Breaking Barriers: Why Free & Public Education Should be Every Woman’s Right

This month, government and civil society organization representatives gathered in New York for the United Nations’ 67th session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) to discuss technology as a tool to facilitate access to education for women and girls.

Breaking the Link between ‘Polycrisis’ and Poverty

This year marks the halfway point— eight years in and eight years out— of the UN Sustainable Development Goals to end poverty and reduce inequalities.

The Caribbean’s Role in the Transformation of Agri-Food Systems

The global food security crisis reveals an increase in the undernourishment prevalence, reaching higher than in 2015, when countries first agreed to eradicate hunger by 2030 as one of the SDG targets. In the Caribbean, between 2014 and 2021, hunger increased by 2.3 percentage points, affecting 16.4 percent of its population by 2021. Moreover, the Caribbean is a net importer of almost all the main food groups such as cereals, dairy products, fruits and vegetables (except the Dominican Republic), meat and vegetable oils.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Women and Girls: Innovation and Higher Education

In September 2020, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action for women’s rights celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was, however, a bittersweet commemoration, mixing joy for the progress in gender equality achieved since 1995, and the stark realization about the multidimensional gaps awaiting tackling and the new divides brought by the social consequences of COVID-19.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Digital Inclusion is Vital for Strengthening Women’s Rights in Africa

The internet has a pivotal role to play in empowering women and girls across Africa, but preexisting forms of gender discrimination and marginalization are underpinning a widening digital gender divide.

International Women’s Day, 2023
The Power of Technology—& the Increased Exclusion, Inequalities & Gender Discrimination

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tremendous power of technology and innovation has become clear to the world. However, it has also increased exclusion, discrimination, and inequalities -- especially for women and girls.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Empower Her

On International Women’s Day, let us remind ourselves of the power of education. We have all benefited from an education that less than a century ago was not a given for a girl and which still remains a distant utopia for millions of young girls.

Why Do 800 Mothers a Day – 1 Every 2 Minutes– Die from Preventable Causes?

The answer is that there are alarming setbacks for maternal health care and, in many cases, even a total lack of maternity services, which threaten to further raise the number of these tragic preventable deaths one million or more a year by 2030.

Our AIDS Response Must Acknowledge and Bridge Gendered Digital Inequalities

Recent crises have pushed the gender inequality gap even wider and new technology has brought new threats to women’s autonomy and safety. This year’s International Women's Day celebrated under the theme “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality” is an opportunity to strengthen efforts to uplift and empower women and girls’ digital participation to ultimately improve their lives.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Promoting Gender Equality and Closing the Digital Divide

The accelerating pace of digitalization has ushered humanity into a whole different era of information and communication. Today, digitalization permeates every aspect of our lives, socio-economically and politically.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Her Land, Her Rights: Advancing Gender Equality & Land Restoration Goals

When it comes to land, gender inequalities are pervasive. Today, nearly half of the global agricultural workforce is female – yet less than one in five landholders worldwide are women ¹.  

International Women’s Day, 2023
To Strengthen Women’s Resilience to Disasters, Make Wealthiest Pay Their Fair Share

She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead.

International Women’s Day, 2023
A New Global Architecture to Defend & Promote Rights of Women & Girls

If you want to have a good reading on women and young girls’ activism, there is a high chance that you have missed an incredibly interesting report.

Nigeria’s Unbanked, Poor Get Reprieve After Court Rules Naira Deadline Unconstitutional

Nigerians confronted by hardships over the scarcity of the newly redesigned naira notes in conjunction with the country's cashless policy introduced by the apex bank have had a last-minute reprieve from a policy that had disrupted their lives and exacerbated hunger.

Most African Govts (3 in 4) Spend More on Arms, Less on Farms

The data is shocking: three-quarters of African Governments have already reduced their agricultural budgets while paying almost double that on arms.

The Dynamics of Violent Extremism in sub-Saharan Africa

There is no better environment for the expansion of violent extremist groups than a vacuum in state authority. It provides ideal conditions for these groups to prey on existing and historical grievances, fill the void with promises of financial support, access to services and attention for marginalized, neglected communities.

Wildlife Is Much More than a Safari. And It Is at Highest Risk of Extinction

Wildlife is indeed far much more than a safari or an ‘exotic’ ornament: as many as four billion people –or an entire half the whole world's population– rely on wild species for income, food, medicines and wood fuel for cooking.

International Women’s Day, 2023
Unleashing Our Region’s Most Untapped Potential: Harnessing the Digital Age to Empower Women & Girls

New technologies and innovations are reshaping our world and its future, often at a dizzying pace. Yet women and girls continue to be left behind in this burgeoning digital universe. How, then, can we harness these developments to create a better future for all of us?

Climate Displacement & Migration in South East Asia

Global warming and climate breakdown are going to be disruptive to say the least. Humanity’s insistence on unsustainable development and rising greenhouse gas emissions will make the settlements of millions of people increasingly prone to extreme weather events and full-blown natural disasters.

Welcome To the Vegetable Garden of Europe – ‘The Greenhouses of Death’

Chances are that the fruits and vegetables sold in European supermarkets have been picked and packed by a migrant worker in southern Spain. By the tens of thousands, they work there, in sweltering hot plastic greenhouses - often underpaid and without residence permit - in the vegetable garden of Europe. "Cheap vegetables, yes. But at what price?"

‘Ticking Time Bombs’ for the Most Defenceless: The Children (II)

While the world’s biggest powers and their giant private corporations continue to attach high priority to their military –and commercial– dominance, both of them being shockingly profitable, entire generations are being lost to deadly armed conflicts, devastating climate catastrophes, diseases, hunger and more imposed impoverishment.