Africa
| Pregnancy Illness Devastates 100,000 Women Yearly. [Africa] Alarmed by a new study that found millions of African women continue to suffer and even die from the pregnancy-related condition fistula, U.N. officials and public health activists are asking rich nations for help in setting up treatment facilities on the continent. |
| New Database Summarizes Effects of U.S. Policy. [Africa] The Global Gag Rule Impact Project examines and reports the devastating impacts of the Global Gag Rule, which bans funding from going to international organizations that discuss or provide abortions. Case studies for several African countries discuss how the rule has affected reproductive health services and HIV/AIDS prevention programs. |
| Petition on the Ratification of the Protocol on the Rights of Women. [Africa]. Many women and their families experience social, cultural and economic rights abuses and political discrimination on a daily basis. Physical violence, vulnerability to life-threatening diseases most notably HIV/AIDS, poor educational opportunities and legal barriers around rights to property combine to keep women in Africa as second class citizens as well as inhibiting their ability to contribute fully to the prosperity of the continent. |
| Things Have to Change, and They Will! [Algeria] There are many forms of violence against women in Algeria, including verbal harassment, threats, repudiation, beating, sexual abuse, rape, denying of individual civil rights for women, forced marriages, etc. The violence that has ravaged Algeria since 1988, including the political violence, has also subjected women to particular forms of violence and atrocities. However, Meriem Belaala, president of the “Association SOS Femmes en Détresse”, is optimistic and believes that women's rights in Algeria are progressively going to be strengthened. |
| The Illiterate Surgeon. [Ethiopia] Just about the worst thing that can happen to a teenage girl in this world is to develop an obstetric fistula that leaves her trickling bodily wastes, stinking and shunned by everyone around her. That happened four decades ago to Mamitu Gashe. But the most amazing thing about Ms. Mamitu is not what she endured but what she has become. |
| Lions Free Kidnapped Girl . [Ethiopia] The United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia are by abduction, practiced in rural areas where the majority of the country's 71 million people live. |
| Contraceptives -- Both Needed and Scorned. [Kenya] As the international community marks World Refugee Day, a Somali woman's tale of how she helped fellow refugees terminate pregnancies has highlighted the shortcomings of reproductive health care in refugee camps. |
| A Muslim Woman's Step for Freedom. [Morocco] An erotic novel written under a pseudonym might normally struggle to find a mainstream publisher and a wide readership. Not so, it seems, when it is penned by a Muslim woman living in a traditional Arab society. |
| Women's Rights Under Sharia. [Nigeria] A number of states in northern Nigeria have implemented laws based on an extremist interpretation of Islamic law, which considers sex out of wedlock a crime punishable by death, and pregnancy is sufficient evidence to convict an unmarried woman of the crime. However, the oath of a man who denies having had sex with a woman out of wedlock is often considered sufficient proof of "innocence" unless four independent and reputable witnesses testify to seeing him take part in the act. Several women have been sentenced to death after bearing a child out of marriage since 2000. |
| Woman Named South African Deputy President. [South Africa] President Thabo Mbeki appointed South Africa's first woman deputy president to fill a post left vacant because of a corruption scandal. |
| Rain Queen Laid to Rest. [South Africa] The Rain Queen, Makobo Modjadji the Sixth, was buried at the Royal cemetery at Ga-Modjadji in Limpopo. At 25, she was the youngest rain queen and the first to be educated. Apart from ruling over the Balobedu tribe, the queen is also considered to be a rain maker. |
| Election Was Undemocratic. [Tunisia] Neila Charchour Hachicha is the founder of Tunisia's Parti Libéral Méditerranéen. Born in Tunis in 1955 and trained as an architect, Hachicha is the daughter of a prominent Tunisian diplomat. Hachicha has become one of Tunisia's chief dissident voices, advocating an end to the one-party state and the establishment of a democratic, multiparty liberal system in its place. |
| Status of Women. [Zimbabwe] More than six months after the Zimbabwe Supreme Court shocked equal rights campaigners by relegating African women to the status of 'junior males' within the family, many Zimbabweans are beginning to wake up to the reality of the ruling. They are worried about its long-term impact, particularly on women's rights. "There's nothing left of the gains women's rights have made in the past 20 years," Welshman Ncobe, the country's leading authority on constitutional and family law, warned after the ruling in a case involving inheritance rights. |