with a grin, as she presses one hand to her chest and cradles her baby with the other, her engagement ring glinting under the strip light in a room bare but for three single beds, all occupied.

“Shamaa has given me everything. First, it was a safe place to be with my baby, and now they have found someone for me to marry so I can live with him and my baby.”

Shamaa is also working with Sudan’s Ministry of Welfare and Ministry of Interior to get more than 2,000 children and young people who were abandoned or born out of wedlock birth certificates, social security numbers and passports. Giving a child legal status in Sudan requires that the mother be married to the father or at least get him to sign a form officially recognizing the child as his.

Struggling to pay for its shelter due to funding cuts from larger charities, Shamaa will soon have to downsize. But its work will continue, says Hussein, whose first name, Nour, means “light” in Arabic.

“We need to make a light in our community,” she says, to make people realize “that these children are not guilty” and need to be nurtured by families to avoid them ending up in large institutions, where development disorders are common.

“We are all Sudanese. These children, they must accept them, they must love them.”

The names of some of the women in this story have been changed to protect their identities.

Childcare Crisis for Mothers in Nairobi Slums

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 William Davies

For women living in Kenya’s slums, lack of access to childcare can make going to work impossible. Those who can afford daycare struggle to find a place in overcrowded rooms packed with babies, while other mothers are forced to leave their children home alone.

NAIROBI – The fried potatoes that Linet Njeri sells on a rubbish-strewn street in Mathare, a slum in Nairobi, are delicious. She’s been selling bags of potatoes – lightly salted, warm and crisp – to passersby for 15 years. Crawling around Njeri’s feet, occasionally perilously close to the wood-burning stove that heats the frying oil, is her 16-month-old daughter, Rosemary. Njeri also has four other children. The oldest is manning a shop behind her, one is at school, and the other two she has left at home, alone.

“I’d like to expand my business, but I can’t because I can’t afford childcare,” says Njeri, who is a single mother. She says she feels lucky because she has her own business, and that means she can bring her youngest with her. “If I was employed, I don’t know what I would do.”

Most days Njeri makes around 600 shillings ($6), but from that she has to pay for the potatoes, wood and oil. “It is a struggle,” she says. “I have to keep Rosemary here with me. Daycare charges 100 shillings a day. It is too much.”

For mothers in Mathare and other slums across the Kenyan capital, lack of access to childcare is a major barrier to work – and to the path out of poverty. Nearly half of all Kenyan women aged 15 to 49 have a child under the age of five.

But because there are so few childcare options, especially in the slums, women face an almost impossible decision on a daily basis. Leave their babies home alone and go look for work, or stay with their children, but fail to earn enough money to feed them.

Kenyan women make up just under half of the workforce, but less than one in five of them have permanent jobs; the rest are casual workers. There are very few jobs that provide childcare, so women in the slums are forced to take on casual work, with the result being they never know if they’ll find work or not.

Walking through Mathare, home to some 300,000 people, a visitor can see several women with their babies tied to their backs as they bend over doing laundry. Other children, seemingly unaccompanied, play alone in the street.

Tucked down one alley, in a tin-roofed shack measuring about 3m (9.8ft) squared, 23 children are being looked after by three women. There are no windows, and the room is crammed with kids aged between six months and three years.

“This is one of the best daycare centers in Mathare,” says Judy Analo, 41, who brings her two grandchildren here every day. Before finding the center, she could only work alternate days with her daughter, as someone had to stay at home to look after two-year-old Tracy and 14-month-old Constantine. “It was so hard to find this place. I saw lots of other places, but this place is much better, as when you pick your children up they will be clean.”

The daycare, which doesn’t have an official name, is open six days a week, from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., but is oversubscribed. They regularly turn mothers away, as they can’t fit any more children into the room.

“Things are really bad,” says the owner, Veronica Ngesa. “Some people leave their children in the streets alone when they are just eight months old.” Others, she says, lock their babies and children in the house all day as they go to work. “There are so many children, so there is a real need for places like this.”

Ngesa’s daycare is supported by the British charity Tushinde, whose name means “Let’s succeed.” The funding pays for two meals a day for the children, many of whom arrive on their first day severely malnourished. The mothers, many of whom are single parents, each pay 30 shillings a day, which is still a struggle for some who might only earn a few hundred shillings a week.

“Many women are casual workers, so if they don’t go to work they don’t get paid,” says Sally Nduta, a social worker and development manager at Tushinde.

But for many women living in Kenya’s slums, even having the option to work is a luxury. “There is a great need for daycare. Forty-six percent of women who want daycare are not able to get good daycare for their children, so they can’t go to work,” says Nduta. “What we do is a drop in the ocean.” She wants the government to enact new laws to make companies provide childcare for those who need it.

Lucy Inziani does whatever work she can – laundry, cleaning, even manual labor – if it means she can provide for her children. Before finding the Tushinde daycare, she couldn’t work, and her family struggled to survive. “Other places are dirty,” she says. “Sometimes the rooms are very small and they are really congested.” It’s hard to imagine a more congested room than the one we are standing in, but all the women here say it’s spacious compared to others.

Even with the dire conditions, mothers who are able to access any daycare at all are the lucky ones. For thousands of others in the slum, earning enough money to survive means risking the health and well-being of their children on a daily basis.