Hungry and Isolated, Women Who Survived Boko Haram Face New Nightmare

This article originally appeared on Refugees Deeply and the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis and issues affecting women and girls, you can sign up for the Refugees Deeply email list as well as the Women & Girls Hub email list. By Shaista Aziz

Hunger and insecurity stalks the displacement camps of Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state, where people who fled Boko Haram face the risk of famine. Shaista Aziz meets displaced women concerned about destitution and abuse, and the female activists trying to help them.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria – Yagna Ibrahim is a woman who has a presence that is difficult to ignore. She strides into the room with grace and confidence, pulls out a chair and sits down next to her friend and fellow women’s rights activist Rabia Musa.

The two women are part of an informal network of women’s rights activists that is trying to mobilize women in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno State to help displaced women and children, providing food, clothes, money and other support.

Both are in their fifties, wives and mothers, educated and financially independent. They prefer not to tell their husbands the details of their work in case they think it’s too dangerous.

“Our society has changed forever and we have to work to limit the damage,” Ibrahim explains during an interview in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state.

Over the past seven years, the militant group Boko Haram has set about destroying communities, schools and health facilities in northeast Nigeria and has used sexual violence and the kidnapping of women and girls to terrorize the population. At least 20,000 people have been killed, and an estimated 2.5 million people have been displaced.

Amid the carnage, communities have been unable to tend to their land and multiple harvests have failed. Hunger has taken over. Children and adults have wasted to death. The United Nations’ children’s agency UNICEF warned that 75,000 children could die this year without a major aid effort in northeast Nigeria.

Yet aid has been slow to reach people in the region. Some Nigerians fear corrupt local officials are diverting resources from people in need. The international aid system was slow to recognize the scale of the crisis and has not yet cranked into full gear. Ongoing fighting has complicated the effort – the U.N. estimates that 2 million people remain inaccessible to aid agencies.

The magnitude of the crisis is slowly coming to light as the Nigerian military “liberates” areas previously under Boko Haram control. Each village and town is a piece of a jigsaw that, when pieced together, reveals a level of suffering that has been largely hidden from the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, traumatized families continue to pour out of their destroyed homes and villages, seeking sanctuary, food and medical care in Maiduguri. Their number has risen sharply in the last six months. Maiduguri’s population has almost doubled in size to more than 2 million people in recent years.

There are 11 official and unofficial camps for people who have been displaced across Maiduguri. People living in the unofficial camps have little access to aid. In one of these camps, known as Custom House, residents told aid workers last month that they had no way to buy food and were boiling leaves to survive.

There is a visible absence of men in the displacement camps. Musa explains that it is likely that most have been killed, forced to join Boko Haram or are being held in military detention centers.

“We cannot say for sure what has happened to them but we know that they are unlikely to return to their families,” she says. “This is the situation and the clock cannot be turned back.”

This has left women and children in a particularly vulnerable position, while creating tensions with the wider population.

“These women are widows and they have limited chances to rebuild their lives,” Ibrahim explains. “Many are young and are suffering trauma.”

Ibrahim says that for many women, their best chance at security could be marrying another man, including one who is willing to take up to four wives under Islamic law.

“We are working to reach out to these widows and try to integrate them into the community, but there are plenty of widows and we are limited in numbers of workers,” she says. “This is a huge issue now for our society.”

Even after they escaped fighting for the relative safety of the camps, the threat of violence and sexual assault continues to cast a long shadow over women’s lives.

Most of the displacement camps are surrounded by the Nigerian military. Men carrying weapons are visible inside the camps, likely members of a civilian militia that is armed by authorities.

In Muna Garage Camp on the outskirts of Maiduguri, where around 15,000 displaced people live in flimsy structures that provide little protection from the scorching sun or monsoon rain, women say they rarely venture outside the camp’s boundaries. “We have no reason to leave,” one woman says.

Another woman raises her arms in the air and starts patting her body down. “This is how the men touch our bodies when we leave the camp,” she says. “They say they need to check us for security. Do you think we want to be touched like this?”

People displaced from areas taken by Boko Haram have been met with suspicion in Maiduguri. Local authorities have openly fanned fears that the displaced population may have radicalized Boko Haram sympathizers in their midst.

Women have been particularly designated as suspect. Local officials describe women freed from Boko Haram control as a security risk, some claiming that is impossible to ensure that the camps for the displaced have not been “infiltrated” by “the wives of Boko Haram.”

When people in Borno refer to “wives,” it is a euphemism for rape and sexual slavery. While it is possible that some women have voluntarily joined or married fighters, most survivors describe forced marriage and horrific sexual violence, including rapes by multiple men.

“Unspeakable things start happening to girls from the age of 12,” Amina, a 15-year-old girl from Bama who recently gave birth to her first child, said in a maternity clinic on the outskirts of Maiduguri.

Another girl, 16 years old and pregnant, said Boko Haram rounded up most of the girls around her age from her village and took them away. While she evaded kidnapping, her brothers said they could not protect her from Boko Haram and forced her to get married.

Women who became pregnant while in Boko Haram captivity have been particularly shunned by local communities. The militant group’s repeated use of women and girls as suicide bombers has also roused the fears of the local population.

This week, a car bomb exploded less than 0.6 miles (1km) away from Muna Garage camp, killing five people. Camp residents told an aid worker – who asked to remain anonymous because not authorized to speak to the media – that a female suicide bomber was behind the attack and that her two-year-old child survived the blast.

The deepening suspicion and fear will make life even more difficult for women who are already struggling to survive on the margins of a fractured society while overcoming the horrors of the past.

In Muna Garage Camp, Aisha, a mother of five, described fleeing her home in Mafa when Boko Haram militants attacked two years ago.

“They came like wildfire to burn and loot our homes – they showed us no mercy, no mercy at all,” she says.

“I picked up my children and ran and have been running since then.”

All the women in this story requested their names be changed for their own protection.

Slow Progress on Ending ‘Legacy of Slavery’ for Domestic Workers

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 Jan Powell

As demand for home help increases around the world, the number of countries adopting laws to protect domestic workers continues to grow. But their abuse and exploitation won’t stop without a fundamental change in social attitudes, say advocates.

When Pavitra left her family and four children in Nepal to go to Oman as a domestic worker, she had high hopes that the job would provide the money her family needed for medical bills. Her sisters had gone abroad before and returned safely with a modest income. But Pavitra’s experience was different. “I would wake at six in the morning and I’d go to sleep at 1 or 2 in the morning,” she says, through a translator. “For breakfast, we had bread and tea and then at four in the afternoon we’d get one meal.”

Then one night, the husband came into the room she was cleaning, shut the door and raped her, threatening to shoot her if she told his wife. Pavitra did tell her employer, who refused to believe her and instead took her to the police, accusing her of seducing her husband. Pavitra was locked up for three months, without access to a lawyer, before she was finally sent back to Nepal. She did not go back to her family, fearing blame and stigma. “If my family, especially my husband, finds out, they will abandon me,” she says.

At least 67 million people worldwide are employed in the home – cooking, cleaning, caring for the very young and the very old. The vast majority of these domestic workers are women who, isolated and hidden away in private homes, are vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. According to the Geneva-based International Labour Organization (ILO), around 90 percent of domestic workers lack even the most basic protection afforded to most factory or office workers.

It was to try to improve conditions for domestic workers that the ILO’s Convention on Domestic Workers was adopted in 2011, setting global standards and conditions for the employment of home help. Five years on, 70 countries have taken action on Convention 189, as it is known, with 22 ratifying it, 30 adopting it and a number of others upgrading their own national legislation in line with the convention’s recommendations. But have the laws made any difference to the lives of domestic workers on the ground?

According to Claire Hobden, ILO technical specialist on vulnerable workers and domestic work, who was involved in drafting the convention, it has done some good. The convention has raised awareness of the rights of domestic workers, she says, and has encouraged the creation of many more grassroots organizations to fight for those rights and contribute to law and policy development. In 2012, Uruguay became the first country to ratify Convention 189 and now has some of the most advanced legislation in the world to protect its estimated 120,000 domestic workers. This has led to wage rises, compensation for night work, and paid holidays. A government-led, country-wide campaign has also contributed to an increase in social security coverage for domestic workers. “The percentage of domestic workers registered for social security increased very significantly following the interventions of the government,” says Hobden.

Hobden says the convention has also prompted some countries to modify their own laws to raise standards. Morocco – which voted to adopt the convention but hasn’t yet ratified it – is one of the latest countries to bring in new legislation to protect domestic workers, setting 18 as the minimum age for employment, requiring a contract of work and a minimum of one day off each week, and imposing financial penalties on employers who break the law.

But there are still many countries – particularly in regions such as the Middle East, the Far East and parts of Asia – where domestic work is largely excluded from national laws. And even where relevant legislation does exist, such as anti-trafficking laws, it is often poorly enforced.

In what Marzena Zukowska, spokeswoman for the U.S.-based National Domestic Workers Alliance, describes as a “two-fold care crisis,” shifting employment patterns, with more mothers choosing to go to work, and an aging population mean the demand for domestic services is increasing worldwide. Many domestic workers live in abysmal, humiliating conditions. Frequently dependent on their employers for food and housing, domestic workers’ meals can consist of leftovers and their living quarters limited to cramped rooms at the back of the house.

Migrants, who make up around 17 percent of domestic workers, are particularly vulnerable. In some areas – including the United States, the Middle East and parts of Europe – migrant workers who have complained about their living conditions have lost their jobs, had their visas withdrawn and ended up in prison for being in the country illegally, according to Hobden. “I remember one woman in the U.S. who had her passport and her shoes taken away from her to prevent her leaving the house – this can happen almost anywhere,” she says.

Abuse, too, is common, with domestic workers describing a range of psychological and physical violence – from verbal abuse to beatings, sexual harassment and rape – usually happening behind closed doors and rarely reported.

While strong, effective legislation is an essential tool for change, improving the lives of domestic workers requires a fundamental evolution in the attitudes of those who employ them, say activists. “Too many people don’t see ‘housework’ as real work. They believe that providing food and accommodation is adequate payment,” says Hobden.

Work in the home traditionally goes unpaid in many cultures, or in return for food and lodging. This “master-servant” relationship, which activists say is just a modern version of slavery, is widely accepted in countries where the notion of an employment relationship with labor rights is relatively new.

“You hear about the murders, the scalding by boiling water, the severe beatings, but that sets a very low bar,” says Hobden. “Other employers may think, ‘I’m a good employer because I don’t beat my help.’ But that’s not enough.” For Convention 189 to do its job properly, activists, rights groups and governments need to focus on changing the way both employers and workers think about domestic work. “We need to raise the bar,” says Hobden. “We need to change that social norm.”

Better Nutrition for Women and Girls Is Crucial to Achieve the SDGs

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 Steve Godfrey

The U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals make up an ambitious new agenda. But Steve Godfrey of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition writes that unless there is investment in improving the nutritional health of women and girls, many of the goals will never be realized.

The Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals adopted last year during the 70th U.N. General Assembly set a new course for nutrition and human development. For the first time, the international community is committed to “ending malnutrition in all its forms,” as opposed to “halving” malnutrition, as stated in the Millennium Development Goals. This means that we have the opportunity to improve the health and lives of an estimated 800 million people who remain undernourished and of the billions of people who suffer from micronutrient deficiencies or obesity. It is a radical new agenda.

Women and young children are often those most affected by the negative consequences of undernutrition. Around half of all pregnant women in developing countries are anemic, which contributes up to 20 percent of all maternal deaths. In many developing countries, women and girls traditionally eat last and have lower quality food, which often leads to poorer nutritional intake. And when a crisis hits, women are generally the first to sacrifice their food consumption to protect the health of their families.

Women account for over 40 percent of the world’s labor force. Yet malnutrition, including micronutrient deficiencies, can diminish women’s earning power through low energy levels, illness and increased absence from work. It is estimated that tackling anemia alone could lead to increased productivity of up to 17 percent.

Moreover, many adverse health outcomes associated with malnutrition are determined by the health and nutritional status of women and adolescent girls. Without the proper nutrients from pregnancy through to the age of 2 – the critical 1,000 days – infants suffer long-term health and economic consequences. Poor nutrition before and during pregnancy is a major determinant of stunting – meaning that a child does not reach its full potential height – which also has lifelong effects on physical and mental development. Currently, a little less than 160 million children are stunted globally.

At the same time, women are leaders in the fight against malnutrition. First, supporting women to breastfeed exclusively for the first six months of a child’s life, and to continue breastfeeding along with adequate complementary foods until at least age 2, is the best nutrition intervention for mothers and their babies. Breast milk provides the essential nutrients needed for healthy development, as well as the antibodies that help protect infants from common childhood illnesses such as diarrhea and pneumonia, the two primary causes of child mortality worldwide. Exclusive breastfeeding, where this is possible, is also beneficial to the mother and is known to reduce risks of breast and ovarian cancer later in life.

Second, women are the world’s primary food producers. Giving women farmers more resources could bring the number of hungry people in the world down by 100-150 million people. What’s more, when women have greater control over household income, they are more likely to prioritize spending on nutritious foods, improving nutrition for the entire family.

Finally, focusing on women’s empowerment is considered to be one of the best ways to improve nutrition. Education is a proven and important means of achieving gender equality, the effects of which are felt throughout families and communities. This includes better nutritional outcomes. A 2011 hunger and malnutrition report estimated that mothers with 10 or more years of education were less likely to have underweight or stunted children. Educating girls not only increases their earning potential, but may also delay the age of marriage and childbearing, which has a positive impact on childhood stunting.

Although the numerous links between empowering women and improving nutrition are understood, more still needs to be done to address the specific nutritional problems of women, adolescent girls and young children. The barriers for women in accessing nutritious diets are numerous and encompass the cost and availability of healthy foods, knowledge about nutrition, as well as the social, cultural and regulatory barriers that shape behaviors and markets.

Over the last nine years, GAIN has been working with our partners through a combination of proven interventions – such as the protection and promotion of breastfeeding and appropriate complementary feeding – and novel approaches to promote nutrition-related behaviors.

For example, a program in East Java, Indonesia, in partnership with the Ministry of Health’s Directorate of Community Nutrition, seeks to improve the dietary practices of pregnant mothers and children under the age of 2 years. Understanding what influences women when feeding their children and the barriers they face has been crucial to developing motivational messages that empower women to make healthy choices. We found that the whole community – members, friends and neighbors – needs to be involved, as everyone plays a big role in determining the choices that mothers make about what they and their children eat. One major component of the program is a behavior change campaign called Rumpi Sehat (Health Gossip), which comprises of national TV ads; “Emo-Demos” (emotional demonstrations), community activation designed to provoke an emotional response; social media; and interpersonal communication.

Another example is our project in rural Rajasthan, India, where women’s groups have been trained to produce fortified blended foods. These foods are purchased by the state’s social welfare program, which then distributes take-home rations to mothers and children. This project is giving tens of thousands of women access to nutritious complementary foods for their babies, aged 6 to 23 months, which are needed in addition to breastmilk. Currently, similar women’s groups are being set up in the Indian states of Karnataka and Bihar.

Adequate nutrition is important for women not only because it helps them be productive members of society, but also because of the direct effect maternal nutrition has on the health and development of the next generation. Maternal malnutrition’s toll on maternal and infant survival prevents countries from achieving most of the Sustainable Development Goals. While there is no silver bullet or single model to follow, putting women and children at the heart of tackling malnutrition is the right thing to do, a core investment for the success of the Sustainable Development Goals.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Women & Girls Hub.

As Mothers, Wives and Farmers, Women Feel the Strain of Climate Change

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 Sally Nyakanyanga

With Uganda suffering through climate change-related drought, flooding and unpredictable weather, women take on most of the work to keep their families fed. But lack of land rights means they reap few benefits.

LAGAJI VILLAGE, Uganda – In Nwoya district, families face a daily struggle to grow the crops they rely on for food and income. Extreme weather leaves the ground either too wet or too dry to grow anything. Drought and deforestation mean villagers – usually women – have to spend most of the day traveling long distances for water and firewood. And then there are the elephants.

“We have to grapple with elephants ravaging our crops, resulting in us being unable to fend for our families,” says Stella Ojara, a peasant farmer and mother of 10 who needs her crops to feed her family and the surplus to sell for school fees. A government conservation scheme in nearby Murchison Falls National Park has had success in increasing the area’s elephant population. But when the massive animals go in search of something to eat, they can devastate local crops, sinking Lagaji’s farmers deeper into poverty and hunger.

Even without rampaging wildlife, the effects of climate change – unseasonably high temperatures, perennial droughts, extreme and unpredictable weather – put enormous strain on farmers across Uganda. Making up more than half of the country’s farmers, women bear the brunt of the fight to survive from one planting season to the next. “When the rains come and we plant our crops, the rains vanish, leaving our crops to wilt and die due to inadequate rainfall,” says Jane Ochira, a farmer in the village of Lagaji.

But with limited land rights, few can reap the benefits of their work.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, the agricultural sector remains the backbone of Uganda’s economy, contributing over 70 percent of the country’s export earnings. Women constitute 56 percent of Ugandan farmers and make up more than 70 percent of agricultural production, nutrition and food security, at the household level, according to the Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET). But while women do most of the farm work, they only own 16 percent of the arable land in the country.

Edidah Ampaire, coordinator for Uganda’s Policy Action for Climate Change Adaptation project, says that women’s rights and roles are severely restricted, particularly in rural areas, and that government policies don’t do enough to address the imbalance. “Gender inequality in agricultural practices demonstrates how men have an advantage over women,” he says. “Women from rural areas are highly dependent on land, yet they are less likely to own land.”

WOUGNET says making land available to women gives them the chance to sustain themselves and their households as climate change forces them to spend most of their time cultivating fields and collecting firewood and water, leaving little time to make an income.

But even women who own land can find themselves unable to grow enough to feed their families, let alone surplus to sell on. “The poor and rural communities, mainly women, are greatly affected by climate change as they depend on extracting resources from the land for their daily survival,” said Paul Mukwaya from Makerere University, speaking to the press last year. As farmers and family caregivers, women have to deal with a slew of consequences resulting from drought and flooding, not just food and water shortages, but also high incidences of malaria and other water-borne diseases. “Food has been rotting in the garden due to floods, and diseases like malaria have caused deaths in families,” says Lagaji farmer Jane Ochira.

Struggling to provide for their families, constantly on the search for food and water, and often battling illness or caring for sick family members, women also suffer from the impact that climate change has on their husbands. According to George Onen, the parish chief for Patira and Pabit in Nwoya district, many women in rural Uganda are subjected to domestic violence due to tensions at home over food shortages and mainly during harvest time. “Poverty and food shortages create fertile ground for conflicts and domestic violence in the home,” he says. “It’s saddening that some men during harvest time, instead of saving the money and preparing for the next farming season, will decide to waste the money on drinking and marrying more women.”

And when the situation becomes too dire to bear, women can find themselves completely alone in the struggle to keep their families fed. When a crop fails due to extreme weather conditions, men will often become “migrants,” leaving for the city to find work and sometimes not returning, according to Maria Mutagamba, minister of water and environment. “They abandon the family when the land is no longer productive to search for work in the city, leaving behind the women suffering with the children.”

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

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.

Syrian Girls Say Building Minds Will Help Build Futures

This article originally appeared on Refugees Deeply and the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis and issues affecting women and girls, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list as well as the Refugees Deeply email list. By Fiona Duggan

Fiona Duggan, of the children’s charity Theirworld, writes about the aspirations of Syrian girls she met in Turkey – a country where more than 60 percent of refugee girls are out of school.

“Education is important because it builds a person’s mind, and the mind will build the future,” says Ethar, a 15-year-old Syrian girl, with a winning smile.

Explaining why going to school is important to her, the teenager, who fled Aleppo with her family four years ago, is unwavering in her conviction. Now living in Gaziantep, Turkey, she attends a school for Syrian refugee children.

This Tuesday was International Day of the Girl – an occasion to commemorate and further acknowledge the importance of girls, their potential and the role they play in building stable and equitable communities. But it is also a time to recognize the barriers they face, devise the means to overcome them, and start putting a plan into action.

Girls and women are subject to unique vulnerabilities in crises and conflicts. Displacement, poverty and the breakdown of built-in familial and social protections can place them at higher risk of sexual abuse, violence, exploitation and psychosocial distress. Conflict often exacerbates poverty, and girls can be pulled out of school or even forced into early marriages to alleviate economic burdens on traditional family structures.

The Syrian refugee crisis is no different. A new briefing paper published by Theirworld highlights an alarming statistic. In Turkey, more than 60 percent of Syrian refugee girls are out of school. This means that more than 370,000 female refugees under 18 years old are at risk of being forced into child labor, early marriage or other forms of exploitation. There has also been a dramatic increase in the number of child marriages – 15 percent of Syrian refugee girls living in Turkey now get married before the age of 18.

I met with Ethar during the second week of October. A keen robotics enthusiast, she enjoys nothing more than tinkering with her robot’s mechanics and programming its every move. She is remarkably eloquent and poised when she talks about education.

“It’s our right … it’s our right to build the future. Building the future needs boys and girls. Without education, girls will not reach their potential, which not only harms them, but also the communities they live in,” she explains, building the logic of her argument with every sentence.

Global education campaigners, including Theirworld, are calling for more to be done to get girls like Ethar into school. The Turkish government has been striving to increase the number of refugees enrolled in school by 50 percent, but more must be done to ensure the international community delivers the $1.4 billion financing – including the $71 million gap Turkey faces – that is desperately needed to enroll all Syrian refugee children, and vulnerable children in host communities, in school by December 2016. That time is fast approaching.

World leaders have promised on a few occasions to ramp up educational commitments, but so far they have failed to deliver on their promises. To keep our promises to children – who are, after all, the architects of our future world – we must keep up the pressure to ensure all Syrian refugee children go back to school, and that they return soon.

But this also means making sure both girls and boys go back to school. Not only is current funding insufficient, the U.N.-led education plan itself fails to acknowledge the gender differences that affect children returning to school.

The plan clearly points out a number of barriers to education, including language constraints, psychosocial support, incentives for teachers, social integration, transportation and access to temporary learning centers. But the lack of a strategic focus on creating equal access for both genders further threatens the futures of Syrian refugee girls, who are left out of education and remain at risk. In order for the humanitarian response to be effective, programs and targeted interventions in countries with large refugee populations such as Turkey must be sensitive to gender-specific needs.

This means we must ask the girls what they want and need. At the same time, we must also improve access to free, quality education for all Syrian refugees, regardless of gender or age.

Farah, a 16-year-old Syrian girl also living in Gaziantep, has faith in the power of education and her female friends.

“Anyone can do anything if they have the will to do it. The world is open to them. Nothing is impossible,” she says. The optimism of girls like Farah who have endured a lifetime’s worth of hardship in the short span of their young lives is remarkable. It must be harnessed.

We as a global community must work together to open the world of education to them. Remember Farah’s words – nothing is impossible.

Images provided by Theirworld, a global children’s charity.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Women & Girls Hub.

Blind Bias: Why More Women Suffer From Preventable Vision Disabilities

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

As the health community marks World Sight Day, women from low- or middle-income countries still make up two-thirds of blind people around the globe – and most of them have a condition that can be cured or prevented.

There are 39 million blind people across the world, and a further 246 million suffering from low vision, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Almost two-thirds are women, the vast majority of them living in low- or middle-income countries.

The WHO says 80 percent of all visual impairment can be prevented or cured with solutions that are relatively easy and low-cost. For example, cataracts, which account for more than half of all cases of blindness, can usually be treated with a 15-minute operation to insert a $2 intraocular lens. But for many blind women, cost is only one of several barriers to diagnosis and treatment.

There is no biological reason for the increased prevalence of vision impairment in women, according to research by the Seva Foundation, a nongovernmental organization that provides eye-care services in over 20 countries. But access to eye healthcare is a major factor.

“In many cultures and regions, within families and the context of communities, blind and vision-impaired women are not considered as important as men to get services,” says Johannes Trimmel, advocacy director of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB). “It’s a question of financing and cost recovery where investment in families is rather going to men and to the younger generation than to women and the older generation.”

Even where surgery is offered for free, getting to the clinics is often a challenge for many vision-impaired women, as is having the information to know that services are available and that their disability is treatable. The Gender and Blindness Initiative, launched in 1983 by the Canadian Global Health Research Initiative, found that the utilization of eye-care services is strongly associated with the socioeconomic status of women and female literacy – an indicator of educational attainment. Highlighting examples from southern India, the Seva Foundation report Gender and Blindness shows that investment in female education improves all aspects of public health, including eye care, and often without having to add to existing health services.

In low-income settings, blindness or low vision can be a disability with severe consequences. In many parts of the world, people who become blind experience a diminishing quality of life, with the loss of independence, mobility and productivity as well as social status and self-esteem. And their families are likewise negatively affected. According to a Nepali proverb, a blind person is a mouth with no hands – someone who needs so much help in their daily lives that their sighted caregiver loses education and employment opportunities.

Despite the potentially massive economic, psychological and social costs of blindness, all eye-care services are reaching only 10 percent of people who need them, says Suzanne Gilbert, Seva Foundation’s cofounder and senior director of Innovations and Sight.

“If you design programs that are inclusive of women, it’s likely to serve everyone who needs them,” she says. “Figuring out how to reach women requires attention to location, affordability – often meaning it has to be free – and quality of care, not just the outcome but also during the process. Are the patients being rushed? Ignored? Or are they being listened to?”

Compounding the impact of gender prejudice in access to healthcare is age discrimination. Over 80 percent of blind people are aged 50 and above. Vision impairment often appears later in life, and in many contexts is accepted as an inevitable part of aging, even when there are solutions. And that discrimination isn’t just about cultural attitudes and the allocation of health resources, it’s present even in the process of data collection. Organizations tracking women’s health stop when the women reach the end of their fertility: Women over 49 years old are ignored in the Demographic and Health Survey and UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey.

“Not being counted in statistics and survey means a denial of and exclusion from information, and prevention and support services,” said Justin Derbyshire, CEO of HelpAge International, a network of organizations working with and for older people, in a recent speech to the WHO.

And then there is the fact that, in many countries, funding is often directed toward health issues that are considered more urgent than loss of vision. As far back as the 1980s, the World Bank identified cataract surgery as one of the most cost-effective interventions that can be offered in low- and middle-income countries. But it also notes that these countries face competing health demands like maternal and child care.

With global demographic trends pointing to progressive and rapid population aging, preventable and treatable blindness will only grow as a pressing health and human rights concern. “We have been working on establishing community-based eye care that can reach all who need it,” says Gilbert. “The key factor is not to approach this as a charity, but to provide quality eye-care services for those who are able to pay, and subsidize those who can’t.”

Later this month, IAPB will hold its general assembly, which takes place every four years. Trimmel hopes it will provide an opportunity to address head-on the barriers that women face. “It’s not just the ophthalmologists, it’s not just the service centers, the community health workers, the people working on education or equality generally,” he says. “It needs structures and people to work well together for women to have equal access to eye care.”

Forced Marriage and Rape: The Legacy of the Khmer Rouge on Trial

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 Nina Teggarty

In Cambodia, the U.N.-backed Khmer Rouge tribunal hears from survivors of forced marriage, but critics say the court should also cover other acts of gender-based violence.

“I just couldn’t understand why falling in love was a crime,” says Youk Chhang, executive director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, an organization that records atrocities that took place under the Khmer Rouge. From 1975–79, Pol Pot’s brutal regime devastated Cambodia, and an estimated 1.7 million people died from starvation or disease, or were executed.

The Khmer Rouge, known as the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK), controlled every part of people’s lives, even love and sexuality. Chhang was only 15 when he witnessed the Khmer Rouge killing a couple because “they fell in love without permission.” To make sure Cambodians married the “right” people, namely those who were loyal to the party, the CPK forced men and women to marry each other.

Survivors of forced marriage are currently giving testimony in Case 002/02, the latest trial to take place at the Khmer Rouge tribunal in Phnom Penh, otherwise known as the Extraordinary Chambers in the Court of Cambodia (ECCC). Evidence of forced marriage will be used to determine if senior leaders of the regime committed crimes against humanity.

The Khmer Rouge used forced marriage to exact ultimate control over relationships, as couples were expected to procreate and produce the next generation of party adherents. No one knows how many people were forcibly married by “Angkar” (the communist party), but mass wedding ceremonies, some consisting of more than 100 couples, took place across Cambodia.

Survivors appearing before the court have described how the regime pressured them to marry. “I refused [to marry] several times, but finally the sector committee said I was a stubborn person,” Sa Lay Hieng said in court. Scared of being killed, Hieng was coerced into marrying a man she did not like. Another witness, who was granted anonymity, said she was made to marry a Khmer Rouge officer in a collective ceremony; when she refused his advances on their wedding night, her new spouse complained to his commander, who then raped her. “I had to bite my lip and shed my tears, but I didn’t dare to make any noise, because I was afraid I would be killed,” she said. She was eventually led back to her husband.

The final testimonies relating to forced marriage will be heard in the coming weeks. But some experts argue that other heinous sexual crimes committed during the Khmer Rouge era, such as rape outside of forced marriage, have been overlooked by the court.

In a study by the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, an NGO that provides counseling to victims appearing before the court, a third of female interviewees witnessed rape outside forced marriage. This finding is echoed by the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has collected a “significant number of documents” detailing at least 156 cases of rape by Khmer Rouge comrades in cooperatives and detention centers. “The women who were raped were accused of having served in the CIA, KGB or other enemies of Angkar, and taken to be smashed [killed],” said Youk Chhang of the Documentation Center.

Farina So, an expert in gender-based violence perpetrated by the Communist Party of Kampuchea, says that “hundreds and hundreds” of rapes occurred, adding that cadres “used it as a tool to victimize women, to silence them.” In the course of her research, So has interviewed numerous survivors of sexual assault; one of these women, Tang Kim, was considered “an enemy of Angkar” and in 1976 was rounded up – along with eight other women – and readied for execution in Kampong Chhnang province, central Cambodia. While Kim awaited her fate, she could hear the other women being raped and then murdered – “I was terrified to see people being killed off and buried one by one” – recalls Kim in a film made by the Cambodian Documentation Center. She continues, “I saw a Khmer Rouge soldier slashing a woman’s abdomen; they cut it open and took out the fetus.” After being gang-raped by the soldiers, Kim managed to escape and went into hiding.

According to So, Kim tried to submit her civil party application to the Khmer Rouge tribunal, but it was rejected because prosecutors are addressing only sexual abuse within forced marriage. It was, says So, a decision that “really disappointed” Kim and other rape survivors, many of whom have spent decades summoning up the courage to speak about their ordeal.

When Women & Girls Hub approached the Khmer Rouge tribunal to ask why the current trial is focusing exclusively on forced marriage, the court’s spokesperson, Lars Olsen, said co-investigating judges had concluded that rape outside forced marriage was not an official policy of the Khmer Rouge. He pointed to this statement from the tribunal: “Those who were accused of ‘immoral’ behavior, including rape, were often re-educated or killed [so] it cannot be considered that rape was one of the crimes used by CPK leaders to implement the common purpose.”

The survivors and their lawyers, who campaigned for years to have forced marriage added to the list of crimes prosecuted in court, are waiting for the expected judgment in late 2017.

Girls Take a Place at the Table to Discuss U.N.’s 2030 Agenda

This article originally appeared Oct. 12 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

The U.N.'s Sustainable Development Goals promise gender equality, but a panel marking the International Day of the Girl agreed that achieving the goals requires monitoring and active participation by girls to make sure governments deliver.

In Geneva, there was no missing the fact that yesterday was International Day of the Girl. Various U.N. offices usually reserved for dignitaries, like those of the director-general and the UNICEF Geneva liaison, were taken over by girls, while a flash mob of young women and their supporters gathered at the Place des Nations in front of the square’s iconic statue of a giant three-legged chair.

To mark the day, Plan International organized a panel featuring young activists from Zambia and Germany, U.N. officials, and Colombia’s ambassador, to discuss how girls fit into the U.N.’s 2030 agenda.

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted in September 2015, comprises 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 169 associated targets for people, planet and prosperity. According to Alfonso Barragues, director of the U.N. Population Fund in Geneva, the main difference between the SDGs and the Millennium Development Goals, which were set out in 2000 with a 2015 deadline, is “a paradigm change.”

“The MDGs were an aid contract between developed and developing countries,” Barragues told the panel. “The SDGs are a social contract, so it’s an agenda for girls and their generation.” Panel members agreed that a key tool in carrying out that agenda is data.

The fifth SDG specifically aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls. Speaking on the panel, Ngandu, a young woman from Zambia, laid out the prejudices she faces every day. “To be a girl in Zambia is to be a second-class citizen,” she said. “People believe that boys are more knowledgeable than girls.”

“Girls face human rights challenges that are enormous, massive, but their situation is essentially invisible,” Barragues told Women & Girls Hub. “This is an invisibility that takes place in front of our eyes.”

As part of the panel, Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen, CEO of Plan International, said that “the invisible girl is the first barrier to be broken.” Plan International’s new report, “Counting the Invisible,” shows how data not only reflects gender differences and inequalities, but also provides girls and those advocating for their rights a useful tool to demand accountability. “The SDGs are not a framework but a promise,” said Albrectsen. “Promises need to be monitored. Everyone needs to hold their governments to account.”

Barragues referred to data as a fundamental tool, saying, “Emphasis on data would kill several birds with one stone: for planning, evidence-based advocacy and ultimately strengthening the social movements of girls.”

After an audience member commented on the difficulties in addressing the needs of sex-trafficking victims, the panel moderator, U.N. Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Kate Gilmore, noted the challenge of giving attention to both data and the voices of those whose experiences it aims to quantify.

“We can’t measure everything. At the end of the day, we have to address the root causes, not just the symptoms, which are easier to measure,” said Barragues. “Social norms and attitudes that come from patriarchal views that women are inferior, these create the power imbalances that put girls at a disadvantage.”

Gender bias is ingrained in the measurement process, resulting not only in the lack of data but even in “bad” data, write contributors Mayra Buvinic and Ruth Levine in “Counting the Invisible.” One consequence is that data can misrepresent reality so that women appear more dependent and less productive than they actually are, which in turn influences policy decisions.

In addition to the importance of gathering better data, the panel also discussed investing in quality education and facilitating active participation by girls in policy discussions as keys to empowerment. Speakers both on the panel and in the audience noted that a solution to gender inequity can only be achieved with the participation of boys and men.

“We should empower women, but we can’t leave men behind,” said Luca, a young woman from Germany on the panel. “We rise, and we take them with us.”

Barragues said there are promising efforts to involve men in the process of empowering women and girls. He points to the International Geneva Gender Champions, an initiative launched by the U.N. Office at Geneva and the United States Mission to the U.N.

“These are heads of agencies and organizations and ambassadors committing to advancing gender equality in the work of the international community in Geneva,” he said. “For example, the initiative promotes panel parity at those events organized by the U.N. There are over 150 champions already mobilized, including the high commissioner for human rights. In fact, the majority are men, which is helpful to promote men’s engagement on gender equality, but is also telling in terms of who holds rank. Ultimately, we are striving to see parity in all areas.”

Carolyn Miles: Without a Gender Equity Shift We Won’t Reach SDGs

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 Flora Bagenal

On International Day of the Girl, Save the Children has released a report detailing the five worst parts of the world to be young and female. Carolyn Miles, CEO of the organization, reveals their plans to ensure a brighter future for young girls in the developing world.

One girl under the age of 15 is married every seven seconds, according to a report published today by Save the Children. Based on indicators such as rates of child marriage, teen pregnancy and the likelihood of dropping out of school, the report also outlines the best and worst places in the world to be a girl. Niger sits at the bottom of the list, closely followed by Chad, Central African Republic, Mali and Somalia. The best place in the world to be a girl? Sweden.

The study, released to coincide with the International Day of the Girl, takes a closer look at the impact of early marriage and early pregnancy on the outcomes of girls’ lives, and calls on the international community to do more to ensure girls in developing countries have the chance to enjoy a childhood.

While the findings of the report once again highlight slow progress on girls’ rights globally, Carolyn Miles, president and CEO of Save the Children, says there is still reason to be optimistic. Real change, she says, is happening in areas where it once seemed impossible. Women & Girls Hub spoke to Miles about setting tough targets for tackling these issues over the next 15 years.

Women & Girls Hub: What has changed for girls’ rights since you started working in this field?

Carolyn Miles: I’ve been working on these issues for a really long time and I think the good thing is that you do see real progress in some countries in terms of the equity for girls. I’ll give you an example. I was in Mali about 18 months ago and I visited a school there. First of all, they had a headmistress not a headmaster, which is fantastic because these girls really need role models. Then when I asked her who the stars of the school were, she said we could go and meet them, and they were three girls. Ten years ago, that would not have been the case in the sixth grade. We would be lucky if there were girls in the sixth grade let alone the star students. So you do see progress and you do see change, but the disparities are still really great, which is what this report is all about.

Women & Girls Hub: What do you find most frustrating about the lack of progress for young girls?

Miles: I guess what’s disappointing is that a lot of it is not about policy. I was just in Bangladesh. Bangladesh has a policy that no girls get married under the age of 18, and yet a third of girls get married before they are 18. So obviously this isn’t about policies.

A lot of the time it is about changing behavior and it’s about convincing families to value girls as highly as they value boys. That’s why one of the things we looked at in this study is women in the highest level of government. Women in those position are more likely to change policy, but they are also role models, so families see women can be leaders, and that starts to change the way people value girls.

We’re not just trying to name and shame countries for this report – we show the report to the countries in the worst position in advance of publishing it. But what we want is to work with these countries to change the situation.

Women & Girls Hub: What can Save the Children and other international organizations do to improve things for the girls featured in this report?

Miles: We have set our sights really high for children by 2030. We want no child under five to die of preventable disease. Every child should be in school and get a basic education, and we want to change the way the world thinks about violence against children. If you look at those goals, the only way we are going to get there is if we look at the children who are worst off in all those places. The children who are worst off in health, in education and in protection. Girls are at the end of the line on most of those issues.

Women & Girls Hub: Do you think global attitudes toward girls are changing?

Miles: I do. I think a big turning point, if you look at the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), the issue of equity is a huge part of it, specifically about gender. Not only is there a specific goal about gender, but in all those 17 goals there is a huge amount of work around equity and a big recognition that, if we don’t get a gender equity shift, we will never reach any of those goals.

Women & Girls Hub: Can it get depressing when you find yourself facing such hugely ambitious targets?

Miles: I think the only way you can approach this job is looking at the glass as if it is half full. If you look at child survival, to me that is one of the most exciting pieces of progress we have made. In 1990, you had 12 million kids who died of preventable diseases and now you have under 6 million. That’s 25 years; that’s in our lifetime.

So why not be ambitious and say, if we can do that in 25 years then we can save the last 6 million in 15 years? We know exactly where those kids live, we know what they are dying of. It’s not about not knowing; it is about changing behavior. [Changing attitudes toward girls] is really hard because it is getting to the core of people’s beliefs and changing the way people think. It’s not easy to do and it will take some time, but things are changing and we have to hold on to that.

The names of the girls in the photos have been changed to protect their identities.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shining a Light on Invisible Girls and Women: Why Gender Data Matters

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 Zahra Sethna

On International Day of the Girl, girls are demonstrating their ability to change the world. Yet more needs to be done to make all girls visible, including gathering meaningful data about their lives, writes Plan International’s Zahra Sethna.

It’s hard to ignore a girl like Masline. An 18-year-old student at a school just outside of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, she is smart, confident and determined. Talking about her hobbies makes her smile. She loves to write poetry and is especially inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello.

Masline is a great example of what happens when girls are empowered to reach their potential. She sailed through her secondary school exams with top marks, and once she finishes her current course of study she would like to become a teacher and act as a role model for other girls.

The sad truth, however, is that around the world there are millions of girls who don’t have the opportunity to fulfill their dreams like Masline.

In a recent qualitative research study of vulnerable girls in Zimbabwe, 81 percent of the 121 girls Plan International spoke to said that at one point or another they had to drop out of school, either temporarily or permanently. Most of the time this was because they couldn’t afford tuition and school fees. Once out of school, they said it was hard to go back and doubly hard to fight off the pressure they faced to get married and lessen the financial strain on their families.

When girls drop out of school and get married as children, they often become invisible to governments and policymakers because their realities are not being captured in official data and statistics. They become much easier to overlook and more vulnerable to abuse, exploitation and violence.

The plight of invisible girls is the focus of our new report, “Counting the Invisible,” which makes the case that improved data on the barriers facing girls and women is essential to achieve true equality.

How Data Can Help

Just having more data will not make all the difference to these girls. Data alone can’t change the world, but when data is collected and analyzed in the right way, they certainly can help make change possible. The insights it reveals can help inform policy and program choices. It can identify needs and challenges and help lead us to the groups of people who face the biggest barriers to realizing their rights, such as rural communities, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. It can provide the evidence advocates need to press for change. And it can show us what works and what does not, so we can be sure to invest in the solutions that really transform lives.

Here’s an example: Let’s say a municipality wants to address the barriers girls face in getting to school. The municipality puts public transportation options in place so girls don’t have to walk long distances, and then it measures how many girls have access to that public transportation. Still, the problem persists – many girls still walk long distances or fail to attend school.

What this municipality failed to do was talk to the girls themselves to fully understand the challenges they face. If they had done some qualitative research, they might have learned that many girls are afraid for their safety in public. In Nicaragua, 65 percent of the girls we spoke to said they do not feel safe on public transportation and 59 percent do not feel safe walking on their own in public places. If girls don’t feel safe riding the bus or walking by themselves in public, having access to public transportation has little meaning in their lives.

When data reveals the scope and scale of an issue, it becomes harder for policymakers to avoid taking action.

That much-needed context is one part of the problem. Sparse data is another. For example, a lack of data on how much time women spend on unpaid household work has led to a misguided impression that women in developing countries have free time to spend on training programs or other well-intentioned community development interventions. When built on an inaccurate assumption of how much time women can afford to spend participating, these interventions often see high dropout rates and low returns on investment.

When data reveals the scope and scale of an issue, it becomes harder for policymakers to avoid taking action. Advocacy efforts in Kiribati, a small island nation in the Pacific Ocean, led the government to conduct its first study on violence against women and children in 2008. Until then, gender-based violence was considered an issue to be dealt with in private. There were no policies or laws in place and little clarity as to how police were expected to respond.

When the results of the study were released in 2010, the nation was shocked to learn that nearly 70 percent of women who had ever been partnered said they had experienced physical and/or sexual violence by an intimate partner. On the back of these findings, some significant legal and social changes were made. This included a new national law, training for police and healthcare providers, changes to school curricula to teach children about respectful relationships and gender equality, services for survivors of violence, and special police units trained to deal with domestic violence. Data can, as this example shows, be a powerful force for change.

That’s why Plan International has joined with a group of like-minded partners to develop an independent measure to track progress for girls and women from now until 2030. This new initiative will produce an assessment that aims to become the leading source of information for advocates, activists, governments, civil society partners and others working to achieve gender equality.

By measuring and monitoring progress and gaps for girls and women, partners will hold governments and other stakeholders accountable for delivering on the commitments they have made. Partners will also complement existing data with original qualitative and perceptions data that more fully reflects girls’ and women’s realities and highlights their right to influence decisions affecting their lives.

The partnership has a simple vision: a world in which every girl and woman counts and is counted. A world in which every girl can, like Masline, learn, lead their own lives, make decisions about their future and, ultimately, thrive.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Women & Girls Hub.

Anjali Sarker: Girls Have to ‘Break the Barriers in Ourselves’

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

From cultural curse to social entrepreneur, Bangladeshi innovator Anjali Sarker is determined to cut through caste and gender to allow people at “the bottom of the pyramid” to rise to their potential.

Anjali Sarker remembers her seventh birthday well, because it was the day her parents brought home the best present possible – a baby sister who she decided was “a little angel.” But Sarker’s delight soon turned to distress when she overheard an uncle giving his condolences to her father about the birth of this “curse” – another girl instead of a treasured boy.

As she got older, Sarker used her uncle’s comment to drive her determination to enter the male-dominated world of business. She lobbied her parents to let her attend Bangladesh’s top business school, despite their pleas for her to follow the path most parents wanted for their girls, becoming a nurse or primary-school teacher.

But Sarker persisted and by the age of 20, she had been featured in Forbes magazine for one of her innovations: Toilet+, a startup that installs eco toilets in the homes of the rural poor and pays people for the solid waste they collect. In a country where many children die of diarrheal diseases, Sarker knew that encouraging more hygienic toilet habits could save lives.

Since then, she’s been collecting accolades and awards for her work with social businesses and she’s currently a Global Shaper at the World Economic Forum. She has channeled her dislike of hierarchies into a youth news network, Campus2Career, aimed at students who struggle to find business news and career advice beyond the civil service. And for her day job, she is team leader at BRAC, managing other young innovators.

Women & Girls Hub caught up with Sarker in Nairobi, where she was speaking as an Aspen Institute New Voices Fellow, to ask her about breaking down prejudices and breaking up all-male panels at conferences.

Women & Girls Hub: What were some of the challenges you faced getting to where you are today?

Anjali Sarker: When I was working in my enterprise, I had to tell my parents, “I’m not working on anything, it’s just my university assignments,” when in reality I had to go to places.

When I was meeting the investors, they asked me the same questions, in a very derogatory manner. They were like, “You are 20 and you are asking for money – do you even have a bank account?” If you want to discriminate [against] a woman, you can find a hundred reasons to stop her from doing what she’s doing.

Women & Girls Hub: How did you overcome the prejudices you mentioned in Bangladeshi society, such as people judging you by your age, gender and social status?

Sarker: You need to have a strategy. From a very young age, my father taught me how to play chase and even though I’m a grown-up and I don’t play chase anymore, I really cherish the idea that it’s a game. If somehow plan A fails, you have plan B and you execute that. That’s how I save myself from frustrations.

Women & Girls Hub: Do you get a lot of emails or calls from girls wanting to know how you cracked the business world?

Sarker: It’s a super-funny question because I get more messages from men, who say, “I‘m very inspired and you’re so articulate. How can I be like you?” And I say: I wish more girls said this!

When you speak at conferences, you see only 20 percent of the audience are girls and the rest are men. No wonder I’m getting more messages from the men. The girls are still inside their houses. So it’s the boys who do the projects, who go outside, who take part in different things.

It’s not in our blood that we have to stay inside the house, but it’s the culture. It’s very linear: You be a good girl. You get married. You have a family. Those are the success metrics for women. I haven’t seen anyone telling a girl child, “You have to earn money, you have to be independent.” Rather, the mother tells the girl, “Buy this dress, make sure your makeup is perfect.” No one is telling that to a boy, so a boy is thinking of how to progress in his career.

Women & Girls Hub: How do you see things changing for the younger generation?

Sarker: If I think about my mother, she never traveled abroad. She just stayed in the same job. I will not do that. It’s changing gradually. Now girls and women have a lot more options. They’re doing more. They’re coming out of their houses. Progress is slow but it’s happening.

Women & Girls Hub: And you’re breaking up “manels”?

Sarker: Yes, I hate those! I organize a conference on innovation every year, and this is my biggest pain and my biggest pleasure – that I ensure there will be no panel without a woman. I try to ensure that it’s 50/50, if not 60/40, but at least one woman.

Women & Girls Hub: What is the idea behind Campus2Career?

Sarker: It’s a new portal for the youth across the country, but it’s not for the elite universities. It talks about a lot of different youth news issues and helps young people make the smooth transition from student life to career opportunities. We are trying to promote non-traditional professions to them, telling them they don’t have to only run after government jobs. They can do entrepreneurship; they can be a sportsperson if they want to. They don’t have to study economics or business or the most sought-after subjects, but they can study literature and be a journalist.

These people feel they don’t have options, because no one has ever told them they do. People who are studying in top universities; they know how to find information from Harvard Business Review. A person hundreds of miles from the capital doesn’t know enough English to use Google and find that. So we are really making things simple for them, in our native Bangla – we don’t use English. We are really focusing on the bottom of the pyramid and seeing how we can give them the most useful information possible.

Women & Girls Hub: What do you say to other girls who want to get into business and are being told they can’t?

Sarker: Don’t be afraid. Once we get the courage to do it, we can do it all. My organs have nothing to do with business, so whatever a man can do, I can do that, too. But all the difference is in our mindset: that I think a man will do better than me, so I stand back. I think before breaking the other barriers, the institutional ones, and talking to other people, we have to break the barriers in ourselves.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

In bid to aid homeless women, New York passes bill requiring shelters to provide tampons

I'll be 100 percent honest: Until this week, this issue never even crossed my mind. It never dawned on me that homeless women face the same monthly period as every other woman in the world. In the following story, Kailah Willcuts gives her testimony on how being on her "time of the month" only exacerbated the everyday struggles of homelessness. Her words moved me. She opened my eyes to a widespread issue facing millions of American women; an issue that isn't discussed enough.

Now, we need to work together to support these homeless women. We need local, state and federal law to recognize the risks and shame that homeless women face and to take measurable steps to aid their health. Stand with me and stand up for them.

-Victoria Mendoza

nytlive.nytimes.com - For the 50,000 homeless women living in the U.S., having their period is more than an inconvenience. Lacking access to sanitary pads or even a place to shower, homeless women are often forced to improvise by using socks, paper towels, plastic bags, or even their limited clothing items.

“Not only is it terrible, but it’s also embarrassing,” admitted Kailah Willcuts, 27, who said she had been homeless for more than eight years. “Not to mention that now you have this stain on your pants. I only have the clothes that I’m wearing, so I’m standing there half naked, bloodied, you know, washing my clothes out.”

As far as dealing with her period goes, things might be getting easier for Willcuts. New York City, where Willcuts currently resides, recently became the first city in the country to require public schools, jails, and homeless shelters to provide free pads and tampons.

“You shouldn’t have to decide between a pad and having lunch,” said Council Member Julissa Ferreras-Copeland, who helped champion the legislation. “It’s about dignity and women understanding that there is absolutely nothing wrong with this process. Once we take the taboo away from this product, then we are really empowering women.”

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In Jordan, Women More Vulnerable to Effects of Extremism, Says Report

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 Flora Bagenal

As Jordan struggles with rising extremism, a new U.N. report suggests women are much more vulnerable than men to the effects of radicalization, such as an increase in domestic violence and being blamed if their children join an extremist group.

Since the war started in Syria in 2011, neighboring Jordan has shouldered the burden that comes with being one of the countries closest to the crisis. Over 635,000 Syrian refugees have settled in Jordan since the conflict started, putting enormous strain on its resources and infrastructure.

Jordan is also the third-largest contributor of fighters to ISIS, the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, after Tunisia and Saudi Arabia, and the country has seen a significant rise in support for the group back home. In early 2015, researchers estimated ISIS and other jihadi groups had about 9,000 to 10,000 Jordanian supporters.

As in many other countries facing the threat of radicalization, Jordan’s government has announced plans to tackle violent ideology, putting in place increased security measures and launching a nationwide counter-extremism project that targets radical preachers and young men thought to be at risk of indoctrination.

But research published by U.N. Women in July suggests women could be equally or even more affected by radicalization than men in Jordan, both as victims and perpetrators. The report, based on 47 interviews and focus-group discussions with a cross-section of Jordanian society, calls for more research into the role of women in radicalization. It says much more needs to be done to include them in counter-extremism work.

“People of all different beliefs overwhelmingly said that while men get radicalized, women are more at risk of the effects of radicalization,” says Rachel Dore-Weeks, a peacebuilding expert for U.N. Women in Jordan who coordinated the research. The effects include a rise in violence at home, increased restrictions on women’s movements and a greater risk of being coerced into sharing or spreading radicalized views.

Dore-Weeks says 87 percent of those surveyed said women are at risk of suffering the effects of radicalization, with 71 percent saying women face a bigger risk than men. Until now radicalization has been framed much more in terms of the security implications and the risk it poses to young men, rather than the wider effect it can have on communities in general.

“People said when they had experienced living in communities where there was a rise in radicalization, either via people in Jordan or people going to fight in Syria and Iraq and coming home, they saw those communities getting much more conservative and much more insular,” says Dore-Weeks. “As a result, where women had been eking out freedoms and breaking gender norms little by little, they were really pushed back.”

In cases where fighters have returned from the front line, respondents reported a rise in incidents of domestic abuse at home and said women could be banned from leaving the house, taking public transport or voicing opinions in public.

It was also reported that when young men or women become radicalized, their mothers are often blamed by society and feel more responsible for their children’s behavior, putting them under more pressure from their communities.

Several women interviewed for the report admitted they feared they could be unwittingly pushing their children to become radicalized. “I always encourage my son to pray, because I believe … religion makes you able to differentiate right from wrong,” one unnamed woman said. “However, even though I respect being religiously committed, lately my son has been taking things a bit too far.” The woman told researchers she saw changes in her son’s behavior, including a new, more extremist attitude toward his sisters, that made her think he might be joining ISIS.

While researchers for the report were unable to speak to women who had been radicalized themselves, several respondents reported knowing women who had been radicalized or targeted by extremists. Often, they said, women were recruited because of their role as “influencers” in the home. While some reported women being targeted online, others said women could be targeted at female-only religious study groups.

The reasons respondents gave for women potentially becoming radicalized were similar to those for men, including financial pressures, lack of prospects, and religious conviction. It was also said women could be persuaded to join ISIS or other radical groups as a way to escape domestic abuse or because of a divorce or other difficult situation at home.

Nikita Malik, head of research at the U.K.-based counter-extremism think tank the Quilliam Foundation, (which was not involved in the report) says counter-radicalization experts have in the past overlooked how important women are to groups like ISIS, reducing their role to that of wife or mother when, in fact, they are highly valuable to recruiters.

“Islamic extremist groups like ISIS are effective because they are made up of a web of networks and women play a key role in that network,” she says, adding that women are needed to bring up children already indoctrinated into the group, to communicate messages within the community, and to uphold a sense of sisterhood, adding legitimacy to the idea of an Islamic caliphate.

Malik says understanding this is key to involving women in de-radicalization work. “In Jordan, we need to see women deployed more as agents of change,” she says. “When a young person is at risk of being radicalized, they won’t turn to an M.P. or an academic – they will turn to a neighbor or a mother or a friend.

“We have to train this level of potentially powerful women to enact de-radicalization.”

Some of that work is already underway, triggered by the U.N. Women report, including a pilot project in universities to create safe spaces for young men and women to talk about radicalization and voice concerns about people they know.

U.N. Women is also in talks with the Jordanian government about approaching female imams to work with the community on countering violent extremism.

And Dore-Weeks says the organization hopes to carry out more detailed research on what drives both men and women into the arms of extremists.

“It’s much more complex than saying it is angry young men who don’t have jobs,” she says. “For the most part it appears to be middle-class people who are being targeted or traveling to [Syria and Iraq] to fight. For them, it is about ideology, it is about fighting a sense of injustice.”

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.

7 ‘Nasty’ Women Who Changed the World

"Well-behaved women rarely make history." - Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

I want to be a 'nasty woman' when I grow up. If groundbreaking, inspiring, passionate women are nasty, then that's exactly what I want to be! For a brief moment, I ask you to place your political viewpoints aside and simply appreciate the many women who worked for a brighter future. They faced opposition. They were ridiculed, discouraged and often disowned by those close to them. Yet they fought for their 'nasty' unconventional ideas and went against the grain for something they believed in. No matter where you stand in politics, shouldn't we all stand with those who wish to change the world?

Click through to read the full list of "nasty" women who made a difference. 

-Victoria Mendoza

viralwomen.com - Whatever their chosen field – from politics and popstardom to fashion and feminism – women have been leaving their mark on the world since time began.

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the world “nasty” as “indecent and offensive.” And women like Clinton — independent, driven, and hell-bent on changing history — have been defined as such for decades. It seems that men decide women who want to make a different are just plain nasty.

This is a list of strong women who did their part, both big and small, to make the world a better place.

1. Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony was raised in a Quaker family with deep roots in activism and social justice and became an advocate for women’s suffrage, women’s property rights and the abolition of slavery. In 1872, to challenge suffrage, Anthony tried to vote in the 1872 Presidential election. While Anthony was never able to legally vote, the 19th amendment, ratified in 1920, was named the “Susan B. Anthony Amendment.”

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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.

Kudos and a Curse: Meet the Savior of Girls in Samburu

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

Josephine Kulea has saved over 1,000 girls in Kenya from forced marriage and the female genital mutilation that usually precedes it. Her work has earned praise from Barack Obama, but she says politicians back home won't support her work in case it loses them votes.

NAIROBI, Kenya – Her face has been plastered across billboards in New York and London and she was lauded by U.S. President Barack Obama on his visit to Kenya. But Josephine Kulea sees herself as still very much a grassroots activist. She works with communities in the area where she grew up, saving girls as young as seven from forced marriage, female genital mutilation (FGM) and either being pulled out of school or never getting the chance to go. Despite national laws banning child marriage and FGM, in Samburu culture, girls can be matched to men old enough to be their grandparents, and polygamy is common.

Once cursed to death by her family for breaking up a marriage between her uncle and a seven-year-old cousin, Kulea, 30, now runs the charity The Samburu Girls Foundation, which, to date, has stopped over 1,000 girls across four counties from marrying young and missing their education. Women & Girls Hub spoke to her about how it all started with her mother and why she became the target of a death curse.

Women & Girls Hub: How did you start helping girls?

Josephine Kulea: I was following in my mom’s footsteps. My mom also fights for girls to go to school within my community because she was taken out of high school to become my dad’s third wife.

Women & Girls Hub: What about your childhood?

Kulea: I finished school but every holiday when I came home there was a new [potential] husband who wanted to marry me. My uncles wanted to marry me off because my dad passed away when I was young. Everyone was over 45 or in their 50s. I was 12, 13, 14, 15. But my mom fought for me.

After I finished school I went to nursing college and came back to work in my village. The first two girls I rescued were my own cousins. The first was a 10-year-old who was supposed to be getting married. Then two days later I got a call to say the same man, my uncle, was going to marry the youngest girl in the family who was just seven years old. She had to go through FGM on the day of the wedding. She got married and two days later we went to get her and arrest my uncle, and that became history in my village. They even had a big meeting to curse me [to death] because it was considered a very bad thing to do.

Women & Girls Hub: How did you feel when you heard about the curse?

Kulea: I knew I was not in the wrong because I was just protecting child rights. I continued getting calls from women from the same village to rescue more girls. I paid their fees with my nursing salary. It was less than $200 a month. I spent almost everything [on the girls’ education] because you have to buy uniforms and books and pens.

Women & Girls Hub: How did the Samburu Girls Foundation come about?

Kulea: In 2012 we started the organization, registering it and making it official like an NGO, so now we can ask people for money. We are now reaching out to four counties – Samburu, Marsabit, Isiolo and Laikipia. The community has donated 15 acres of land. That’s where our girls stay, we have a dormitory and dining room. Safaricom [Kenya’s largest mobile phone company] is coming to build us classrooms soon and we hope to eventually have a fully fledged school because we’re spending a lot of money on taking these girls to schools across the country.

Women & Girls Hub: How many girls have you helped?

Kulea: We’ve rescued over 1,000 girls. We have 300 girls who are directly under our organizational support. When we rescue these girls, the families normally are bitter because they are missing out on the dowry. It is sometimes up to one year until the girls are accepted back [by their families]. We talk to the parents and counsel them and the girls. Eventually we reunite them. Some parents lie to us. They really want to marry them off again, so we tell the girls that they can always come back to us, they can call us and also they become our eyes in the village and they make sure their own sisters, cousins and neighbors are not going through the same thing.

Women & Girls Hub: Is there any sign parents are starting to value educating girls?

Kulea: The problem we have is the villages in these areas have been marginalized for so long. The illiteracy levels are so high: In Samburu county it’s 80 percent. Such communities have yet to understand the value of educating girls.

Women & Girls Hub: The culture of ‘beading’ – when men give young girls beads to “book” them for sex – is this changing?

Kulea: It is dying out around the cities because more people there have embraced education. But there are a few other areas where it is still very common and as much as we try to spread awareness that it’s wrong, people feel it’s still part of our culture. Some girls feel it makes them beautiful because someone has given them these beads.

Women & Girls Hub: What was it like getting mentioned by Obama?

Kulea: It was awesome! It felt nice because sometimes you work so hard, do a lot of work and you think you’re hidden in the bush and no one notices. We are yet to get those shout-outs from the local or county government.

Pushing to Put Women and Girls at the Center of Development

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 Eline Gordts

As world leaders gather in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, Katja Iversen, president and CEO of Women Deliver, says that gender should be at the forefront of the development conversation.

One year ago, during the 2015 U.N. General Assembly, world leaders adopted the Sustainable Development Goals: 17 targets to help end poverty, fight inequality and injustice, and tackle climate change by 2030. This year, as global leaders meet to debate how to make that ambitious agenda a reality, Women Deliver argues that gender should be at the forefront of the conversation.

On Wednesday, the international advocacy organization officially kicked off Deliver for Good, its campaign to transform the way the development community looks at women and girls – from powerless victims to agents for change – and to push stakeholders to apply a gender lens to the Sustainable Development Goals. Nine organizations, including Business for Social Responsibility, Landesa and Plan International, have signed on to the campaign.

Women & Girls Hub spoke with Katja Iversen, president and CEO of Women Deliver, about Deliver for Good’s approach and goals on the sidelines of a panel discussion hosted by the organization in New York.

Women & Girls Hub: Why is putting women and girls at the center of the Sustainable Development Goals so important?

Katja Iversen: The philosophy of the campaign is that we need to invest in women and girls if we want to see positive change happen in the world. While some people may find that obvious, apparently it’s not.

We need to focus on them, their needs and their opportunities. The Sustainable Development Goals are a fabulous opportunity. Every single country in the world has to make national plans, so why not use this opportunity to really place women and girls at the center of them. They should be a focus in health, education and economic development plans.

We do anything we can to put girls and women in the driver’s seat and also showcase, with evidence, how they are the change agents. That evidence is rolling in. Studies by McKinsey & Company explained during the panel have shown that it economically pays off to invest in women and girls.

Women & Girls Hub: The Deliver for Good campaign cuts across sectors and focuses on “the whole woman.” Please expand on those ideas.

Iversen: It’s important because it’s the most efficient. We’re not a body part. I’m not identified by a sickness or by my age. We’re whole people. Why build a clinic for nutrition advice, a separate clinic for HIV and one for family planning? It’s a holistic approach that looks at people as whole people and not as however an organization wants to define them.

It’s also efficient funding-wise. It’s not as if we live in an abundant world, so why not do it the best way? Let’s come up with some smart solutions that bring it together.

Women & Girls Hub: Peder Michael Pruzan-Jorgensen, the senior vice president of Business for Social Responsibility, explained during the panel discussion that in many parts of the private sector, the development of women and girls is still a foreign language. What are some of the crucial things that can be done to make it part of their language?

Iversen: Make it easy, and make it economically viable and desirable.

Showcase the evidence that proves that investing in women and girls will lead to growth for the company. I met with the CEO of Sony yesterday, and he said that investing in women, whether at the assembly line or in boardrooms, has paid off. He said that with the evidence there is now, he wouldn’t be a responsible manager if he didn’t invest in women.

It’s also important for us to get into the fora where people like him are. Make the communities come together. At the Women Deliver conference, we brought together 65 business leaders. We also worked with BSR to develop a book – a toolkit, basically – that explains how to approach this, whether you’re a small, medium or multinational company.

Women & Girls Hub: That ties into an interesting insight Peder brought up – that just targeting the multinationals is not enough, because those big companies are not the main employers that women and girls in the developing world interact with.

Iversen: Exactly. The biggest growth in employment is in small- and middle-sized companies. If those companies apply a gender lens and break down some of the gender barriers and prejudices, that’s where the growth in the female workforce will come from.

Women & Girls Hub: Plan International CEO Anne-Birgitte Albrectsen noted today that in the areas where her organization works, the needle hasn’t moved much when it comes to the lived reality for women and girls. How can we speed up actual change in women and girls’ lives? How can we go from amazing goals to implementation?

Iversen: I’m a pragmatist. Let’s look at who’s out on the front line, the organizations that are working in the field. We need to push so that those people and organizations deciding the reality put gender central, do more and get the opportunity to do more by receiving funding for what they do well.

The U.N. works with governments, that’s their job, but we want to push in the same direction across sectors, with everyone who touches upon the lives of girls and women.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Women’s Refugee Commission: Protecting Female Refugees Is Essential

This article originally appeared on Refugees Deeply and the Women & Girls Hub of News Deeply, and you can find the original here. For important news about the global migration crisis and issues affecting women and girls, you can sign up to the Women & Girls Hub email list as well as the Refugees Deeply email list. By Preethi Nallu

Speaking at the opening of the United Nations Refugee Summit on September 19, Women’s Refugee Commission members reiterated their calls for a “complete rethink of traditional humanitarian response.” This conversation is part of our “Voices from the Summit” coverage.

NEW YORK – Addressing world leaders at the first roundtable of the U.N. Summit for Refugees and Migrants on Monday was a defining event for Foni Joyce from South Sudan. A 24-year-old woman who was displaced from her home due to conflict, she opened the conversation at the morning session, as an individual representative of displaced women and girls across the world whose specific needs deserve closer attention amid the accelerating migration influxes.

“The solutions are right in front of you. We can contribute,” said Joyce, speaking on behalf of the Women’s Refugee Commission (WRC). Joyce had to defy odds to be able to graduate from university, but she would like to see education and employment become more accessible to female refugees in their transition towards stability. Indeed, it is not often that women are leading voices at the podium, whether with international policies or community-level decisions within displaced communities. The WRC has been working on rectifying this dearth of female voices that has become abundantly clear over the Mediterranean migration crises.

Given that a majority of women like Joyce increasingly end up in urban centers of the world, while seeking asylum, WRC has been documenting this growing trend and its impact on female refugees over the past several years.

In February of this year David Miliband, the president of the International Rescue Committee, announced a statistic at the U.N. that rang alarm bells for mayors of cities and municipalities across the globe.

“At least 60 percent of refugees are now living in urban areas,” Miliband said during his briefing.

This never-before-witnessed level of urban displacement is being investigated by field research that calls for a more “nuanced” understanding of the hurdles that female refugees, in particular, face in urban contexts.

Earlier this year, WRC published a report called “Mean Streets,” based on conversations with diverse refugee populations in Quito, Ecuador; Beirut, Lebanon; Kampala, Uganda; and Delhi, India. Over this summer, they further identified the risks that female refugees in Greece and Turkey, especially those stranded in urban centers, encounter due to an “ineffective” deal between the European Union and Ankara.

Reiterating their “Call to Action on Protection Against Gender-based Violence in Emergencies” at the U.N. summit in New York, the WRC’s researchers explain that policy initiatives do exist to protect female refugees in transition and once they reach their destination. What WRC researchers would like to see is an explicit commitment from governments and acceptance of a concrete action plan that they, together with 50 other groups, have endorsed as part of a five-year road map.

The latest findings, WRC says, show that Greece is “shockingly ill-equipped” to handle basic gender-based needs. Marcy Hersh, senior advocacy officer at WRC, spoke with Refugees Deeply about how the U.N. summit can pave the way not only for protection of women and children but also for providing livelihoods and education. These crucial elements can reduce the risk of women and minors being trafficked, attacked or manipulated into harm.

Refugees Deeply: Could you spell out your main campaigning points at the U.N. Summit for Refugees and Migrants?

Marcy Hersh: The summit should advance effective asylum and legal protection mechanisms in domestic migration management policies and in international forums. It must seek to end arbitrary detention for asylum seekers and instead emphasize the lifesaving importance of access to comprehensive reproductive health services. We are looking for an explicit, detailed commitment to protect all displaced women and girls from gender-based violence while in transit and upon reaching their destinations. We are also calling for expansion of legal and safe employment opportunities that leverage the capacity of refugee women and youth to sustain and protect themselves and their families.

Refugees Deeply: Is it possible to formulate a global, binding policy to protect displaced women and girls from gender-based violence (GBV)? How would such a policy come into effect?

Hersh: I would say that that the policy initiatives needed to protect displaced women and girls from the threat of gender-based violence, in fact, already exist and it is our hope that the U.N. Summit for Refugees and Migrants is an opportunity to further the uptake of said initiatives. The “Call to Action for the Protection of GBV in Emergencies” is a commitment by all humanitarian partners to change how we work so that every humanitarian and refugee response provides safe and comprehensive services for those affected by GBV and mitigates GBV risk. A group of more than 50 governments, U.N. agencies and NGOs have developed a five-year road map that outlines concrete steps all humanitarian and refugee stakeholders can take over the next five years to build this change into the policies, systems and mechanisms we use to respond to emergencies. Each stakeholder has unique strengths and capacities, and by coordinating action and working together we can provide better protection from GBV to the people we serve. When more partners become members of this initiative, and fulfill their commitments under the road map, displaced women and girls will experience meaningful protection.

Refugees Deeply: How does the current E.U.-Turkey deal expose female refugees to gender-based violence (GBV)?

Hersh: Virtually overnight, the E.U.-Turkey agreement forced an unprepared and ill-equipped Greece to shift from being a transit country, where refugees stayed for a few days, to being a host country for 50,000 stranded refugees seeking legal protection. The consequences have been alarming. The deal has had profound and distressing ramifications for refugees, especially women and girls seeking asylum and family reunification in Europe. Refugees now endure prolonged displacement, family separation and unacceptable hurdles to accessing legal protection. Refugee women and girls face unsafe and dire living conditions, increased risk of gender-based violence and heightened fear, anxiety and uncertainty.

Refugees Deeply: How can this situation be remedied?

Hersh: In our recent report, the Women’s Refugee Commission issued a number of recommendations to the European Union, Greece and Turkey. Foremost, we urge the E.U. to review and overhaul its humanitarian and asylum policies to fairly, humanely and expeditiously respond to the needs of all refugees seeking safety, protection and relocation and adhere to international and European laws that bar the return of refugees to unsafe countries. We call on the E.U. to increase financial, material and human resources and oversight to help Greece and Turkey effectively adjudicate claims and deliver needed humanitarian services.

We call on both Greece and Turkey to establish appropriate alternatives to sheltering refugees, wherever they are. Turkey is also urged to ensure refugees have equal access to legal protection and aid regardless of nationality, and to facilitate and increase humanitarian assistance, legal counsel and psychosocial support for returned refugees.

Refugees Deeply: How can the Greek asylum system be scaled up to better protect the interests of all asylum seekers and lone women in particular?

Hersh: Greece must build the capacity and resources of the Greek Asylum Service to ensure the timely and fair review of asylum claims, as well as requests for family reunification or relocation. They must ensure that refugees have information about legal options and processes in a language they understand. Lastly, they must simplify and streamline administrative requirements and decision-making processes to reduce bureaucratic delays.

Greece should coordinate closely with international aid organizations to upgrade safety and services at all sites – increasing access to specialized medical care, psychosocial support and safe spaces for GBV survivors, and reproductive health care and mental health services.

Refugees Deeply: Is there evidence of discrimination based on nationality in terms of aid and shelter, once refugees arrive in Greece?

Hersh: Refugees’ rights and ability to access legal protection in Europe vary dramatically depending on nationality. WRC believes policies linked to nationality create an unofficial and unfair hierarchy among refugees – impacting everything from protection options to the ability to access services. Such discriminatory policies are also in contradiction of the concept and tradition of due process and individualized determinations.

Refugees Deeply: What are the conditions you discovered in Turkey that render it less than safe for mass returns?

Hersh: WRC was not granted direct access to the centers where refugees are returned. From our mission in Turkey, we learned that returned refugees arrive in Turkey most often by boat or sometimes by air and are then transported to one of two “removal centers.” Non-Syrians are largely sent to a center in the Kirklareli area near the Bulgarian border and Syrian refugees to the Düziçi center, a remote site in southern Turkey. Turkey describes removal centers as temporary accommodation while background checks and the registration process unfolds, but WRC would characterize the facilities as detention centers. Freedom of movement is limited at these sites, and individuals can’t leave the premises. Possessions were confiscated and specialized medical care, legal counsel and other needed services are reportedly not available. European MEPs who visited the sites “documented violations of fundamental rights” and cases of “inhumane and degrading treatment.”

Refugees Deeply: Given that a majority of female refugees across the globe are now in urban centers and often on streets, how should U.N. agencies and NGOs address the needs of such refugees differently? Where has UNHCR’s 2009 Urban Policy fallen short?

Hersh: Protecting urban refugees with heightened risks, including women and adolescent girls, requires innovative, tailored programming and outreach. First, recognizing that they are the chief responders in urban settings, humanitarians must systematize and broaden engagement of local actors. Next, in recognition that shelter and livelihoods are extremely fraught with risks and dangerous for urban refugee women, humanitarians must develop proactive and targeted strategies for addressing GBV risks related to shelter and livelihoods. Lastly, humanitarians in urban settings must balance programming done within refugee communities with sessions in the host community. Women refugees remarked that while GBV awareness-raising activities, for example, are beneficial to refugee communities, it is equally important – if not more important, in some locations – to conduct these activities within the host communities where they feel vulnerable and targeted.

Refugees Deeply: How can the U.N. better engage local actors and why is this key?

Hersh: Local actors are the first responders in humanitarian emergencies. They are the first on the scene, they have the best knowledge of humanitarian needs, and will stay the course, providing lifesaving support to displaced populations, long after international donor funding dries up and international partners have moved on to the next crisis. The World Humanitarian Summit included in its Grand Bargain a commitment to direct 25 percent of humanitarian funding “as directly as possible” to local and national organizations. Fulfilling this pledge would be a major milestone and would firmly recognize the essential contributions of civil society organizations in humanitarian response.

Refugees Deeply: How would you propose for “accountability mechanisms” to be put in place to assess the performances of U.N.’s implementing partners?

Hersh: There needs to be far greater accountability throughout the humanitarian system, not just from the U.N. to its implementing partners, but in fact a more robust system of mutual accountability that resonates at all levels. When donors issue funds to an implementing partner, they will include mandatory monitoring and reporting to ensure that the aims of the project are achieved and that the funds are well spent. In order to achieve thorough and meaningful change throughout the humanitarian system, accountability must go in the other direction as well, from implementing partners, up to the U.N. and donors.

The World Humanitarian Summit provides an ideal opportunity to create mechanisms of mutual accountability, where everyone’s commitments, be they from an NGO, a U.N. agency or a donor, all are monitored and publicly reported on, to ensure that all actors fulfill their pledges. It is only through collective action and collective accountability that members of the humanitarian community will meet our ambitious and essential goals.