Back from the Brink: Young TB Survivor Turns Advocate in South Africa

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 Sophie Cousins

Phumeza Tisile was 19 when she was diagnosed with a deadly, drug-resistant form of TB. Her experience of treatment and eventual survival turned her into an activist fighting for better access to treatment for others who face the same fate.

It was 2010 and South Africa was hosting the FIFA World Cup. Phumeza Tisile, who was 19 years old at the time and in her first year of university in Cape Town, was out celebrating with friends.

She had noticed that she had been getting thinner, but didn’t think anything of it until that day, when she tried to blow the vuvuzela – a blow horn that can be heard at most soccer games in South Africa. It was difficult. She couldn’t breathe.

Tisile went to her doctor and was diagnosed with “regular” tuberculosis (TB) and put on a six-month course of treatment.

But two months on, she seemed to be getting sicker. She eventually went back to the doctor, and further tests found she had a multi-drug-resistant form of TB, often referred to as MDR-TB.

TB, a contagious airborne disease, is the leading cause of death in South Africa, which has one of the highest incidences of the disease in the world. According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization (WHO), an estimated 450,000 new cases arise every year across the country. While more men than women are diagnosed with, and subsequently die of, TB, the disease can have particularly dire consequences for women of reproductive age. TB is one of the top five killers of women aged 20 to 59. If a pregnant woman contracts the disease, the risk of her pregnancy ending in perinatal death is six times higher, while the risk of premature birth and low birth weight increases twofold.

There is also a rising number of people, like Tisile, being diagnosed with drug-resistant strains of the illness. Most of these patients are resistant to at least two first-line drugs. Some people, known as extensively drug-resistant patients, are resistant to at least four of the core anti-TB medicines.

Dealing with patients who develop drug resistance can be very costly, as the specialist medicines needed are sometimes up to 200 times more expensive than normal TB treatments. The drugs are stronger and can have devastating side effects, including kidney impairment and depression.

Tisile was put on a drug regime for two years. “They put me on 20 tablets [a day],” she says. “I also had to have an injection every day for six months.”

But it wasn’t long before the medicines took a toll on Tisile, who ended up hospitalized for five months when she stopped being able to walk properly.

Furthermore, one day she woke up and noticed there was something else seriously wrong. She went to the bathroom, used the toilet and noticed she couldn’t hear it flushing. Then she turned on the tap to wash her hands, but again, there was no sound.

“I thought, ‘OK, maybe there’s something blocking my ears.’ I cleaned my ears but there was still no sound. People were moving their lips, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying,” she says.

What Tisile didn’t know, and hadn’t been told, was that hearing loss is a common side effect of the daily injections she was taking as part of her MDR-TB treatment. “When the doctor told me I was deaf, he also told me I was resistant to eight MDR-TB drugs,” she says. “I had been taking the wrong medication.”

Tisile was finally diagnosed with XDR-TB – the most severe form of TB, with little hope of survival.

The medicines made her feel even sicker. She was constantly in and out of hospital. An operation to remove TB from her lung resulted in a broken rib and a collapsed lung. By mid-2011, her XDR-TB treatment was no longer working.

Then medical staff from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) stumbled across her at a government clinic, and started her on an individually tailored XDR-TB regimen.

After two more years of treatment, she was told she had a 20 percent chance of survival.

“MSF told me that if I wanted to stop the medication all together, then I should and that I should consult a priest to prepare myself, because they didn’t see a way out of this one,” she says.

Against the odds, Tisile’s health finally started improving and, in August 2013, she was declared cured of XDR-TB.

After managing to raise $80,000 for a cochlear implant, Tisile regained her hearing in February 2015, almost five years after she lost it, and is excited to be restarting university next year to pursue gender studies.

Now she’s a fierce advocate for better access to testing and treatment for drug-resistant TB. She wants to see better, more affordable treatments with fewer side effects and a higher cure rate. And she is calling for the international community to fully fund the fight against the disease. “I could have died, and they don’t really know why I didn’t,” she says.

One of the drugs credited with helping cure Tisile is a high-strength antibiotic called linezolid. While the drug has shown promising results, it’s not widely available in South Africa due to its cost. It’s currently under patent and is not registered as a drug-resistant treatment in the country, making it difficult to access in public facilities.

Two new drugs for treating the most resistant forms of TB, bedaquiline and delamanid, have been developed since 2012 – the first new TB treatments in almost a century. But access remains severely limited due, again, to high cost and the fact that the drugs are registered in only a few countries. While the companies that produce them have set up limited donation programs, the cap on the number of treatment courses given is far below what’s required, and many high-burden countries are excluded from the deal.

“The world is just letting people with TB down,” Tisile says. “We know TB affects those who don’t have money. We need to raise awareness.”

Members of the World Health Assembly have committed to WHO’s End TB Strategy, which hopes to end the TB epidemic by 2035, reducing deaths by 95 percent and cutting new cases by 90 percent, with the ultimate goal of TB elimination as a public health problem by 2050.

But with the TB burden larger than previously thought, growing resistance and a massive gap in funding, experts are skeptical whether this goal is achievable.

Mick Frick, TB/HIV senior project officer at the Treatment Action Group, an independent think tank in South Africa, expressed concern at the decline in funding in the fight against TB, which he blames on a lack of investment by pharmaceutical companies and “anemic political will.”

“Meeting the innovation needs of the groups most affected by TB will be essential for ending the TB epidemic [but] these groups are being left behind,” he says.

The Battle to Take Rape off Thailand’s TV Screens

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 Helen Roxburgh

In Thai soap operas, rape is often shown as a vehicle for revenge or a path to true love. Now activists are calling on producers to stop romanticizing the crime and feeding into the country’s culture of gender inequality.

To avenge his father’s death, Pathvee hunts down the only daughter of his father’s enemy, harasses her and rapes her. Then she falls in love with him and they live happily ever after. It might sound unlikely, but this is the plot of the popular Thai soap opera “Unending Fire of Passion,” which is far from unusual among Thai soaps in turning sexual violence into romance.

In “Sunset at Chao Praya,” the hero, Kobori, forces his new wife to have sex with him. In “Missing Heaven,” the lead character Kavee rapes the heroine Narin for family revenge, and in “The Power of Shadows” a handsome male character drunkenly rapes the female lead. In almost all cases, the women end up ultimately falling in love with their attackers.

A study by the Thai Health Promotion Foundation found that 80 percent of Thai soap operas, or lakhon, depicted rape or sexual violence in 2014. Characters who commit sexual violence are also rarely – if ever – held to account.

“The depictions of rape on TV relates to the concept of ‘good girl’ and ‘bad girl’ in traditional Thai society,” says Yupa Phusahas, senior program officer at nonprofit organization The Asia Foundation, Thailand. “If the female character is a good girl, the depiction of rape sometimes signals the male character’s love and affection for her. If the female character is a bad girl, the rape is punishment for immoral behavior or lack of virtue.”

But now public anger is growing as critics accuse these shows, typically broadcast during prime-time viewing hours, of normalizing rape. And the condemnation of soap opera rape is compounded by national outrage over real-life cases of sexual violence, including the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl on a train in 2014. A petition launched that same year calling for an end to romanticizing lakhon rape now has over 60,300 signatures.

In April, Thailand’s National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) launched guidelines for producers, encouraging them to be “cautious” when depicting violence against women and to include content that addresses men’s sexual responsibilities.

While the guidelines aren’t as stringent as activists were pushing for, they are seen as a step in the right direction. In July, NBTC took action against the makers of a TV soap called “Club Friday” over a scene where a female villain is raped as another character films it. The commission fined the channel 50,000 Thai baht ($1,400), forced it to increase the program’s audience suitability rating and said those scenes would be cut in future re-runs.

But even with threats of a penalty, activists say directors and producers are often reluctant to bring about change, particularly because soap operas depicting sexual violence, nicknamed “slap and kiss,” have consistently brought in higher ratings.

“Most television soap operas are adapted from famous old novels containing rape storylines in which female protagonists are raped by male protagonists,” says Jaray Singhakowinta, professor of sexuality studies at Bangkok’s National Institute of Development Administration. “Some of them are so popular that they have been made into movies and television soap operas more than 10 times since the 1970s.”

Singhakowinta says producers often justify rape storylines as a mere reflection of the real world. Some even argue that watching these scenes “offers a symbolic escape” to those who might commit rape, he says, a theory he vehemently rejects.

“The media’s excessive reproduction of rape rather informs female audiences that men’s sexual aggression is normal, and to an extent acceptable,” Singhakowinta says. “Media producers never include a legal consequence of rape.”

According to Thailand’s National Research Institute, about 30,000 rape cases are reported each year. Naiyana Supapueng, head of the Teeranat Kanjanauaksorn Foundation, a gender equality group, has predicted the real number is probably 10 times official figures, as most rape cases never reach the legal system.

Several factors stop women in Thailand from reporting rape, including community pressure. The Pavena Foundation, a nonprofit advocating for the rights of women and children, said that of the 656 cases they worked with in 2015, most of the victims were raped by stepfathers, friends or neighbors.

Thailand also struggles with a male-dominated legal system, few female police officers and a blame culture. “Rape has not been on the priority list of criminal cases that police officers will take seriously or investigate, unlike drug-related crimes or homicide,” says Yupa Phusahas, program officer at international development organization The Asia Foundation.

Victims who do report the crime often have to walk into all-male police stations and face unsympathetic questioning about what they were wearing, what they did to provoke the attacker and why they were out late.

There is even a grey area over the linguistics. In the Thai language, two words can describe a rape: bplum, which means “wrestling” and can also refer to forced sex that ends in a relationship, and khom kheun, which is used to describe rape as a criminal act.

Last year, the government launched a campaign to teach schoolgirls self-defense and dispense advice on how to protect themselves from sexual harassers. But sex education in schools remains limited. A UNICEF study released this year found that up to 41 percent of male school students in Thailand have “problematic attitudes” toward gender and sexuality, while most teachers do not receive training on approaching topics such as sexual rights, gender and violence.

Critics say the portrayal of rape in popular culture is a sign of ongoing gender inequality in Thai society. “The roots of the problem cover all institutions,” says Matcha Phorn-in, director of Thai-based rights organization Sangsan Anakot Yawachon. “We need to change the mindset of society and give out new messages, and we need to send these messages into families, the education sector and the media. We need a justice system that will make sure there is justice for women as well as men.

“When it comes to violence in these soap operas, it’s not just about rape. It’s about the broader issue of who controls the system.”

‘I Was Going to Starve’: A Story of Trafficking and Escape in Kuwait

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

A recent case has shed light on the number of young women being trafficked from Zimbabwe to Kuwait. One woman tells of how, desperate for work, she ended up being sold to a family and trapped in a cycle of exploitation and abuse.

After finishing her secondary education, Hazvinei Garanowako had tried to find a job but with no luck. Instead, she found herself looking for menial tasks to make some money. Then a friend’s mother told Garanowako, now 24, that she could get her a job in Kuwait, with the visa costs and airfare paid for. “It was a relief to hear that the lowest I could be paid was $750 working in a hotel,” says Garanowako.

She left for Kuwait with dreams of finally moving out of the cramped one-room home she shared with her parents and two other siblings. But her hopes were short lived. When Garanowako arrived at the airport in Kuwait, she and some other African women were instructed to wait in a separate line at passport control. Then they were taken to a storeroom where they waited for more than 10 hours, she says. Eventually, a woman came and took Garanowako to a car waiting outside the airport.

“I was told harshly to get in as the woman exchanged money and my travel documents with an Arab man,” she says. She was taken to the man’s house and put to work as a housemaid, along with seven other women from the Philippines, Ghana and India. They worked 23 hours a day, serving the family and cleaning the 15-room house. Garanowako says if she stopped to take a break, the wife would beat her. She was forced to survive on leftovers that she secretly ate in the bathroom. “I had to lie to [the family] that I needed to take a bath so they would switch off the camera in the bathroom for me to eat,” Garanowako says. “If I didn’t do that, I was going to starve.”

A month into her ordeal, Garanowako managed to find a cellphone to call her mother, Evas Mututa. Mututa gave her daughter the address of the Zimbabwean embassy in Kuwait, but to get there, Garanowako first had to steal some clothes to disguise herself as a local. “Luckily, I found a taxi and managed to reach our embassy, which later helped me come back home,” she says.

The plight of young Zimbabwe women trafficked into servitude in Kuwait came to light recently, when Zimbabwe’s ambassador wrote a letter pleading with the government to tackle the issue.

Grey Marongwe, the Zimbabwean ambassador to Kuwait, wrote to Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in May, saying that the embassy was getting around 10 calls a day from Zimbabwean maids asking for help to escape their employees. “The maids issue has escalated to unprecedented levels,” said the letter. “From the 15 maids we reported in our first letter [dated October 2015], numbers have swelled to more than a hundred.”

According to Marongwe, unsuspecting job seekers are promised high salaries, free air tickets and free accommodation, only to realize on arrival in Kuwait that they have been sold into servitude. The maids have their passports confiscated and are forced to stay with their employers for at least two years.

After lobbying efforts from the embassy and various civil society organizations, the government has stepped in to help bring home 120 trafficking victims so far. Seven of the traffickers were arrested, and have since been released on bail.

Garanowako knows that, despite her ordeal, she’s one of the lucky ones. According to officials, there are more than 300 Zimbabwean girls who have been trafficked to Kuwait and are still trapped there. Zimbabwe, once the breadbasket of the region, is struggling to keep its people fed and employed. Severe drought – which the World Food Programme says will leave around 4.1 million Zimbabweans in need of food aid by January 2017 – a liquidity crunch, and high levels of unemployment and poverty have forced many to flee the country in search of jobs.

“Trafficking is a big issue, not only in Africa but globally,” says Lily Sanya, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) chief of mission in Zimbabwe. “It is a clandestine practice which has been made easy by globalization.”

The IOM has said forced labor is a global business worth $150 billion a year, and the International Labour Organization estimates that about 55 percent of trafficked victims are women, while 26 percent are children. Exact figures are hard to come by, but according to the U.S. Department of State 2016 report on trafficking in persons, Zimbabwean women are being lured to South Africa, China and the Middle East, among other countries. The report puts Kuwait on its Tier 2 watch list, meaning the state does not fully meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking but is making significant efforts to do so. It reveals that domestic employees work on average 14 to 16 hours a day while employers retain 80 to 90 percent of the workers’ wages. Some Kuwait employers also monitor and confine the workers, who are often in poor health due to lack of adequate nutrition and healthcare, according to the report.

When Women & Girls Hub approached the Kuwait embassy in Zimbabwe for comment, we were told there was no one available to speak on the issue.

In March, former Kuwait ambassador to Zimbabwe Ahmed al-Jeeran was implicated as the ring leader in the trafficking syndicate that trapped Garanowako and other girls, accused of advertizing vacancies for non-existent nursing jobs in Kuwait in the local press. Jeeran was allegedly working with his secretary, Brenda Avril May, who is accused of being the contact person, as well as organizing airfare and visa arrangements, for trafficked women. Both Jeeran and May deny any wrongdoing.

Contacted by Women & Girls Hub for comment, May said, “I will not talk on that issue of trafficking,” and referred us to her lawyer. The cases of all those implicated are still pending in court, with possible sentences of up to two years in prison to be issued if they end in convictions.

While Zimbabwe has helped trafficking victims escape their dire situations, the women say support ends almost as soon as they get back home. When Garanowako returned to Zimbabwe, she spoke to a counselor the day she arrived, but has had no follow up since. She and the other women who were repatriated were given $100 and some groceries. Kindness Paradza, chairman of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Foreign Affairs, says the government is working with partners such as the IOM to assist victims of trafficking to start income-generating projects.

But the negative impact of Garanowako’s experience in Kuwait is more complicated than an empty bank account. Her mother, Mututa, says that, ever since her daughter left for Kuwait, the family home has been wracked with distrust and conflict. “When I got news that the girls were trafficked to Kuwait, l was heavily traumatized,” says Mututa. “On the other hand, her father accuses me of leading Hazvinei into trafficking.”

Ma Thida: ‘I Want a Public Apology For Me and My People’

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 Ruth Carr

For surgeon and author Ma Thida, writing is what drives her political activism and her fight for education. When it led to her being thrown in jail for 20 years, however, she used the experience as fuel for a searing memoir.

Ma Thida’s love of literature started when, as a young girl growing up in the Myanmar capital Yangon, she discovered a cupboard full of books in her grandfather’s house. She went on to become a surgeon, but continued to write and self-publish short stories. In her 20s, she became an advocate for the opposition National League for Democracy (NLD) party and traveled with party leader Aung San Suu Kyi throughout the country, recording Suu Kyi’s speeches and helping write and distribute NLD literature.

Thida’s outspoken blend of politics and writing led to her being jailed in 1993 by the military junta. She was sentenced to 20 years in Yangon’s infamous Insein Prison.

It was there that Thida contracted tuberculosis and severe endometriosis. After intense lobbying from groups such as Amnesty International, she was released from prison on humanitarian grounds in 1999. Fourteen years later, and by then a nationally recognized writer and speaker, she founded PEN Myanmar, a local branch of PEN International, the worldwide organization fighting for freedom of expression and the rights of writers, especially those silenced by authorities.

Since Thida’s time in Insein, Myanmar has seen many changes. Scores of political activists have been freed from prison and Aung Sang Suu Kyi has been elected to parliament. Yet behind the signs of progress there is still a palpable tension. Bloody clashes between ethnic groups and security forces are frequent, and key positions in parliament are still assigned to the military.

Recently, Thida’s prison memoir, “Prisoner of Conscience: My Steps Through Insein,” was published for the first time in English. She spoke with Women & Girls Hub about the importance of literature and the power of voice.

Women & Girls Hub: What work is PEN Myanmar doing to defend freedom of expression?

Ma Thida: Because of past censorship and heavy propaganda, writers have had no interactive way of reaching out to their audience and I really wanted to break this. I wanted more interaction between writers and readers and vice versa, so we have been organizing public discussions where writers can read their work aloud and we have had discussions in public places, like on trains and in bus stops.

Women & Girls Hub: How can literature enhance society?

Thida: Literature is about people, it digs into the heart of a society. Unlike journalism or media, which is about facts and figures, literature provides deep insight into people’s true nature and their thinking. My country has been in a big black hole of isolation, so we really don’t know each other enough, especially the minority groups. I feel everyone should learn about each other, and the easiest and most effective way to do this is through literature.

Women & Girls Hub: Is it hard for people to find their voice after so many years of not just state but also self-censorship?

Thida: Even though there is no more state censorship, there is still peer and self-censorship and we are still seeing the symptoms of our past isolation. People are still struggling to [write] a page; there is still an inertia and people are struggling with their own feelings of authority.

Their identity has been lost for such a long time that they do not even know their own potential. And we still have so many ethnic groups fighting each other. Censorship, propaganda and a substandard education system have meant there is a struggle for mutual understanding. It’s why promoting freedom of expression and all the different voices is the most important thing right now.

The most dangerous thing about censorship is that it affects people’s way of thinking. After five decades you can imagine. For example, certain subjects might be considered taboo and over time people become indifferent to these topics or issues. They don’t feel the need to investigate or think beyond, and due to substandard education, they don’t know how. So people’s way of thinking becomes designed and this is a big problem.

Women & Girls Hub: Do you think your experience of being in prison was different to the experiences of the men who were incarcerated at the same time?

Thida: I think the experience was very different, especially for the political prisoners as there were not so many female political prisoners during my time, yet there were many in the men’s section, who were able to form a strong collective. They smuggled in shortwave radios, they kept themselves very motivated and updated, and they would continue to have serious discussions. Also many male guards secretly helped them, while in the female section that wasn’t the case. Sadly sometimes women can be enemies amongst themselves. And the female guards were suffering themselves, through a lack of knowledge and education, and were powerless compared to their male counterparts. So they didn’t dare to help us.

Women & Girls Hub: The perception is that Myanmar is on the road to real freedom and democracy, yet you recently stated that you are “not optimistic about the current political system.” Can you tell us why and what you think needs to be done?

Thida: What I really want is a public apology, not only for myself but for my people. There should be a mechanism to acknowledge and admit what was wrong and who is responsible, without any bitterness or hatred. It could reduce the tension and people’s psychology of hatred and wanting revenge.

We also need a new or amended constitution, because with the 2008 constitution, it’s like having two parallel governments at the same time. The army is still in control of the Ministry of Defence, the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Ministry of Border Affairs and the police are still under the control of the military. Although we have three pillars – executive, legislative and judiciary – separated by the law, the power sharing is not clear.

Superwoman Network Empowers Vulnerable Women in Sudan

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

Based in Khartoum, the Superwoman Network brings together five civil society organizations to provide support, legal aid and training to help women who were once the victims of domestic violence and FGM.

KHARTOUM, Sudan – Before Jamila joined the Superwoman Network in Sudan’s capital Khartoum, she felt powerless and alone in her struggle to cope with years of violence from the two closest men in her life.

“Anything he saw in front of him, he would use to beat me,” she says of the husband she left eight years ago.

But after escaping her husband, Jamila and her children suffered at the hands of her father who, unemployed due to sickness and supporting two new wives and more children, resented having to support them, too.

“When I argued with his children whilst ironing, he took the iron and burnt me with it,” says Jamila, pointing out the nicks and dark patches of scar tissue on her neck, arms and chest. “He has also burnt my sons. The eldest has marks all over his body from where [my father] would heat up a screwdriver and burn him with it.”

To help women like Jamila – women with nowhere left to turn – the Superwoman Network brings together five civil society organizations. The group offers support to vulnerable women in contact with the law, such as current and released prisoners, as well as single mothers and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV).

“We give them hope that life is still there,” says Amani Tabidi, executive director of one of the network’s members, the Babiker Badri Scientific Association for Women’s Studies (BBSAWS) at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman. BBSAWS provides the women with skills training and basic literacy. It also offers “legal and psychological support to overcome stigma and economic empowerment,” says Tabidi, who is also a lecturer at Ahfad University and recruits peers to mentor the women.

“Most of the women are coming from very poor communities, so they don’t have someone to help them,” she says.

They also often see no way out. Last year, Rashida Manjoo, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women at the time, visited Sudan and voiced her concern about the culture of “silence and denial” when it came to the subject of SGBV. When Jamila told people about her father’s abuse, “they would tell me, ‘At the end of the day, this is your dad and may God help him,’” she says.

Jamila and other SGBV victims who are trapped by violence have been able to use the Superwoman Network’s sessions on coping mechanisms to help deal with, and lessen, the abuse they suffer until they can get away from it. “The sessions changed the way I think,” says Jamila. “The situation at home is the same but I’m emotionally stronger.”

Now, when Jamila’s father loses his temper, she says she uses breathing and meditation techniques to stop herself from shouting back and escalating the situation, and to calm herself afterwards.

The Superwoman Network has also given Jamila cooking utensils and trained her on cookery and crafts to get her closer to her goal of freeing herself from her father’s support by setting up a baking business.

Since launching last year with funding from the United Nations Development Programme and the Finnish embassy in Egypt, the Superwoman Network has helped over 30 women. The network hopes to have helped 100 women by May 2017. It’s an ambitious target in a country where public support and advocacy of women’s rights is routinely stifled.

Fatima joined the network through an organization that helped her rebuild her life after female genital mutilation (FGM) nearly ruined it. The procedure made sex impossible, sometimes causing her to bleed, which traumatized both her and her husband. Through one of the other Superwoman partners, SEEMA Centre for Training and Protection of Women and Child’s Rights, which helps women affected by GBV, Fatima was able to have surgery to repair the physical damage caused by the FGM as well as counselling for her and her husband to overcome the emotional trauma.

She now runs a small catering business and advocates against FGM in her own family and at SEEMA events. “This network opened my life,” she says. “Before, I was confined to my home and now I’m exposed to lots of different things and people.”

The women also support one another through saving and lending groups to finance projects that will boost their status in their communities or at home.

The effect trickles down to other women in their communities and to the next generation, too. Fatima’s community has stopped carrying out FGM after she found the courage to tell them what she went through.

Tabidi cites other cultural changes: “Some of [the women] benefit from this project by pushing their daughters to education.”

For Jamila, one of the most important things she has learned from the Superwoman Network is that she is not alone. “It taught me how to change my thoughts,” she says, “and now the life I’m living is completely different.”

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

South African Activists Call for Legal Recognition of Muslim Marriages

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 Jen Thorpe

South African law requires marriages be conducted by a registered official. But many of the country’s Muslims get married in exclusively religious ceremonies, leaving married Muslim women with little legal protection, say activists.

Anyone wanting to get married in South Africa has three legal options, all of which aim to protect the rights of the people saying “I do.” Heterosexual couples can wed under the Marriage Act; for same-sex couples there is the Civil Union Act; and marriages conducted under customary law are protected by the Recognition of Customary Marriages Act.

But a significant number of marriages are conducted in religious ceremonies. South African law requires that any religious marriage be conducted by a registered marriage officer in order for the union to be solemnized under one of the country’s marriage laws. A purely religious marriage, one performed by an unregistered religious figure, has no legal status in South Africa.

That means that many of the estimated 750,000 Muslims in South Africa are in marriages that are not recognized by law. Women & Girls Hub spoke with Hoodah Abrahams-Fayker, attorney at the Women’s Legal Centre (WLC) in Cape Town, about what this absence of legal protection means for Muslim women and girls in South Africa and why the WLC is fighting for Muslim marriages to be legally recognized.

Women & Girls Hub: Why is there a need for specific recognition of Muslim marriages in law?

Hoodah Abrahams-Fayker: Many Muslim couples get married under religious ceremonies without the subsequent registration in terms of the Marriages Act. The legal literacy of most South Africans is low, and thus many couples are not aware of the benefits of legal protection, especially in terms of divorce.

Registering a Muslim marriage can be difficult. This is because, historically, only a few members of the Islamic clergy chose to become registered marriage officers. The government discriminated against Muslim people during apartheid and as a result, the Islamic clergy took a political and principled stand not to register as marriage officers as prescribed by the Marriages Act. They felt that this registration hindered their ability to practice their religion freely.

One of the key reasons we think legislation is required is to provide regulation of the divorce process. This will positively affect current challenges around inheritance, maintenance and the property rights of women. The WLC has seen thousands of cases where Muslim women do not have access to legal protection when they wish to divorce their husbands or when their husbands state that they wish to be divorced from them. To dissolve a marriage under Islamic law, the couple must approach the Islamic clergy. The clergy is comprised mainly of men and can be biased in favor of the husband. And there is no standardized regulation of how Islamic divorce proceedings should be heard. This has significant implications in terms of the allocation of property and the livelihoods of the children in Islamic marriages. Hence, many women do not get a fair divorce hearing.

The Recognition of Customary Marriages Act makes particular provisions for marriages conducted under customary law, applying to “those customs and usages traditionally observed among the indigenous African people of South Africa.” This recognition excludes those who are not “indigenous African people,” including those married religiously in Muslim, Hindu and Jewish weddings.

Women & Girls Hub: In terms of girls and young women, how would a law around Muslim marriages provide better protection?

Abrahams-Fayker: The Marriage Act requires that boys under the age of 18 and girls under the age of 15 cannot get married without special permission from their parents, a judge and the Minister of Home Affairs, and that all persons under the age of 21 must get their parents’ permission before marrying. These laws aim to protect young adults and to ensure that marriages take place between consenting adults.

But because Muslim marriages are not legally recognized, the Islamic clergy will often not report cases where marriages are under the legal age. South African statistics show that many more underage brides get married each year in South Africa than underage grooms, thus this particularly affects young women.

Because these marriages are not reported, there won’t be any government statistics on them. This means that our government statistics on underage and early marriage will not be accurate, and may be an underrepresentation of the extent of the issue.

Women & Girls Hub: Has the Women’s Legal Centre faced any opposition in its efforts to get better legal protection for Muslim women through a new law?

Abrahams-Fayker: There seems to be the misguided sense that the Muslim community does not support it, but in the WLC’s workshops with the Muslim community we find that when participants are informed about the benefits of legal protection, they are in support of it. Some small, very vociferous, groups have opposed the WLC’s application, but that does not equate to its rejection by the majority of Muslim people in South Africa.

The main concern of those opposing the law is that creating law specifically around Muslim marriages amounts to religious interference and singles out Islam. However, from the perspective of the WLC, the failure to provide protection in these marriages discriminates against Muslim women, and is therefore unconstitutional.

It has been more than a decade since the first version of the Muslim Marriages bill was introduced, and so the WLC has taken the government to court over these delays. The case will be heard in the High Court in Cape Town in March 2017.

Women & Girls Hub: In the interim, how is the WLC working to support women in Muslim marriages?

Abrahams-Fayker: The reality is that many Muslim women are not initially aware of how their rights in the South African legal context differ from those under Shariah law. In addition, few have the legal or financial resources to take up the matter of divorce outside of the Islamic clergy. The WLC continues to work in communities providing workshops on human rights, as well as providing free legal advice at our offices for any women who need it.

A positive recent development is that a number of Muslim marriage officers have been registered. However, this does not necessarily mean that more Muslim marriages are being solemnized both civilly and Islamically. There is still a need to raise public awareness and to make sure that marriage officers fulfill their legal duty and encourage couples to register their marriage.

In addition, although there is no law protecting Muslim women in divorce, there have been cases where women have taken their request for divorce to the courts and received favorable judgments. But a comprehensive legal remedy would be far more favorable.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

The Blind Grandmother Giving HIV-Positive Kenyans Support and Dignity

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 Kalunde Kilonzo

Already blind, Catherine Mwayonga was written off by doctors as having six months to live after being diagnosed with HIV. Fifteen years later, she now helps other disabled HIV-positive Kenyans to demand better treatment and adapt to life with the disease.

NAIROBI, Kenya – When a visitor walks up the stony path to Catherine Mwayonga’s home in Thika, 30 minutes from the Kenyan capital, she hears their footsteps and raises her voice – bold and husky – to usher them in. She’s sitting on the sofa, knitting a sweater for a newborn baby and counting the stitches with her fingers. “Karibu sana (welcome),” she says.

Mwayonga, 62, the mother of six grown boys and two adopted daughters, is blind. She lost her eyesight when she was 7, after a cow kicked her in the head and threw her against a tree. She is also HIV-positive, which she only discovered when she overheard a doctor talking about her to his colleagues: “The patient on bed 12 is HIV-positive.”

Mwayonga remembers hearing him announce her status as she lay still on the cold bed, pretending to be asleep. “He said it in English, assuming that I did not understand,” she says. “It shocked me.”

That moment led to years of fear, denial and confusion as Mwayonga’s disability – one that had long ago become a natural part of her full life – suddenly became an impediment to coping with her illness. Everything from getting information from doctors to taking medication was a struggle. But 15 years on, Mwayonga has overcome those challenges and now devotes her time to advocating for HIV-positive people with disabilities, calling for more respect and improved resources.

The first case of HIV was discovered in Kenya in 1984, and the country’s infection rate currently stands at 5.6 percent. Figures from the Kenya National HIV and Aids Estimates shows it has the fourth highest HIV prevalence in the world, with about 1.6 million people infected with the virus.

For two years before her diagnosis, Mwayonga had pleaded with doctors to test her for HIV/AIDS. In 1996, after a decade of illness, her husband died from what Mwayonga later discovered were AIDS-related complications. She knew the risk of her having contracted HIV from him was high. “In 1999, I would have malaria today, typhoid tomorrow, but nothing specific,” she says. “I would ask why they were not testing me for HIV/AIDS. They would say the disease would not get [disabled] people like me. But I asked them: Aren’t I a human being?”

By the end of 2000, Mwayonga was ill more often than not. She had been teaching at the Thika Primary School for the Blind for 40 years, but now could only make it to work one month out of every three. “When I started vomiting, losing weight and having diarrhea, the doctors said my body was overproducing bile and I was put on ulcer medication.”

In March 2001, Mwayonga started having breathing difficulties and was rushed to hospital, where doctors told her she needed a blood transfusion. When the lab technician came to her bed to draw her blood, “I told him, I hope you will test me for HIV with that blood sample,” she says.

“Who told you about HIV/AIDS?” he asked her. That was the last she heard about her illness until the doctor announced her status as she pretended to sleep.

The poor handling of her situation continued, she says, when a doctor finally broke the news to her personally. He told her she had only six months to live, that she should sell her property and distribute her money to her family.

Devastated, “I told them it was very unprofessional how they were handling my case and how they had given my life an end,” she says. Some other doctors assured her that with the right diet and treatment, she could live with the disease for many more years. But she was never given or offered counseling to help her deal with her new, life-changing health status, nor given any tips on how to disclose the news to her family.

Instead, when she was discharged from hospital, she was handed an array of drugs to take daily. Because the antiretrovirals (ARVs) are not marked in Braille, she would often get her medication mixed up. “Every day, I felt tired and sleepy,” she says. “I was overdosing on the drugs. I had muscle wasting.”

This episode of her life, which she describes as a near-death experience, prompted her to share her status publicly in 2010. “Having HIV when you are disabled is a double dilemma,” she says. “Your privacy is infringed, your status is made public, and accessing and using ARVs is a hurdle. It is a major jungle for disabled HIV patients.”

There are places in Kenya, such as the Disabilities Programme at Liverpool VCT, an NGO where people with disabilities can access HIV testing and counseling services and get help from service providers specifically trained to work with the disabled. But there are very few facilities like this catering to disabled HIV patients.

So when Mwayonga isn’t teaching at the school, she devotes her time to filling that healthcare gap. As the head of the Thika branch of the Kenya Network of Positive Teachers (KENEPOTE), an organization of teachers living with HIV/AIDS, she helps organize regular outreach events to dispel myths on HIV, fight stigma and call for better inclusion of people living with the virus. She counsels elderly people on how best to break the news of their HIV-positive status to their children and grandchildren. She visits high schools to give talks on HIV prevention and treatment. And she opens up her home to anyone looking for help or advice on reproductive health.

But even simple advice like “use a condom” comes with complications. “When you tell a blind couple or someone visually impaired to use condoms, it is like an insult,” she says. “Because the packaging and instructions are only meant for those with sight. They wouldn’t know if the condom has expired, where to open it, and may not wear it correctly.”

Ultimately, Mwayonga wants the Kenyan government to pass legislation obliging manufacturers to put Braille, as well as large-sized letters, on condoms and packages of ARVs. She says all HIV testing centers should have a counselor who knows sign language to serve deaf clients and ensure their confidentiality.

In 2011, Mwayonga was among 15 women recognized by the National AIDS Control Council and the Network of People Living with HIV in Kenya (Nephak) for their championing for the rights of women living with HIV in Kenya.

“The disabled can also get HIV,” she says, stressing the importance of including the disabled in any policies or programs designed to tackle HIV prevalence in Kenya. “We cannot be left out.”

Jordan’s Female Taxi Drivers Crash Through Stereotypes

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 Elspeth Dehnert

A group of women in Jordan are defying gender roles for a career on the road. While it’s not easy working in a male-dominated sector, the country’s female taxi drivers are willing to challenge the naysayers in order to do the job they love.

AMMAN, Jordan – The only difference between Hiba al-Sharu and her male counterparts is the color of the sign that sits atop her taxi – hers is pink, a symbol for a woman-friendly service in a country dominated by men. She is one of 10 women who earlier this year became some of the first female taxi drivers in Jordan. They are being hailed as pioneers in a conservative society where jobs are dictated by gender and women often feel uneasy taking taxis driven by men.

“It’s a beautiful job because of the relationships you form and the freedom that comes with it,” says al-Sharu as she swiftly changes lanes in the traffic. Also, she adds, “I have a passion for driving cars.”

Al-Sharu became a taxi driver in March after her friend told her about a new female-driven service being offered by Taxi al-Moumayaz, one of the leading companies of its kind in Jordan. CEO Eid Abu al-Haj says the reason for creating the initiative was twofold: to give women the chance to work in the male-centric transportation sector and to provide female riders with a more comfortable option.

“People think it’s odd,” says al-Haj. “But I try to prove that there’s nothing wrong with it. There’s no difference between a woman driving a normal car or a taxi.”

The opportunity came at the perfect time for al-Sharu. Despite holding a bachelor’s degree in business administration, the divorced mother of one had been struggling to find a decent job with a stable salary, health insurance and social security benefits. Driving for Taxi al-Moumayaz gives her all of that plus the ability to design her own schedule and to earn an additional income in the form of tips. More than six months have passed, and she’s happier than ever about her decision to work on the road.

But not everyone is supportive of al-Sharu’s new career path. “The Middle Eastern mentality doesn’t accept that I’m a taxi driver,” she says while fixing her hair in the rearview mirror.

In addition to working odd hours, taxi drivers must be alone in their cars with strangers – including men – for long periods of time. It’s an uncomfortable combination in a society where, traditionally, women are thought to bring shame to their family and culture if they do something that could be perceived as promiscuous. While Jordan is among the more progressive of the Arab nations – so-called honor killings are rare – harassment of women is commonplace, especially of those who are considered to be engaging in indecent or abnormal behavior.

Al-Sharu recounts one disturbing incident in particular: A couple of months ago, two male passengers refused to pay after instructing her to drive aimlessly around the city. After she realized they were mocking her, a verbal argument ensued. Then the fight turned physical. “The window was open and one of them grabbed a long stick from outside the car, and then he began hitting the meter with it,” she recalls. “It’s because I’m a woman.”

But it’s not only strangers who take issue with her line of work. “My father is still not happy. He is ashamed,” she says. “But I don’t care. This is my life, not his life.”

While al-Sharu is able to defy the men in her family, not all women in Jordan have that option. The country’s patriarchal laws and cultural traditions deny women full equality. Women cannot pass citizenship on to their children, for example, or legally marry without permission from either a male blood relative or the court. The male guardianship system still dictates many aspects of everyday life.

Without full control over their own lives, women in Jordan have a difficult time breaking out of the traditional female role. Salma Nims, secretary general of the Jordanian National Commission for Women, says women in her country are first and foremost mothers, wives and guardians of the domestic sphere. Working outside the home is discouraged in some families, unless it’s a monetary necessity. And for women who do work, being a fully functioning member of the labor force is not easy since they are expected to also continue taking sole responsibility for the household.

Nims believes that one of the best ways to improve the work situation for women in Jordan is to stop the perpetuation of gender stereotypes in the media and school curriculum. “We are raising a generation that sees women with very limited options in terms of jobs,” she says. “These stereotypes and judgments affect how young men and women see themselves and how they perceive the other and the role they play in society.”

But al-Sharu favors a more direct approach: “My advice to women is to break the stereotype.” Her becoming a taxi driver may not seem like much of a revolution, but she thinks it could help inspire a new reality for women in Jordan who want to free themselves from the confines of their gender roles.

“We’re not stealing; we’re not doing anything bad. We’re helping people and providing a service,” she says of herself and her fellow female taxi drivers.

“Try us,” she adds with a smirk, “and then say what you want.”

The Woman Bringing Boko Haram Wives Back to Their Families

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 Siobhán O’Grady

Social media activism inspired Fatima Askira to collect clothes for women affected by Boko Haram. Nearly four years later, she is pioneering programs to help them rejoin their communities.

In early 2013, as women and children fleeing Boko Haram flooded into the northeastern Nigerian city of Maiduguri, Fatima Askira watched them arrive to under-resourced makeshift camps with nothing more than the tattered clothes on their backs.

At the time, she didn’t consider herself particularly qualified to help them. She had recently graduated from the University of Maiduguri with a degree in botany, and had little experience working with victims of conflict – especially ones who may have survived brutal attacks, kidnappings and rape at the hands of the militant organization that has, in recent years, killed more than 20,000 and displaced millions more across northeastern Nigeria and the surrounding Lake Chad region.

But after bearing witness to their suffering in her hometown, Askira was inspired to start with what she knew how to do: collect clothes to donate to some of the displaced. With the help of a social media campaign, her charity drive ballooned from a small-scale local collection into a national volunteer network that brought donated clothing, toiletries and food to Maiduguri from across Nigeria. Askira, now 26, has since formalized that effort into the Borno Women Development Initiative. She and the NGO’s 19 other volunteers and staff focus on working with local government officials and humanitarian agencies to run reintegration programs at safe houses for women who either willingly joined or were forcibly recruited by Boko Haram.

Women & Girls Hub spoke with Askira about the challenges that arise when these women leave the extremist group and try to rejoin their old communities.

Women & Girls Hub: Do the women who end up at these safe houses have a variety of experiences in captivity, or do they share a similar narrative of what life was like under Boko Haram?

Fatima Askira: There are different kinds of women being rescued. The women who did not go into the bush but who were living under Boko Haram control because their villages were taken over by the group are the ones who can more easily reintegrate into the camps, because they were not really radicalized.

But some of the women have been wives to Boko Haram, and they were rescued by the Nigerian army and are now being kept in safe homes. Most of them were married to Boko Haram voluntarily and were not forced into it, because they married [the Boko Haram fighters] when they were still in our society. When their husbands were chased out of the communities, then the women followed them. Some of the women followed voluntarily, some were forced.

When I was speaking with one of the girls recently, I asked her what it was like to be living for so long with Boko Haram. I said, “Didn’t you feel like you wanted to come back to your family after all these years that you stayed with Boko Haram?” And she said, “Fatima, it’s not like I have a choice. He’s my husband and I married him because I love him and then this happened. And I thought of my parents for a while, and then I had to forget about them because life goes on.”

Women & Girls Hub: For the women who left their families voluntarily, how do their parents react if their daughters want to come home?

Askira: It’s not possible to integrate any of them quickly back into their families. They may be radicalized already, so they have to go through the deradicalization process and learn countering narratives before we can integrate them back into their communities. And some of the parents say they won’t accept them immediately after they are rescued. You know how hard it is for them: Your daughter spent about four years with Boko Haram in a place like that, you don’t know who she is, you’ve forgotten what she looks like.

But from the other side, some of the women at the safe house don’t socialize, they don’t talk to you. It’s often easier for them to speak with each other because they are like a family now. Still, sometimes it’s possible to reach them. In one instance, we played them propaganda audio from an imam who split from Boko Haram earlier this year and then condemned the group for being too violent. He hadn’t left Boko Haram entirely, but there was some balance and sanity to what he said. They heard how violent it was and they heard from a person they trust that it is wrong.

Women & Girls Hub: Do the women seem to have been deeply involved in the conflict itself?

Askira: They don’t even know the extent of the violence caused by their husbands, that’s the most amazing thing. When we played a video of a bomb blast and the destruction it caused to try to explain this to them, there was so much surprise on their faces. When they were with Boko Haram, they didn’t go out and they were kind of restricted in an area without access to news or information.

Women & Girls Hub: How do you see your project moving forward?

Askira: The next project we want to do is set up an informal school for the women to be able to access a little bit of Western knowledge. We believe that would maybe bring out their interest in going back to school and tell them school is not in conflict with their religion, but rather that school will further motivate them or be the source of a future for them, because after school you can get a job.

Women & Girls Hub: You’ve described a lot of damage to the local community caused by Boko Haram. Have you faced difficulties convincing the community that reintegration is necessary for peace?

Askira: What I’ve come to believe is that the Boko Haram fighters, some of them are victims, too. Equally as we have families, they have families, and their families did not commit any wrong in society because their children joined this movement. So if we’re going to bring some sort of balance, we need to go down to the communities, reorient them and sensitize them to the importance of accepting some of these people back.

When I started, initially a lot of people said, “It won’t work out, why are you wasting your time? Nobody will support you, nobody will assist you.” And I said, “I still want to do it.” And sometimes it’s very challenging for us to access materials and reach out to others. But you just keep doing it in any little way you can.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Shelter Helps Stigmatized Young Mothers Build Happy Families in Sudan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Shallow Well Full of Hope for Women in Kenya’s Lamu County

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 Sophie Mbugua

In many areas of rural Kenya, women spend hours each day searching for water. As they worry about the impact on their families and livelihoods, one project could help them take back the time stolen by the search for water.

LAMU COUNTY, Kenya – Every morning at 3 a.m., Esther Katuma, a 34-year-old mother of five, leaves her house in search of water. She hopes to return before her children come home from school for lunch and in time to scare away the baboons that have been devouring the bananas and pawpaws on her farm.

Every day, she says, women like her from Maisha Masha village, near Lamu County’s Witu Forest, walk over 25 kilometers (15.5 miles) through the forest, dodging wild animals, some of which are also looking for water. “Everyone, including the animals – both wild and domestic livestock – depends on water wells within the forest,” says Katuma. “The earlier you get to the well, the earlier you return home to other chores.”

With no river running through the county, Lamu residents rely on shallow wells, water pans and boreholes to harvest groundwater. Until recently, the groundwater was regularly recharged by seasonal rainfall. But a dry spell has left the area water stressed, as wells and boreholes run low and any water left becomes too salty to drink. “The wells are turning saline due to lack of recharge owing to inadequate rainfall this year,” says Dishon Mwamburi, the director of water at the Ministry of Lands and Physical Planning.

Villagers – mainly the women – are forced to dedicate more and more of their time searching for water. But a new project is helping communities adapt to the water shortage, letting women get back to their livelihoods and their children.

Maisha Masha village is a relatively new settlement, built on a wetland that was meant to provide residents with a reliable water source. Natural or manmade areas that are seasonally or permanently flooded with water, wetlands make up 3 to 4 percent of Kenya’s land surface. But according to Mwamburi, unplanned settlements and an increased number of people and livestock in search of arable land have been encroaching on the wetlands over the past few years. At the same time, climate change has been leading to hotter dry seasons and shorter rainy seasons. Together, those factors have resulted in a water shortage.

For many women in Lamu County, the time spent looking for water is time away from their children. Damaris Kandenge worries that while she is busy on her long walks for water, her children are vulnerable to being targeted by the militia group al-Shabab, a militant Islamic group with ties to al-Qaida. “This forest is inhabited by the al-Shabab group,” she says. “I worry about my children. What if someone tries to recruit them and I never get to know about it?”

Kandenge, along with 20 women and 10 men, formed the Back to Eden group a year ago,to support their families through beekeeping and tree planting. She says other mothers in the group worry that, without supervision, their children are missing school or engaging in underage sex. Kandenge points to the fact that so far this year, the number of young girls getting pregnant is higher than in past years. “We have no time for the children,” she says. “When you return and find an empty bowl of food, you assume the children have come home for lunch.”

The long hours spent searching for water also lead to conflicts at home, says Kandenge, with some men engaging in extramarital affairs because, they say, their wives are neglecting them. “This water has become a thorn,” she says. “It’s a race between finding water, ensuring our children are safe and our men are happy – all in one woman.”

According to the 2015 Joint Monitoring Program by the World Health Organization and United Nations Children’s Fund, 2.6 billion people have gained access to improved drinking water sources since 1990. Despite the global achievements, Kandenge and Katuma are among 663 million people who are still without access to water globally.

Mwamburi says that due to financial constraints, there are no current plans to provide water solutions to Maisha Masha village. So the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) has stepped in to help. As part of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development IGADBiodiversity Management Programme, funded by the European Union, ICRAF has been working with Maisha Masha residents, promoting water technologies to help them access water and cope with rainfall variability. “We are combining roof catchment, rainwater harvesting, surface runoff and groundwater to ensure they have water available throughout the year,” says Wilfred Muriithi, a groundwater and agriculture engineer at ICRAF.

Muriithi and his team are helping the Back to Eden group build a freshwater shallow well that should be ready for use by the end of October. The hand-dug well, which costs over $500 and is co-funded by the community and ICRAF, taps into a flowing underground aquifer and should permanently serve the community, says Muriithi.

The shallow wells make use of natural aquifer’s in the ground to extract clean water flowing from the highlands to the ocean. An aquifer is an underground layer of water bearing, permeable rock that can be tapped into, providing a constant source of clean water.

Muriithi says the wells will provide a long-lasting solution to Lamu’s water as long as they are well maintained. “[Their] sustainability depends on the water usage and protection of the aquifers upstream,” he says.

Kandenge can’t hide her excitement as she talks about the benefits the shallow well will bring to her family and community. She plans to use it to rescue the vegetables and 2,000 seedlings currently drying up in her nursery, and for beekeeping and household use. And the time she will save not having to walk miles for water, she plans to spend with her family. “I cannot wait for this well to gush out water,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

Women & Girls Hub: Why is this study important?

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

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

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

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

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

Women & Girls Hub: What were your main takeaways?

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

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

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

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

Women & Girls Hub: What are your next steps?

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

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

MC Soffia: The 12-year-old Brazilian Girl Who Fights Racism with Rap

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 Kamille Viola

Tween rapper MC Soffia, breakout star of the Rio Olympics opening ceremony, may sing about dolls and dreadlocks, but her message to young black girls in Brazil is serious: “When a black person suffers, we all suffer.”

Sporting shocking-pink dreadlocks, a black sparkly catsuit and a giant bow, 12-year-old rapper MC Soffia stole the show at this year’s Olympic opening ceremony in Rio in August. She performed on stage alongside Carol Konka, one of Brazil’s leading female rap artists and instantly became an international sensation.

Asked by a fellow performer shortly before going on stage what it meant to be part of such a big event, she said: “I’ll be representing all the black kids from the outskirts who can’t be here talking, I’ll be their voice.”

Within minutes of appearing on stage, photos of her performing were splashed across Twitter and other social networking sites, while several international papers declared her the star of the show.

For a country that has struggled with racism, it was a powerful moment brought about by a young girl who says her music is inspired by her experiences of being bullied growing up.

Afro-Brazilians make up 53 percent of the country’s population, a total of about 106 million individuals. It is the world’s largest black population outside Africa and the second largest after Nigeria. According to UNICEF, black Brazilians aged 12 to 18 are nearly three times more likely to get killed than their white counterparts.

MC Soffia, whose real name is Soffia Gomes da Rocha Gregório Correa, began rapping when she was in primary school.

“My mother took me to a hip-hop workshop when I was six,” she says. “When I started singing, I wanted to make rap music because it helps you say how you are feeling, what you’re seeing and what is happening.”

Her lyrics are mix of childish ideas and powerful political messages. In one song called Menina Pretinha – “little black girl” in Portuguese – she sings: “Barbie is cool but I like Makena [black dolls made by Lucia Makena] best.”

The song, about a fairytale princess with dreadlocks, continues: “Exotic doesn’t mean beautiful; you’re not cute, you’re a queen.”

Her no-nonsense attitude reflects a new generation of young black girls in Brazil who are being raised to feel more confident, and to fight racism, from an early age.

“I don’t want children born today to suffer in the way I have suffered,” she says. “I was a victim of racist bullying. I didn’t do anything about it [at the time] but now my school has an anti-bullying group, where we discuss this kind of thing.”

Her message to young black girls is simple. “The first thing you need to do is to accept yourself, to love yourself,” she says, adding that girls need to stand up for themselves when people criticise them or say things mean about their appearance. When someone mocks her hair, she says she always knows what to say: “My hair is not kinky, it is coily [sic],” she says. “Kinky is your prejudice.”

While she says most of the time her life is like any other young schoolgirl – she plays with her friends and hangs out at her dad’s or her aunt’s house on weekends – she also sometimes gets stopped in the street by fans.

“When I am walking downtown, usually someone stops me to say things like, ‘you influenced my daughter,’ or ‘you inspired my niece.’” Young girls also come to her gigs and tell her how much she influences them.

MC Soffia’s own influences include Willow Smith and Beyonce. She says she wants to be that famous, too, one day.

Speaking about her Olympic performance, she says she was nervous before going on stage, but Carol Konka joked around with her, helping to keep her calm.

“The moment I started singing, I didn’t see anyone anymore.”

MC Soffia also credits Carol Konka and other rappers with helping her fight sexism in the music industry and rise as a star.

“When a woman suffers, we all suffer together and the rap scene is very prejudiced,” she says. “When I began singing, no one helped me. Only Criolo [a Brazilian rapper], he gave me a microphone as a gift. But now [that I’m well-known] I think I have earned their respect.”

In order to capitalize on her fame and newfound respect among Brazil’s more mature rappers, MC Soffia says she plans to release a new single and video soon.

“Her career is on the rise,” Kamilah Pimentel, MC Soffia’s mother, told Women & Girls Hub. “We expect even bigger visibility after the release of the new clip, [which] will talk about the empowerment of black children.”

‘Hate Crime’ Call for Corrective Rape Receives Boost in South Africa

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 Jen Thorpe

Six years after the South African government promised to address violence toward the LGBTIQ community, a hate crimes bill was opened for public comment this month – but the struggle to ensure lesbians enjoy a life free from violence is not over, say activists.

One night earlier this month, a lesbian couple were sleeping at home after having returned from a music festival in Nelspruit, Mpumalanga, in eastern South Africa. They were woken by loud noises outside. Shortly after, a group of men kicked down their door, entered the house and demanded sex.

“When I refused, one pushed me onto the bed, undressed and started to rape me,” one of the women later told a local newspaper. “Our cries fell on deaf ears as nobody came to our rescue.”

Both women were raped while the gang admonished them for being gay.

“They hurled insults at us and told us that they wanted to teach us … how it feels to be a woman,” said one of the women.

Corrective rape, the belief that heterosexual rape can “cure” or “correct” a woman’s homosexuality, is known to be common in South Africa, although the exact number of incidents is impossible to calculate. There is no separate category for corrective rape in the law, which means incidents are not officially recorded. Despite promises of a law to deal specifically with corrective rape in 2010, and years of pressure from lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) groups in South Africa, activists say concrete government action has been slow to materialize.

Many are now calling for corrective rape to be legally recognized as a hate crime, along with other hate-motivated acts, which could force government institutions and the police to provide specific responses, such as gender sensitivity training for staff dealing with these crimes and enhanced sentencing for perpetrators. A law could also push authorities to come up with a standardized response to incident reports with an emphasis on better data collection and monitoring of hate crimes to measure the extent of the problem, and the subsequent allocation of appropriate resources to address it.

“Even though the term [corrective rape] is often used, no such legal category exists,” says Sanja Bornman, managing attorney of the Lawyers for Human Rights‘ Gender Equality Program and chairperson of the Hate Crimes Working Group.

“Activists are calling for a law that specifically recognizes the motive of hate, which makes these crimes different for several reasons, including the implicit threat to other lesbians within these communities,” says Bornman.

While a draft hate crimes bill was opened to public comment on October 19 and obliges police and judicial officials to take sexual orientation and gender identity into account when considering motive, Bornman says the process of having it officially signed into law will be lengthy.

In the meantime, the government is taking small steps to address the issue of corrective rape, but activists say these small successes are often marred by a lack of capacity. In 2011, a Change.org petition demanding the South African government take action to stop corrective rape, received over 170,000 signatures. The result was the formation of the National Task Team on LGBTIQ issues (NTT), a partnership between the government and civil society groups aimed at addressing hate crimes, among other issues.

“The NTT holds significant promise but is hampered by a lack of capacity and coordination, especially at the provincial level,” says Bornman.

The Department of Justice also established a Rapid Response Team to respond to hate crimes and to address the backlog of reported incidents of hate crimes being committed against LGBTIQ persons. But this team, too, is ineffective, say critics.

Historically, South Africa has taken a progressive approach to LGBTIQ issues in the law – it was one of the first countries in the world to protect the right of sexual orientation in its constitution, for example.

But activists argue that laws aren’t much of a deterrent in the context of South Africa’s patriarchal society. In a recent survey commissioned by the Other Foundation, an African Trust aiming at advancing freedom and equality in Africa, an estimated 450,000 South Africans reported they had physically harmed women who “dress and behave like men in public” in the previous 12 months, and 700,000 had verbally abused gender nonconforming people.

Violence against lesbians in South Africa is taking place against a backdrop of sexual violence and machismo culture. More than 50,000 sexual offenses have been reported to the police every year since the Sexual Offenses Act was passed in 2007, with a decline in reported sexual offenses in the past five years. The Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust attributed this decrease to reduced reporting rather than reduced incidence of rape, thus those figures might only reflect a small portion of the real number of offenses.

Cases of corrective rape are rarely reported and even more rarely result in a conviction. But when perpetrators are punished, those cases often illustrate the disconnect between the country’s progressive law and patriarchal reality. In 2008, national female football star Eudy Simelane was murdered just outside Kwa Thema in Johannesburg. Simelane, who had been a vocal advocate of LGBTIQ rights, had been gang raped, beaten and stabbed 25 times in the legs, face and chest. Simelane’s trial was the first related to the murder of a lesbian women to end in a conviction. But in his sentencing, the judge ruled that her sexual orientation did not play a role in her rape and murder.

For the new law on hate crimes to be successful in preventing crimes like corrective rape, Bornman believes much more needs to be done to educate the public “about what it means to be LGBTIQ, and to ensure that those who do violate rights must be held accountable more consistently.”

‘It Was Death or a New Life’: The Teen Who Fled Syria in a Wheelchair

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 Charlotte Alfred

Nujeen Mustafa didn’t realize fleeing from Syria to Europe in a wheelchair would be considered extraordinary. Now in Germany, she has written a book about her journey. Speaking to Refugees Deeply, she says she hopes the attention will demonstrate that refugees are more than numbers.

The first time 17-year-old Nujeen Mustafa saw the sea, she and her wheelchair were hauled on to an overcrowded dinghy headed for Europe.

Growing up in the Syrian cities of Manbij and Aleppo, Mustafa – who was born with cerebral palsy – rarely left the house.

Last September, Mustafa traveled 3,500 miles across hostile borders and perilous seas to Germany in a wheelchair, with the help of her sister.

She describes the odyssey in a new book “Nujeen: One Girl’s Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair,” co-authored by veteran British journalist Christina Lamb.

A year after her journey, Mustafa lives outside Cologne, Germany, with two of her sisters and four nieces. In Syria, she was largely self-taught and learned English by watching American soap opera “Days of our Lives.” She now attends a school for people with disabilities and has learned German.

Meanwhile, Mustafa is still waiting for documents to allow her to stay in Germany and apply for her parents to join her from Turkey.

Refugees Deeply: What are your happiest memories of Syria?

Nujeen Mustafa: I mostly remember my home, the city, the balcony and our family gatherings to watch soccer. That was really fun.

Refugees Deeply: What do you wish more people would know about why people like your family are leaving Syria?

Mustafa: I’ve come to realize that people who have left wars, or witnessed wars, have just become numbers, and they are usually forgotten. It is the politicians who are the ones who are mentioned, and they are not good people for people to read about. I am terrified that in 50 years I’ll hear the names of the people who caused this tragedy in my country, and they’ll be the ones who are remembered, and not me or my family.

Refugees Deeply: What do you hope people would learn from reading your book?

Mustafa: The goal of the book was that people should not think of us as aliens. I speak the words of many other people when I say we are trying really hard, and we are trying to adapt ourselves to the new style of everything. People have to understand, living as a refugee is not easy. I’m not eager to learn German grammar. To rebuild your life from the zero point is not an easy thing to do.

When you end up sensing that people are skeptical, or are mean to you, after all you’ve been through, this is a really unpleasant feeling because you feel like a stranger, like an outcast. I’d like to reassure everyone that we are only guests – I hate the word “refugee” – and if we ever get the chance, we will gladly go back.

Refugees Deeply: What were the best and worst moments in your journey from Syria to Germany?

Mustafa: The best moment was when we decided to go. You think: “I’m going to pass a whole continent, and I’m going to be so far from home.” I told my sister, “This is going to be fun! You’ll never have this experience again in your whole life.”

Because I had this circle of people in my family that were trustworthy and my life was totally normal apart from not going to school, I think that caused me to be oblivious to how my condition was. So even with the wheelchair I thought, let’s try it, we have to do it. You never know what you are capable of until you try. The worst fear was death, but the journey looked possible. Either it would be death, or a new life.

The worst parts were the registration, the fear of getting fingerprinted, that you have to trust Google to know where you’re going and you are surrounded by police all the time. They treat you well, but you also feel like something they will gladly get rid of.

Refugees Deeply: How did doing this journey change you?

Mustafa: Now I know what I’m capable of doing, and that made me more determined, because I know more about what I can do. The reaction of other people to my journey really shocked me. My life was so normal to me, I forgot that it’s going to be considered a weird thing for a wheelchair user who didn’t go to school, to speak English and do this journey across Europe. I was really happy, because I have people’s support, I have friends and to feel useful was awesome.

Now I’m just happy that I’m away from bombing, from helicopters and cluster bombs. Even though it’s a really high-cost thing, because I left behind my family.

Refugees Deeply: In what ways has life in Germany been different to what you expected?

Mustafa: In many ways! Instead of waiting for lunch, I’m waiting to do my next interview. Also getting up early, doing stuff teenagers here do, and the sense of security. You have this internal peace in your heart. You dare to look forward to things, because there is no fear.

I had some difficulties. When I arrived in Germany I thought: “Oh my God, am I going to start speaking like them? Do things like they do?” You have to learn the German language very fast. At school, I was a little intimidated at first because I didn’t understand them well, and they’re always expecting something new, but you get used to it and now it’s fine.

I thought of it as the start of my new life, so I was happy for the challenge. I’m turning 18 years old soon, and it’s time to face life.

Refugees Deeply: What do you hope to do next?

Mustafa: I’m in ninth grade right now and I have one year left at school. I will try to do my best and be the best. I have this tendency to be number one. I’m a perfectionist and that’s crazy. I get a headache when my sisters’ pronunciation of German is totally bad, and it gets on my nerves.

I think when you’re in a new society, you tend to want to prove yourself, and that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m also trying not to appear awkward and adapt myself to the German lifestyle.

After school, plan A is to study physics and become an astronaut. Plan B is to continue writing. I will write about anything I know – it may be sport, or it may be stories because I have a really wild imagination. The six American winners of the Nobel prize were all immigrants, and I think that’s proof how useful immigrants can be to countries. I will try to help Germany; I will try to do my part.

As soon as I get my residence permit, I will apply for my passport and then I think directly we will fly back to Turkey to see my parents.

Refugees Deeply: Do you think it is more difficult for people with disabilities who become refugees?

Mustafa: As I said earlier, you never know what you are capable of. But I always think of people who are stuck in Syria with disabilities. I know how hard it is to wait for death to come. I think no matter what you should be happy you are alive. I think we must all have faith in God. No one is an extra number of the world’s population. I understand that our society does not understand people with disabilities as people in Europe do, but I think we can maintain hope, and hope for the best. I always say, nothing lasts forever. Even war does not.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

“NUJEEN: One Girl’s Incredible Journey from War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair” is in bookstores now, published by Harper Wave. Read an excerpt from the book here.

The Push to Get Every African Country to Criminalize Marital Rape

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Escaping Ebola: Danger from the Desert to the Deep Blue Sea

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 Hereward Holland

Fleeing Sierra Leone for Europe, Fatima and her family endured a dangerous journey across six countries, the Sahara Desert and conflict-ridden Libya. And that was all before they joined the thousands who continue to risk their lives crossing the Mediterranean.

Fatima has been on the run from an invisible terror for almost two years. It took her sister Omo, her brothers Muhammed and Yaya, and her uncle, also called Muhammed. Now she sits on the deck of the Sea Watch search-and-rescue ship 24 miles off the coast of Libya, exhausted and heavily pregnant, but safe.

Her bubbly 10-year-old son Daniel lies in her arms as she recounts her odyssey, which traversed six countries, the largest desert in the world, an ISIS insurgency and the hungry waves of the Mediterranean. “We came, little by little,” she says, stroking Daniel’s forehead.

In 2014, Ebola swept through Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, infecting 28,600 people and killing 11,300 of them. The hemorrhagic virus decimated Fatima’s hometown. “It was like during the war,” Fatima said, referring to Sierra Leone’s 11-year civil war in which over 50,000 people were killed. “In Port Loko, Ebola was the worst in all Sierra Leone,” Fatima says of the lush riverside settlement two hours’ drive from the country’s capital, Freetown.

Over a million people seeking asylum arrived in Europe by sea in 2015, mostly fleeing wars in the Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Meanwhile, others, like Fatima and Daniel, were running from other things: disease, oppression and poverty.

As the numbers swelled, Europe’s warm embrace soon turned cold and in March the Turkey-Greece sea route was closed. But while the number of arrivals has gone down, even more people have died at sea this year – highlighting the inadequacy of Europe’s response.

Fatima recalls how she had watched Ebola take whole families. She couldn’t let it take her young family, too. So in September 2014, she fled with Daniel and her husband, Musa, “because it was getting worse every day.”

They wanted to get as far away as possible, which meant first going through Guinea, then Senegal, Gambia, Burkina Faso and eventually ending up in Mali where smugglers offered to take them across the Sahara Desert.

Firm data are unavailable, but a recent report by 4mi, an affiliate of the Danish Refugee Council, says that anecdotal testimony suggests the crossing of the sea of sand could be even more deadly than the journey across the Mediterranean.

Based on interviews with over 1,300 migrants between 2014 and 2016, the report says 1,245 people perished crossing Libya, Sudan and Egypt, compared to 3,771 people killed or declared missingcrossing the Mediterranean in 2015. “The relatively small number of migrants interviewed by 4mi monitors suggests the 1,245 figure is a conservative estimate of those who actually perished.

“It would be safe to assume the number of migrants and refugees dying before reaching the shores of Egypt and Libya is even higher than the number of deaths at sea,” the report says.

Six months pregnant, Fatima and her family squeezed on to the top of a pick-up truck with 30 other people. For three days, they saw no sign of life. “The desert was worse than everything,” she says. “The water was disgusting. It tasted salty. Some died, some survived.”

Once in Libya, the family was robbed of everything, including Fatima’s phone. She and her family spent three months searching for a way to escape the country in the grips of an ISIS insurgency and cross the sea to sanctuary.

Last year, over a million people entered Europe by boat, most of them crossing to Greece from Turkey, although 150,000 crossed from Libya. On average, 10 people died every day, most of them on the longer and more dangerous journey from Libya.

This year, the number of people crossing to Greece has sharply declined, but the traffic on the route from Libya continues apace. Shipwrecks and boat capsizings on the Mediterranean have already claimed over 3,600 people this year, almost as many as last year. In one deadly week in May, the United Nations Refugee Agency estimated 880 people drowned.

By the time Fatima and her family had reached the point they were meant to cross from Libya to Italy, Fatima was sleeping on floors and due to give birth any day. Then their luck turned when they managed to persuade a smuggler to take them on board for free.

“The boat was full of people. People were fighting, people were yelling,” she says. “I suffered a lot. Even if you say you are pregnant, nobody listens to you. I was crying until I got here.”

The Sea Watch search-and-rescue ship arrived to meet them, and the crew plucked Fatima and Daniel from the overstuffed rubber boat. Musa had remained on the boat and would meet them later on the Italian naval vessel that would take them on to Italy.

Sea Watch is part of an informal flotilla of aid ships and European war ships saving thousands of people every day. But the head of mission, Ingo Werth, is concerned that the enterprise, while essential, is only a temporary and ineffectual solution. To really save lives, he says, would require political action.

“It’s a ridiculous game. I think it would be much safer to go to Libya, pick up the people and take them to the Italian shore. It would be much safer. You wouldn’t lose one life,” he says.

A UNHCR spokesman told News Deeply it is urging governments that are still accepting refugees to take in more people through organized channels, including resettlement, work or study schemes, family reunions and humanitarian visas.

For Fatima and her family, the journey is almost over – she hopes. Sitting on the Sea Watch deck, Daniel drifts off to sleep as Fatima begins to contemplate the end of life on the run.

“Daniel is very strong, but we are tired,” she says. “We are tired of that kind of life.”

Photo Essay: Acting and Chatting to End Early Marriage in Malawi

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

When Malawi passed a law banning child marriage last year, activists applauded it as a significant first step in ending the practice. Now some local groups are using song, theater and dialogue to spread the message and change attitudes towards early marriage.

Malawi has one of the highest rates of early marriage in the world, with one out of every two girls married by the age of 18, according to the umbrella group Girls Not Brides. After immense pressure from activists and grassroots organizations, Malawian President Peter Mutharika signed a bill last year that raised the minimum age of legal marriage from 15 to 18.

The new bill is seen as a significant step toward ending child marriage in the country and has been celebrated by activists and civil society. But according to Faith Phiri, the executive director ofGirls Empowerment Network, a grassroots organization operating to advance girls’ rights in Malawi that operates in Chiradzulu, “The job is far from done.”

The law gives support to those fighting early marriage by giving them the right, for example, to report to the police anyone seen forcing their young daughter to marry. “But solving this issue requires much more than new laws,” says Phiri. “Most importantly, it requires community participation and changes in attitude.”

So activists and local groups are working in rural communities to raise awareness about the new law. In their own ways, they are creating dialogue and spreading the message about the end of child marriage.

A Chief Takes the Law Into Her Own Hands

In Malawi, the tradition of local leadership means village and district chiefs have the final word over the affairs of their community. Decisions regarding marriage and divorce traditionally have to be approved by local authorities, giving village chiefs the power to end child marriages in their communities.

“I made the minimum age of marriage 22 in my own village,” says Ida Alli, the senior chief of Chiradzulu District.

Alli, who was declared a champion of women’s empowerment by former president Joyce Banda, takes pride in making it as hard as possible for people in her village to marry off their daughters. “If I hear rumors that someone might be interested in marrying their daughters off, I personally go to their home, I invite the man’s family, too, and talk to both of the families,” she says. “We talk for hours, and usually for days. I warn them about the dangers of marrying young and the importance of education.”

In the event that talking with the families doesn’t work and a girl needs further protection, Alli invites the girl to live with her at her farm and ensures that she goes to school. The chief also supports vulnerable girls in their efforts to find work and open small businesses.

Alli is aware of the privilege of her position as a traditional leader, and her potential influence on the decisions of her fellow villagers. “In our culture, reputation in one’s community is important,” says Alli. “A lot of people don’t want to do something that is not approved by traditional authorities.”

Fathers and Daughters Open Up

Fathers play a key role in determining whether or not their daughters will get married at a young age, but in patriarchal settings, fathers and daughters rarely have an open dialogue about the issue.

To help family members have honest discussions about early marriage, Girls Empowerment Network got together with community activists and launched Father-Daughter Chat Day. The group regularly runs events that bring together fathers, daughters and other community members to talk about their futures and dreams while they play games, sing and dance.

During one recent Father-Daughter Chat Day, a man held his teenage daughter’s hand and announced, “I promise not to marry my daughter off, and I will support her dreams of becoming a teacher as much as I can.” He then signed a piece of paper and handed it to the village chief as a guarantee that he would keep his promise.

Then the crowd of villagers cheered and applauded as dozens of fathers followed the same ritual, publicly pledging to not marry off their daughters.

Theater and Singing for Those Having Second Thoughts

If the efforts of the village leaders and the father-daughter chats aren’t enough, the girls of Chiradzulu have a secret weapon: Their haunting singing.

Every weeka few local girls aged between 11 and 16 come together after school and compose songs against child marriage. In their most popular song, they ask their communities to support them with their education instead of marrying them off.

“Community theater, music and art have all proven to be great ways for communities to start a dialogue around the issue of child marriage,” says Lakshmi Sundaram, executive director of Girls Not Brides. “They can also help girls and their communities understand and express some of the harmful consequences of the practice.”

Moreen, a 16-year-old community theater actor and an early marriage activist, is sitting on the ground, looking intimidated by the older actor playing her mother-in-law. A child marriage survivor and a mother of two, Moreen recently escaped an abusive marriage that left her HIV positive and moved back in with her family. Now back in school, Moreen is using her passion for theater to get people in her village to understand why girls should wait to get married.

The show stops and one of the actors hands a microphone to a member of the audience to discuss how issues like early marriage or domestic abuse should be tackled. “So, how do you deal with a situation like this at home?” the actors ask the audience, and the crowd starts to buzz with suggestions.

“I don’t want the things that happened to me to happen to other girls,” Moreen says. “Also, acting is a lot of fun.”

South Sudanese Women Carry Bulk of the Burden in Uganda Refugee Camps

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 Lorena Ríos

With their husbands fighting in the civil war or struggling to find work, the South Sudanese women staying in Uganda’s refugee camps often find themselves responsible for supporting their families on their own.

ADJUMANI, Uganda – When violence between government and opposition forces broke out in South Sudan’s capital, Juba, in July, Regina fled to Uganda with her husband and their seven children. After a month in the newly established Pagarinya refugee settlement in northern Uganda, her husband left. “My husband went back because there is no work in the camp,” says Regina, 37, sitting surrounded by her children on a Sunday morning in late September. Since his departure, she has not been able to communicate with him and has not received remittances. “I put my faith in God,” she said resolutely.

The recent clashes in Juba sparked an exodus of South Sudanese fleeing into neighboring countries such as Uganda, where three-quarters of the refugees have headed since July – more than 85 percent of them women and children. Poverty, lack of employment and education, and dependency on unreliable food aid only exacerbate the desperate conditions in many settlements. And often, women find themselves coping with these challenges on their own. With their husbands either staying behind in South Sudan to fight or struggling to find work in the refugee camps, many women have to take on the roles of breadwinner and head of the household on top of their traditional responsibilities.

“The majority of people in the settlement picking wood are women,” says Regina. “I go find firewood and sometimes my daughter comes as well.” For Regina, like many other women staying in Pagarinya, collecting wood is a four-hour task, as cutting trees is prohibited inside the settlement. A Ugandan shop overflowing with firewood and timber sits across from her plot, but Regina can’t afford to buy any. If she wants to cook for her family, she has to wake up at 5 a.m. to find firewood.

According to research by Molly Kellogg of the U.N. Women’s Peace and Security team in Uganda, the country’s limited resources for meeting the most basic protection services inside the settlements “compound the burden of violence South Sudanese women refugees bear.” Furthermore, U.N. Women found that in Kiryandongo refugee settlement, 68 percent of women refugees suffer from psychological trauma. “The breakdown of structures, forced displacement of people and separation of families have increased the prevalence of gender-based violence in the refugee settlements,” writes Kellogg in the report, which is not yet published.

Uganda’s progressive policy towards refugees grants them one 98 foot by 98 foot (30m by 30m) plot of land per household. However, this is not enough for women to feed their families and pay for school fees. To make enough to support their families, women often have to work in the fields around the settlements – making as little as 2,000 Ugandan shillings ($0.60) for a full day’s work – and sell a portion of their food rations.

In Ayilo refugee settlement, a few kilometers away from Pagariyna, a group of about 50 women gathers to talk about the trauma brought on by years of war and displacement. Even though most of them have been refugees since civil war broke out in South Sudan in 2013, none of them have yet reached self-reliance. “Our husbands don’t work, they stay at home,” says one of the women in the group. “Men are embarrassed to work in the fields since it is ‘women’s work.’”

The title of “refugee” is only for women, one of them says, to which the group quietly cheers, lamenting the precariousness of life in displacement and the challenges of carrying out their traditional roles as well as the added responsibility of ensuring the survival of their families.

With her husband fighting in South Sudan, Christine, 29, from Western Equatoria, relies on her children to help make ends meet. She has been living in Boroli refugee settlement in Adjumani district with her four children and five foster children since 2014. “My husband doesn’t get a salary,” she says. “He hasn’t earned anything in five months and we don’t have land to cultivate in the settlement.”

To pay for her children’s school fees, Christine sells food rations and works in the fields for about $3 a day. Her children help her pick groundnuts. And still, she can only afford school for one of her children at a time. At the moment, she’s sending her five-year-old son because he is the strongest, she says: “He doesn’t cry as much.”

Back in Pagariyna, Regina sits under the only tree in her plot and watches as people return to their plots after Sunday service. “I want to go to church, but I can’t,” she says. “I have to cook for the children.” Nearby, one of her children, a toddler, is chopping wood, letting the axe fall on a tree branch twice his size.

Reporting for this story was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation as part of its Africa Great Lakes Initiative.