Shifra Ainomugisha from Uganda receives the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year award from the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Shirley Botchwey. Credit: Commonwealth

By Kizito Makoye
LONDON & DAR ES SALAAM, Jun 25 2026 (IPS)

Before anyone called her an innovator, before artificial intelligence entered the conversation, before solar-powered cold rooms, before the language of sustainable development, Shifra Ainomugisha knew food loss in its painful form.

At dawn, she would grab a bucket and walk into rows of tomato plants on her family’s farm in Western Uganda to collect what had already been lost.

The tomatoes looked healthy from a distance. But many had softened, burst, or spoilt before reaching the market – the true meaning of food loss.

“I used to wake up every morning to collect rotten tomatoes and throw them away while trying to save whatever remained,” she recalled.

Almost half the family’s harvest disappeared this way.

Yet the labour never stopped.

Her parents worked relentlessly. Seasons came and went. Fields produced food. But income remained painfully uncertain.

“Meanwhile, we struggled to pay school fees,” she said. “Some children dropped out of school even though we worked very hard during holidays on the farm. We were producing food but could not earn enough money to support our education.”

Shifra Ainomugisha poses beside a solar-powered irrigation system in Uganda. She was named the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year. Her contribution includes combining renewable energy and AI-enabled agricultural support to help smallholder farmers increase productivity and reduce post-harvest losses. Credit: Solafam, Uganda

Mission Accomplished

Those childhood memories – of abundance turning into loss and hard work failing to translate into opportunity – would eventually shape a mission that has now earned Ainomugisha recognition as the regional winner for Africa under SDG 2: Zero Hunger in the 2026 Commonwealth Youth Awards.

Selected from almost 1,000 applicants across the Commonwealth’s 56 member states after a two-stage adjudication process involving 57 judges, Ainomugisha joined 19 finalists recognised for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals through innovation and community impact.

But the award was not her only accolade.

Today, the Ugandan farmer and innovator earned the prestigious title of 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year at the 2026 Commonwealth Youth Awards ceremony in London.

The Commonwealth Secretary-General, Shirley Botchwey, presented the award to Ainomugisha.

In her remarks Botchwey congratulated all the finalists.

“You are already winners. To be selected from across 56 nations is a testament to your courage and your creativity. You embody the very best of our family. You have shown resilience in the face of challenge and innovation in the face of constraint.”

She continued, “Today is not about recognition alone – it is about momentum. It is not about isolated excellence — it is about collective advancement. Together, we will continue to strengthen the Commonwealth Youth Programme as a flagship vehicle for youth development in the Commonwealth.”

A Journey That Began With a Big Question

For the young Ugandan entrepreneur, however, the journey did not begin with awards.

It began with a question she carried since childhood:

How can people who grow food still remain hungry?

“Nobody should die of hunger,” she tells IPS.

“Because we are here to help. Farmers are doing agriculture, and we are solving food waste, which means we are fighting hunger. That is one of the SDGs we are working on.”

Today, Ainomugisha serves as co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of  Solafam, Uganda Ltd, a social enterprise using solar-powered technologies and artificial intelligence to help smallholder farmers reduce food losses, improve yields and increase incomes.

Her work combines three interconnected interventions: solar-powered cold storage, solar irrigation systems and an AI-enabled advisory platform known as Lean AI – a WhatsApp chatbot designed to guide farmers on planting decisions, irrigation timing, pest management, post-harvest handling and market access.

Together, the technologies aim to solve one of Africa’s challenging agricultural paradoxes: producing food but losing too much of it before it reaches consumers.

According to regional agricultural estimates, post-harvest losses continue to absorb a huge share of food production across sub-Saharan Africa, undermining incomes, nutrition and rural resilience. Smallholder farmers – who form the backbone of food systems – are particularly vulnerable because many lack access to storage, irrigation and agricultural extension services.

For Ainomugisha, those statistics have faces.

Her mother’s face.

Her father’s.

Her neighbours’.

And her own.

“I come from a tomato-growing family,” she said.

“Growing up, we experienced food wastage and low returns despite all the hard labour we invested in farming.”

Her father became one of her earliest inspirations.

Although he never had the opportunity to pursue formal education, he constantly experimented with solutions.

“He tried solving it by buying a diesel irrigation pump to increase yields because we only have one major farming season,” she explained.

“If you don’t make enough money during that season, the whole year becomes difficult.”

He attempted to preserve produce in improvised storage spaces.

But tomatoes continued spoiling.

Years later, after gaining access to education and exposure to technology, Ainomugisha began thinking differently.

“First of all, it wasn’t simply my decision alone,” she reflected.

“It began with my father. My father did not get the opportunity to go to school, but I did. I felt I had a better chance to solve the problem than he did.”

That conviction followed her into university.

Shifra Ainomugisha (centre, in reflective vest), co-founder and CEO of Solafam, Uganda Ltd, stands with farmers and community members beside a solar panel installation that supports climate-smart agriculture initiatives. Through renewable energy and farmer-centred innovation, the project seeks to reduce food loss and improve rural incomes. Credit: Solafam, Uganda

Solar to AI to Filling Knowledge Gaps

Together with colleagues, she founded Solar Farm while still studying.

Initially, the concept was straightforward: cold-chain storage.

Support from entrepreneurship initiatives – including LEAP Africa – helped transform the idea into a functioning enterprise.

But customers quickly changed the direction.

People arriving at the cold rooms often revealed a deeper challenge.

Some had little produce to preserve.

Storage alone was not enough.

The team expanded.

Solar irrigation came next.

The goal was to help farmers reduce dependence on expensive diesel fuel and enable year-round production.

Farmers could access irrigation systems through a flexible financing model – paying 20 percent upfront and then making weekly payments of approximately USD 1.60 until ownership.

“We wanted to create a solution that farmers could actually afford,” she said.

Then came the next leap: artificial intelligence.

Ainomugisha says the AI component emerged from another observation.

Many farmers lacked access to agricultural training.

Knowledge gaps were driving losses.

“Many people are farming, but they are not always doing it the right way,” she explained.

“You might find a tomato farmer irrigating in the morning, yet tomatoes are better irrigated in the afternoon or evening.”

The team launched Lean AI – a chatbot accessible through WhatsApp that provides real-time agricultural guidance.

Farmers can ask questions and receive recommendations on farming practices, pest control, irrigation and post-harvest management.

The system is now being adapted to work via real-time messaging protocol known as USSD to reach users with basic mobile phones.

“We use AI to continue training farmers even when we are not physically present,” she said.

“We believe this will improve yields, increase incomes and eventually change the narrative that farming is only for the poor.”

Shifra Ainomugisha poses beside a solar-powered irrigation system in Uganda. She is combining renewable energy and AI-enabled agricultural support to help smallholder farmers increase productivity and reduce post-harvest losses. Credit: Solafam, Uganda

Changing the Narrative

That narrative matters deeply to her.

“In Uganda, there is a narrative that agriculture is for poor people,” she said.

“That is sad.”

She pauses.

“People believe that because despite hard work, they cannot escape poverty.”

One of the defining moments came in 2023.

After struggling to convince local markets to host their first cold room, the team installed it at her family home.

Her mother became the first customer.

Then came neighbours.

Then more farmers.

Initially, usage was free.

People needed proof.

One woman – a friend of Ainomugisha’s mother who traded fruits and vegetables – became an unexpected validation.

She stored produce for a month.

Fresh vegetables that once spoilt within days remained viable for nearly two weeks.

That extra time allowed her to wait for better prices instead of selling under pressure.

“She later realised how much it was helping her,” Ainomugisha said.

“Now she earns more from farming than she did before.”

Solafam eventually introduced a pay-per-use model.

The impact, Ainomugisha says, became measurable.

“What makes us proud is that we have increased farmers’ incomes by 28 percent.”

“We have also reduced post-harvest losses by about 30 percent.”

Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General (Programmes), Tanmaya Lal, Commonwealth Secretary-General, Shirley Botchwey, and Commonwealth Deputy Secretary-General (Corporate), Tania Baumann, pose with the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year and Africa Regional Winner, Shifra Ainomugisha, at the Commonwealth Youth Awards ceremony in London. Credit: Commonwealth Secretariat

Winning Reaction

Those outcomes helped propel Solafam onto the Commonwealth stage. The Commonwealth Youth Awards are an initiative of the Commonwealth Youth Programme, which has supported youth development work in member countries for over 50 years.

“I am honoured to be named the 2026 Commonwealth Young Person of the Year.  This recognition is not only personal but also represents the farmers and communities in Uganda whom we serve.  It also affirms that solutions built from lived experience can create real impact. I cannot wait to continue this journey with the support of the Commonwealth and its remarkable network of partners.”

The Awards recognise young leaders advancing development solutions across member states.

For more than a decade, the programme has provided visibility, networks and funding opportunities to support youth-led initiatives.

This year’s finalists span sectors ranging from climate action and health innovation to entrepreneurship and communications.

For Ainomugisha, being selected is an honour.

“I’m glad to be a finalist for the Commonwealth Youth Award and a regional winner for Africa,” she said.

She believes three things contributed most to the selection.

Sustainability.

Impact.

Accessibility.

“First of all, our project is sustainable. We have maintained it from 2022 until now.”

“Secondly, we are creating meaningful impact.”

“Also, our technology is affordable for smallholder farmers.”

But perhaps what distinguishes her work most is who it centres.

Women.

“Because this problem is personal to me,” she said.

“I did not hear someone else’s story and decide to solve it.”

“I am a woman, and I saw how my mother worked every day on the farm, yet our lives were not improving.”

Across much of Africa, women form a large share of the agricultural workforce while often facing unequal access to land, financing, technologies and extension services.

Ainomugisha says designing with women in mind is not a strategy.

It is lived experience.

“Of course, we also work with men, but the majority of our beneficiaries are women.”

As global conversations increasingly focus on artificial intelligence, her message is clear.

Technology alone is not enough.

It must be accessible.

Affordable.

And designed around people’s realities.

Her next ambition is expansion—making agricultural intelligence available even to farmers without smartphones.

The larger vision is not simply digitising agriculture.

It is restoring dignity to farming.

The memory of rotten tomatoes remains.

So does the memory of school fees that almost went unpaid.

But today, those memories no longer represent failure.

They represent the beginning of a different harvest.

One where innovation is measured not only in algorithms or solar panels but also in whether families who grow food can finally afford to eat, learn and dream.

And for Ainomugisha, that future has already started.

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Excerpt:

Cécile Koffi and her colleagues collect salt from concrete pans on the beach in rural Benin. Credit: Neha Banka/IPS

By Neha Banka
OUIDAH, Benin, Jun 25 2026 (IPS)

It is barely noon, and a group of women sit near the beach on the outskirts of Djégbadji village, in West Africa’s Benin, sifting through mounds of salt harvested from the Gulf of Guinea’s ocean.

Large concrete vats covered with black tarpaulin show traces of white salt sediment as the seawater slowly evaporates under Benin’s midday sun – except that instead of using fire, the group uses solar energy.

The women have been working as part of a grassroots project called ProSEL Benin, a collaborative effort of the governments of Benin along with India, Brazil and South Africa (IBSA) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) that focuses on strengthening local salt-producing communities to access sustainable energy sources and create medium-sized enterprises for the production and marketing of local iodised salt.

Salt production is one of the main income-generating activities for the populations living in and around southern Benin.

Generations-Old Traditions

“In Benin’s coastal areas, women skim the salt from the coastal marshes… they put up their little huts and boil salt water in massive vats over an open fire inside the hut. They then sell the ‘cooked’ salt at the markets and on the roadsides. It’s an unhealthy practice for various reasons,” says Robina Marks, who served as South Africa’s ambassador to Benin and Togo from 2021 to 2024 and was closely involved in the implementation of the IBSA-backed project.

The traditional method of collecting and cooking the salt has been practised in Benin since at least the 15th century, primarily by women, and involves collecting saline soil, evaporating the water and filtering brine by burning chopped mangrove wood to produce salt.

The practice harms women’s health due to how they collect the salt and the conditions in which it is prepared.

“It takes a very long time and is very labour-intensive,” Marks says.

The ProSEL Benin project attempts to change this traditional practice and make the process of collecting salt healthier and cleaner.

Salt-making is an important source of income for communities here, relying heavily on the cutting down of mangroves.

ProSEL Benin’s research estimates that approximately 20,000 cubic metres of mangrove wood are cut down annually in coastal Benin for use as firewood in Indigenous salt-making.

The UNDP and the Benin government discussed the new method about five years ago.

“But the idea came from the people on the ground, who had the needs. The Benin government came up with the project and wanted to work with UNDP,” says Aoualé Mohamed Abchir, who served as the UNDP Resident Representative in Benin from 2020 to 2024 and was instrumental in its development.

ProSEL Benin, Abchir says, is an attempt to advance three out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development: gender equality; decent work and economic growth; and responsible consumption and production. This project aims to help rural women in Benin make and sell clean salt and become self-reliant.

In 2021, the Board of Directors of the India, Brazil and South Africa Facility for Poverty and Hunger Alleviation Fund awarded USD 1 million to the UNDP to implement the salt project.

IBSA is an example of collaborative efforts between the three developing countries, as well as a South-South cooperation initiative within the United Nations that focuses on development cooperation among developing countries in the Global South.

When 60-year-old Cécile Koffi was first introduced to the salt project, it took some time to convince her to switch from the traditional method of making salt.

“There are a lot of things the salt does. Salt is intrinsic to the community’s women,” Koffi says, examining the day’s salt collection.

Salt is culturally important to Benin, and its uses go beyond culinary applications.

“It is not only used as food, but it also has a cultural aspect to it. It is regarded as sacred and is used in many of the vodoun practices,” says Marks.

“When we go to the market to sell our produce, we sprinkle salt on the ground and sweep it up before setting up our spot. It is believed that every bad spirit will go away if we do that. Salt is very important. We use it in a lot of rituals,” says Koffi.

Julienne Dekon collects saline water using the traditional method to make salt in rural Benin. Credit: Neha Banka/IPS

These deep-rooted cultural beliefs were one reason why it was difficult to get the women to change and adapt to the ProSEL Benin project, even though it was backed by the Benin government, explains Abchir.

Traditionally salt production is a cultural activity carried out by the Xwla populations of the coastal zone in Benin. The traditional production of salt by the salt farmers in the villages is subject to many prohibitions related to working days, village deities, and so on.

“The name Xwlajè is also intimately linked to the Xwla ethnic group,” says Luc Obale, national project director of ProSEL Benin. The Benin government has been working to certify the salt so that it can be sold with the label ‘Xwlajè’ to identify its cultural origin.

“The old method is their ancestral way of producing salt, so it has significance. Sometimes when you change the way you produce something, some people believe it may have negative implications. The women could have got the salt directly from the sea, but there is a reason why they weren’t doing that before the project,” says Abchir.

The ProSEL Benin project targeted five areas in coastal Benin where people have traditionally harvested salt: Sèmè Kpodji, Grand Popo, Ouidah, Kpomasse, Comè and Lokossa.

“In those other areas, people have been more open to using sea water to make salt, but Ouidah is Ouidah. It is very special. They believe that the best salt can only be cooked, not dried. They believe that they have to cook it,” explains Abchir.

Ground-Level Interventions

The ProSEL Benin project is not the first intervention programme that has attempted to make local salt cleaner and more environmentally sustainable, but it has been successful because caseworkers managed to get it off the ground, says Cessi Marlene Capo-Chichi, who works with UNDP as a project coordinator.

“Organisations have struggled to convince the local community to change their ways,” she says.

Some 500 metres from where the ProSEL project is ongoing by the beach, within the limits of Djégbadji village, is a coastal lagoon where women work inside a network of thatched huts, making salt in the traditional way.

“The traditional way of making salt is more laborious,” says 45-year-old Julienne Dekon, lifting a cane basket heavy with saline soil collected from the marshy land that surrounds her.

These days, the Benin government prevents the chopping down of mangroves for wood, and women are encouraged to use dried palm leaves and coconut shells for fuel instead.

Dekon says that she wants to continue working using the traditional method, although many of her friends have now switched to the modern method of salt making using seawater after joining the ProSEL project.

As she begins boiling the saline water inside her hut, smoke fills the small space.

“When I have to work a lot, I do get tired. But I don’t know much about how this affects my health,” says Dekon.

Dekon doesn’t remember when she started making salt, but it has been a very long time, and she is now accustomed to preparing using the traditional methods.

“The method on the beach (ProSEL project) is easy to do. But when it is raining, it is not possible to do it outside. But I can continue to make salt even in the rain, because I collect the soil and start cooking indoors. The two systems are too different,” says Dekon, referring to the open-air concrete salt vats by the sea that are susceptible to the vagaries of the weather.

However, the wet weather also affects the women using traditional methods.

From April to August, Benin experiences its rainy season, with short spells of rain between September and November, and the low-lying marshes near the lagoons are prone to flooding.

“We are pushing them to switch to the ProSEL system because during the rainy season the area where the salt is produced traditionally is inaccessible. It is completely flooded, and so for more than half the year, there is no production of salt. We needed to give them alternatives,” says Abchir.

While it is easier for the women to avoid the rains by tracking the weather, it is harder to bypass the persistent floods, he says.

Abchir says the project focused on giving the women access to seawater to make sure they could make salt and have steady income through the year.

“Using the seawater to make salt is less painful. You just get the water and let the sun evaporate it. You don’t have to cook it, and it is safer. You can also make more money,” says Abchir.

Just down the unpaved road from where Dekon works, a woman stands by the highway selling salt.

The difference between the salt produced by women like Dekon, who have been working using traditional methods and those engaged with ProSEL Benin is clear: the traditional salt is visibly yellow-brown with streaks of grey, colours that come due to the lack of a filtration process. The ProSEL Benin salt is clean and white, fortified with iodine that the women mix into the salt just before filling it into bags.

A one-kilogram bag of salt produced by women using the traditional method, sold in local marketplaces and by the road, would cost approximately 800 West African CFA franc (approx. USD 2), while the same amount produced by ProSEL Benin would sell for 1,000 CFA.

For Public Consumption

ProSEL research indicates there are about 4,000 women harvesting salt in Benin. The country imports most of its salt from countries like Ghana, Senegal and India because its Indigenous salt farming covers only a small fraction of the country’s actual needs.

Stakeholders realised that it was not enough to teach the women how to make cleaner salt; they also had to be given access to markets to sell it. One market that the project aims to tap into is the World Food Programme (WFP) under the UN’s Benin office, which helps feed over 1 million children annually with daily school meals. The WFP has been undertaking research to understand the feasibility of purchasing and using salt through these cooperatives led by women under ProSEL.

The Benin government has ambitious plans for the harvested salt.

In December 2025, Benin’s food safety agency, ABSSA, the Agence Béninoise de Sécurité Sanitaire des Aliments, certified the salt for public consumption, after which the salt was prepared to be sold under the label Xwlajè.

Presently, the Xwlajè salt is sold in seven different supermarket chains across Cotonou, as well as in standalone shops located in the municipalities of Porto-Novo, Cotonou and Comè.

“In addition, steps are underway to market Xwlajè salt in the duty-free shops at Cotonou International Airport,” says Obale.

Abchir adds that a process that would take the women six hours now takes them two. Bringing about change has been difficult, he says, because it involved convincing people who were accustomed to working in a specific way for generations.

He admits that they wouldn’t have been able to do much without winning the trust of the women, their husbands who still oversee their lives, the mayor and the local community leaders.

“The local team went down to the women and understood their needs so that sensibilities could be understood and it would be accepted. It is very difficult in Benin when outsiders come in and tell them what to do.”

Abchir says that there is a high risk of undoing all that work if there is mistrust in the community towards the project.

“They are accepting the changes. Now we are trying to build construction for storage, keeping machines, etc. It is a sensitive phase, but we are hopeful that it will work.”

Benin’s government has prioritised tourism over the last few years, and its Indigenous salt farming practices are a key part of its plans to introduce tourists to Beninese culture.

The ProSEL project does not aim to fully remove the traditional method of salt farming, says Obale.

“The modern salt production unit is located not far from the traditional production site to allow tourists to see the difference between the two production methods,” he says.

Mireille Adjovi, a new mother in her 20s, has come to work at the ProSEL site with her infant sleeping on her back.

“With the money I get, I am able to take care of my children. I will be able to send them to school. I think about myself last: my husband and children come first. Maybe the men give money for the household, but women still suffer a lot. If women need something, husbands give the amount of money they want to give you, not what you need. The men don’t think about the women. So the project helps me earn my own money,” says Adjovi.

For women like Adjovi, making salt is not just about following the jobs women before her have done for generations.

She doesn’t know what the UN’s SDGs are or even what IBSA means, but the work at ProSEL Benin allows her to prioritise her own health and well-being while working collectively in a women-led cooperative.

When she talks to other women working at the site, she also thinks about the hard-earned independence and self-reliance she now has.

Note: This article is brought to you by IPS Noram in collaboration with INPS Japan and Soka Gakkai International in consultative status with ECOSOC.

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Clarke A survivor of sexual violence covers her face with her hands in a camp for displaced people in Tawila, North Darfur. Credit: UNOCHA/Giles

By Mariya Salim
DELHI, India, Jun 25 2026 (IPS)

Three years ago, during a mission to the Central African Republic from United Nations Headquarters, I met a woman whose story has remained with me ever since. She had survived rape during the conflict. Yet what stayed with her most was not only the violence she had suffered, but the stigma that followed it. When she returned home, her family refused to take her back. In a society where survivors of sexual violence are too often burdened with shame that rightfully belongs to perpetrators, she found herself isolated and struggling to rebuild her life. In that moment, it became painfully clear that for survivors, the violence does not end when the assault ends, it continues through stigma, exclusion, and the resulting silence for most.

Conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) does not end when the act itself ends. Its consequences ripple through families, communities, and generations and that is precisely why more needs to be done to not just address it but prevent it from happening in the first place.

As the world marked the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict on 19 June, (The day marks the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1820 (2008), which condemned sexual violence in conflict and recognized its impact on peace and security), I found myself reflecting on the many survivors whose stories I have encountered throughout my career. I witnessed firsthand the devastating and enduring impact of these crimes, sometimes documenting and analysing the many cases sent to us by colleagues on the field and sometimes while interacting with the survivors first hand. At a moment when wars dominate global headlines, from Gaza and Ukraine to Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo, ignoring CRSV means ignoring one of war’s most enduring and devastating consequences.

Today, the issue is more urgent than ever. Civilians continue to bear the heaviest burden of conflict, and among the most devastating consequences of conflict is sexual violence. According to the United Nations Secretary-General’s 2026 Report on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence, nearly 9,800 cases were verified globally in 2025, more than double the number documented the previous year. Yet even these alarming figures represent only a fraction of the actual scale of violations, given the barriers to reporting, including stigma, insecurity, fear of retaliation, and limited access to services. “The figures contained in this report should be understood not as the full picture, but as an indication of a much broader pattern of violations that remain largely unseen and underreported.” said Special Representative to the Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten.

From Sudan and South Sudan to Haiti, Ukraine, and Myanmar, recent UN reporting shows that conflict-related sexual violence continues to affect communities across the globe, reminding us that it remains one of the most enduring and devastating consequences of armed conflict.

CRSV is not an inevitable consequence of war; it is often a deliberate act used to terrorize communities, assert power, and deepen divisions. Its impact extends well beyond the immediate violation. For many survivors, the trauma is compounded by stigma, rejection from family members, exclusion from community life, loss of livelihoods, interrupted education, and limited access to justice and support services. The consequences can endure long after the conflict itself has faded from public attention.

In South Sudan, I documented stories of women and adolescent girls who had survived gang rape while collecting firewood, water or travelling to markets. I listened to survivors who feared reporting violations because they worried about being ostracized by their communities and feared retaliation by their attackers who ranged from soldiers to armed militia. I encountered families struggling to support children born out of rape while facing stigma and economic hardship.

Although women and girls bear the overwhelming burden of conflict-related sexual violence, my work also exposed me to the experiences of men and boys who had endured similar violations. Many carried their trauma in silence, reluctant to come forward because of stigma, fear, and societal expectations surrounding masculinity. As a result, their experiences are frequently overlooked, even as they grapple with profound physical and psychological consequences.

In conflict zones such as South Sudan, local civil society organisations continue to play a critical role in supporting survivors despite significant resource and safety constraints. These organisations often serve as the first and sometimes only point of contact for survivors seeking assistance. They provide psychosocial support, referrals to healthcare, legal aid, community awareness programmes, and safe spaces for healing. Yet the scale of need far exceeds available resources.

As Rev. John Ngbapia Bakiri, Executive Director of Rural Development Action Aid (RDAA), explains:

“The biggest challenge we face in dealing with Survivors of CRSV in South Sudan is the limited scope and resources of the intervention relative to the scale of need. Many CRSV Survivors remain unreached, several highly affected communities excluded, and the specific needs of children born out of rape are not fully integrated into the response. These children continue to face stigma, protection risks, and limited access to essential services, compounding the vulnerability of survivor households.”

Addressing conflict-related sexual violence therefore requires moving beyond emergency response and looking at prevention with a survivor centred approach. It requires sustained investment in healthcare, psychosocial support, education, livelihoods, legal assistance, awareness building and social reintegration. It requires supporting local organisations that remain embedded within communities long after international attention has shifted elsewhere. It also involves very importantly engaging with the government including the implementation of national action plans, criminalization of conflict-related sexual violence in domestic legislation, and meaningful accountability for perpetrators regardless of rank or affiliation.

Despite decades of advocacy and normative progress, accountability remains elusive in many contexts. Survivors continue to face significant barriers in accessing justice and perpetrators often operating with impunity is common. With peace processes and political negotiations frequently overlooking the experiences and priorities of survivors, funding for survivor-centred services remains inadequate despite growing needs. At a time when violence and instability are rising across the world, we can no longer afford to relegate conflict-related sexual violence to the margins of policy and peacebuilding efforts. Its consequences are profound and enduring, leaving scars not only on survivors but also on the communities and societies struggling to rebuild in its aftermath.

The International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict offers an important moment for reflection. But remembrance alone is not enough. What survivors deserve is justice, protection, meaningful support, and genuine participation in shaping the policies and responses that affect them with a seat at the decision making table. Their stories are not simply testimonies of suffering, they are calls to action.

Mariya Salim is co-founder of Zariya. She is a Human Rights activist and an international SGBV expert currently based in Delhi India. She has served as a Women Protection Adviser with the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS), and was part of the United Nations team working on Conflict-Related Sexual Violence at UN Headquarters in New York.

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By UN Women
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 23 2026 (IPS)

A study of 133 AI systems found that 44 per cent demonstrated gender bias and 26 per cent demonstrated both gender and racial bias. Yet only 51 per cent of marketers currently use human oversight to test AI-generated creative before release. Ahead of the United Nations Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance from 6 – 7 July and AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland from 7-10 July, UN Women sets out what is at stake – and what must change – to build a gender-equal digital future.

1. The AI content era is here. And the window to shape it is closing fast.

Generative AI is now among the most widely used technologies in day-to-day marketing and communications work, in the United Kingdom (UK) alone, 88 per cent of advertising and media agencies are already using it in some form. Discriminatory algorithms could therefore further perpetuate gender inequality and discrimination. As AI tools become embedded in content generation and media buying at scale, decisions about who gets seen, how they are portrayed, and whose stories get told are being made at speed, and largely without human scrutiny or gender perspective.

2. Bias and discriminatory algorithms are not a glitch in AI – it is a pattern documented across systems at scale.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been found to consistently associate women with “home,” “family,” and “children,” and men with “business,” “executive,” “salary,” and “career.” When tasked with completing sentences that start with a person’s gender, about 20 per cent of responses from LLMs exhibited sexist and misogynistic attitudes, including portrayals of women as sex objects and property of their husbands. These are the predictable output of AI systems trained on decades of unequal representation of women and men. AI bias is not only a system design problem, but also a policy problem. Of 138 countries assessed, only 24 referenced gender in a national AI strategy, and just 18 included substantive gender-responsive provisions, risking inequality being “baked in” to future systems.

3. AI is intensifying violence against women and girls in digital spaces.

According to UN Women data, women and girls globally already have less access to digital spaces – and when they do, they are far more likely to experience online violence. Almost one in four surveyed women human rights defenders, activists and journalists had experienced AI-assisted online violence and 12 per cent report having experienced the non-consensual sharing of personal images, including intimate or sexual content. Six per cent say they have been targeted through “deepfakes” or manipulated images/video, while more than one in four have received unsolicited sexual advances through digital messaging. AI is compounding this. Deepfakes are among the most visible examples of AI-enabled abuse that disproportionately targets women and girls. As AI-generated content becomes the norm, the tools for harassment, manipulation, and image-based abuse are scaling alongside it.

4. Women are being locked out of the rooms where AI is built.

Gen AI is expected to drive job growth in tech-intensive sectors, yet women remain underrepresented in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) and AI, making up only 30 per cent of the AI workforce globally. The people designing these systems are not representative of the billions of people the systems are expected to serve – and that glaring gap is compounding the problem.

5. The economic disruption of AI will fall hardest on women.

Women outside the AI sector are nearly twice as likely as men to hold jobs at high risk of automation. AI disparity does not manifest in gender inequality alone – harms are multiplied across race, disability, socioeconomic status, and geography. The communities already most underrepresented in media and labour markets face the greatest risk of being left further behind.

6. Inclusive AI is a commercial imperative.

In a first-ever global study, the Unstereotype Alliance, an industry-led initiative convened by UN Women, proved that inclusive advertising has a positive impact on business profit, sales and brand value. Brands that create inclusive advertising, free of gender stereotypes, enjoy +3.46 per cent short-term sales and +16.26 per cent long-term sales uplift. They are 62 per cent more likely to be a consumer’s first choice, have 54 per cent higher pricing power, and experience 15 per cent higher customer loyalty. As AI becomes central to how campaigns are planned and produced, the brands that embed inclusion into those processes stand to gain – and those that do not, face significant reputational and commercial risk. The Unstereotype Alliance playbook launched in June 2026 gives marketers a way to catch bias before it ships, every time they use generative AI.

UN Women calls for gender equality and the rights and experiences of women and girls to be embedded at every stage of AI life cycle from development, deployment, and governance. When designed with safety and used with intention, AI can help detect stereotypes, broaden representation, and improve accessibility at scale. The choice of whether it does lies with the people making decisions – in governments, in companies, in experts researching and developing AI – and it depends on whether we incorporate the voice, expertise, and lived experience of women and girls from diverse contexts, civil society organizations who work with them and know their issues deeply.

For interviews or more information, contact the UN Women media team at media.team@unwomen.org.

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Sephora*, an 18-year-old mother of two, holds her baby girl at the Karibuni wa Mama Clinic supported by SOFEPADI in Bunia, Ituri province, DR Congo, on 25 November 2025. Originally from a remote village, she fled when armed clashes erupted in 2023. Credit: UNICEF / Mirindi Johnson

By Naureen Hossain
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 22 2026 (IPS)

A record number of children were subject to grave violations by parties to armed conflicts, the highest since the UN mandate for children and armed conflict (CAAC) was established in 1996.

In the Secretary-General’s annual report, UN-verified sources confirmed 35,558 violations committed against children during armed conflicts. This is the fourth year in a row that incidents have increased from years.

The data in the report is based on instances occurring in and verified in 2025. At least 24,174 children were directly affected or had their rights violated, through killing and maiming, forced recruitment, abduction, sexual violence, and denial of humanitarian assistance. At least 1 in 3 victims were girls. The killing of children increased by 34 percent compared to incidents from 2024, totaling to 14,224 children killed or maimed. 5129 children were abducted, and there were at least 8322 instances of denial of humanitarian assistance. 6607 children were recruited or used by armed groups, and a total of 1667 children were detained for their actual or alleged connection to armed groups.

For the first time since the CAAC mandate was created, government forces were responsible for the highest number of grave violations. In addition to the killing and maiming of children, government forces were largely responsible for the destruction or military use of schools and hospitals, and the denial of humanitarian access. This sense of impunity is further amplified by hostilities, and in the increasing use of wide-area explosive weapons and in densely populated areas, resulting in more civilian casualties. The use of artificial intelligence and autonomous weapons systems has also transformed.

The states responsible for the highest number of violations included Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories, Myanmar, Somalia, Nigeria and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Israeli forces were responsible for nearly one-third of the grave violations in the report — 12,455. In the DRC, 4,114 grave violations against children were committed, including 519 deaths and 1067 abductions.

Vanessa Frazier, the UN Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, at the release of the Secretary-General’s annual report on children and armed conflict in 2025. Credit: IPS / Naureen Hossain

Under-Secretary-General Vanessa Frazier, the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict, warned that the frequency — and intensity — of violations against children reflect a growing disdain for international law and the protected rights of children.

“2025 was without a doubt one of the darkest chapters for child protection since monitoring began,” said Frazier. “When States, on whom the obligation to protect children falls, instead contribute to their suffering, it signals the deeper erosion of respect for international law. The principles of humanity, distinction, proportionality, and necessity must be restored — without exception.”

Frazier told reporters on June 18 that the report is meant to be a “tool of accountability”. It should be used by member states to inform their own actions to take the appropriate steps needed to protect children in armed conflict. In the case of countries named in the report with ongoing situations, this is also an opportunity for them to enter into agreements to reduce and prevent further violations during conflict between now and the following year.

Frazier confirmed that early drafts of the report were shared with these countries back in March, and the countries had at least one month to present their own evidence to be corroborated with the UN-verified data. She added that open dialogue between her office and the countries is encouraged, if those countries choose to engage in the first place.

The report calls on member states to uphold international law to protect civilians, especially children, during times of conflict, through upholding their commitments to existing peace and security agreements. Parties to conflicts are also called on to develop and implement action plans with the UN, and to grant the UN access to conduct thorough monitoring and reporting of grave violations against children.

The report also calls on technology and social media companies to take concrete measures to prevent their platforms from being used by armed groups to recruit and exploit children, and to cooperate with accountability and child protection mechanisms. The misuse of digital technology can have adverse effects on children’s wellbeing even in peaceful contexts. Without sufficient legal guardrails and proper monitoring, children are more likely to be exposed to misinformation and recruitment content.

A senior UN official told Inter Press Service that online recruitment is a pervasive issue across multiple conflict areas, and that more resources need to be mobilized to create responsibility. The official confirmed that Frazier and her office were in contact with lawmakers from the European Union to determine how existing frameworks like the Digital Services Act could protect children. The office is also working with TikTok in Colombia to implement strategies to prevent the recruitment and use of children during conflict.

Frazier called on the state actors to adopt action plans to protect and reintegrate children formerly associated with armed groups. In 2025, 13,112 children received protection and reintegration support with the help of other UN agencies like UNICEF and its partners. This requires funding support from donors and state parties as much as it requires political will. Further investments into accountability and prevention measures among parties in conflicts are also needed, through partnerships with the UN, governments and parties to conflicts.

Before she was the Secretary-General’s Special Representative (SRSG) for Children and Armed Conflict, Frazier was the Permanent Representative of Malta to the UN during its term in the Security Council from 2023-2024. Both in her capacity as SRSG and as a member of the Security Council, Frazier has visited conflict sites and spoken with children directly impacted. She reflected that it was particularly aggravating to see state actors in the list of perpetrators in the report, given that state actors, who are also UN member states, are supposed to be the ones abiding by the rule of law and protecting children. “It’s not acceptable that there are nine state actors listed, irrespective of who they are and how bad they are,” said Frazier.

What was most striking to her is that many of these incidents that resulted in so many child casualties could have been avoided. State actors seem to make the conscious, operational decision to target factories manufacturing weapons or enemy strongholds, regardless of whether civilian infrastructures like schools are nearby and would get caught in the radius. Even if those infrastructures are not the intended target, state actors will follow through with the attacks, which show a disregard for international humanitarian law and a lack of concern for the consequences of civilian casualties. It is children who are suffering the consequences of state actors’ decisions, Frazier said.

“I think for state actors it is worse than non-state actors, because this mandate was originally created to target armed groups and non-state actors; ones who work outside of the law. We cannot have state actors who are supposed to work within the reams of the law, now working outside the reams of the law. That should not be something that is acceptable.”

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Women farmers using a thresher; they are beneficiaries of a UNDP project to bring agritech to smallholder farmers. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe , Jun 19 2026 (IPS)

Long burdened by the labour-intensive nature of agriculture, Zimbabwe’s female farmers are finding relief in new agritechnologies that significantly reduce the time they spend in the field.

With assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), female farmers are adopting technologies such as earth augers, multi-crop threshers and grinder-choppers to help them navigate climate resilience and boost production at a time when African countries are facing funding cuts in the agriculture sector, further threatening food security.

As global food prices soar because of the ongoing geopolitical tensions that have disrupted global trade and commerce, female farmers find themselves bearing the high costs of food, but new technologies such as those being introduced for Zimbabwe’s farmers are expected to ease these challenges.

Women in Zimbabwe make up the bulk of small-scale farmers, providing a backbone for the country’s food security efforts, but they have been shut out of agricultural finance, limiting their access to farming inputs and equipment.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, “approximately 80% of women live in communal areas, where they constitute 61% of farmers and provide 70% of the labour.”

Despite Zimbabwe’s farm mechanisation drive, there are concerns that the collateral demanded by banks has made it impossible for women to fully participate in the country’s agricultural economy.

According to the UNDP, the Green Climate Fund finances the project to support rural female farmers through labour-saving agri-tech under the Climate Resilient Livelihoods Project, which aims to strengthen climate resilience.

“The initiative is supporting 230 Farmer Field Schools with earth augers, multi-crop threshers and grinder-choppers designed to reduce the physical burden of agricultural labour, improve productivity and strengthen resilience to climate change,” the UNDP said in its June media brief.

“The introduction of labour-saving technologies is helping women reclaim valuable time, reduce physical strain and participate more actively in income-generating activities, community leadership and climate-resilient farming practices,” the agency added.

Across Zimbabwe, rural women face the same challenges: field work overload and taking care of their families, creating both physical and mental strain, experts say.

However, with the introduction of earth auger machines, which are hand-operated and drill the earth to prepare for planting, beneficiaries say they are experiencing significant ease in farming labour practices.

“Digging basins manually was exhausting. The auger brought real relief. We now finish plots fast and plant on time,” said Christine Mudzingwa, a farmer and housewife in Buhera, in the country’s east.

“There’s balance now. I can tend my garden and spend time with my family,” she said, painting a picture of how female farmers have struggled to juggle their multi-tasking routines.

Rural farmers have traditionally literally beat grain to produce livestock feed, and the physically taxing practice has led to poor health, with fatigue being an integral part of the occupational hazards women have to endure.

“Preparing feed for livestock used to take us the whole day,” says Precious Hobane, another smallholder and beneficiary in Gwanda, a  low rainfall district in the country’s west. “We chopped stover manually, and it was very tiring work. During harvest time, threshing grain was another difficult task for women.”

The planting season has been difficult for female farmers because they know the work ahead will be exhausting, but simple technologies are providing relief, the farmers say.

“Digging planting basins manually was one of the most exhausting jobs,” says Christine Mudzingwa, from the Manicaland province in the country’s eastern highlands. “You would spend the whole day bent over with a hoe in hard soil. By evening, you were completely worn out, but the work would still not be finished.”

The UNDP intervention has been a great help for the 230 women, who say they can now invest their energy in other, more productive farming endeavours.

“Preparing feed used to take a whole day. Now the grinder-chopper does the heavy work. The machines help us care for livestock during droughts, and women are no longer exhausted,” explains Hobane.

The UNDP partnership with the government of Zimbabwe is part of a broader Green Climate Fund initiative expected to promote climate resilience and boost food production as countries in the Global South continue to seek ways to cushion their populations against climate uncertainty.

“Through this Green Climate Fund Readiness support, Zimbabwe is strengthening the systems, partnerships and investment pathways required to translate its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) ambitions into climate-resilient and low-emission development outcomes,” said Constance Pepukai, the UNDP Nature, Energy and Climate Team Leader, at the launch of the initiative.

The government has welcomed the climate-proofing support as Zimbabwe seeks to boost household food security amid a series of droughts and floods that have further complicated how smallholders navigate the climate crisis.

“The project provides an important platform for aligning climate technology, private sector engagement and project pipeline development with Zimbabwe’s national climate priorities,” says Washington Zhakata, acting Secretary for Environment, Climate and Wildlife.

For now, the beneficiaries of the small agritech remain confident that their working hours are being invested wisely and that if the technology is to spread further to the bulk of the country’s female farmers, taking to the fields could be less daunting.

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Opening ceremony of RightsCon 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan. Credit: Equality Now

By S. Mona Sinha and Mrinalini Dayal
NEW YORK, Jun 19 2026 (IPS)

RightsCon, the world’s leading summit on human rights in the digital age, has served for over a decade as a vital global gathering, bringing together civil society, academics, technologists, policymakers, and the private sector in cross-border collaboration. The abrupt cancellation of RightsCon 2026, following intervention by Zambia’s government just days before the convening was due to commence in Lusaka, should concern us all.

Worryingly, this is not an isolated disruption. It reflects a deeply troubling global pattern of shrinking civic space alongside a rapidly growing, well-resourced, and increasingly networked transnational anti-rights movement. We are calling on civil society, donors, the media, and democratic governments to take a strong stand against these coordinated efforts to undermine human rights and the forums that uphold them.

S. Mona Sinha

On May 1, RightsCon organiser and host Access Now released a statement announcing the summit, scheduled to run between May 5 and 8, could not proceed after Zambia announced it was postponing the event to ensure it “aligns with Zambia’s national values, policy priorities, and broader public interest.”

Access Now reported that on April 27, one day after the Zambian Ministry of Technology and Science had endorsed RightsCon, government officials told organisers that diplomats from China were pressuring Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to attend. Zambia’s new conditions for allowing the conference to proceed included select topics being moderated and the exclusion of some participants, including Taiwanese civil society representatives.

Access Now has called this interference “transnational repression” and a deliberate effort to project authoritarian preferences across borders and shrink civic spheres.

Mrinalini Dayal

Digital rights advocacy is essential to advancing gender equality. That is why Equality Now co-founded the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights (AUDRi), a global campaign working toward a digital future where everyone can enjoy equal rights to safety, freedom, and dignity.

Equality Now and AUDRi were looking forward to returning to RightsCon to reconnect with allies and forge new relationships. Over 500 sessions were scheduled, including two by Equality Now on co-creating solutions to online safety and privacy challenges, and addressing the exclusion of women from artificial intelligence development and other emerging technologies.

Activists have spent months preparing, from developing proposals and collaborating with partners to organising funding, travel, and logistics. Significant time, energy, and resources have been invested that cannot be recouped.

RightsCon is one of the few annual, in-person opportunities where smaller frontline organisations meet potential funders. Locally led groups, particularly those in the Global Majority already grappling with funding cuts and rising competition for limited resources, will be hardest hit by the lost networking, visibility, and donor engagement that sustains their work.

Beyond this substantial loss is the deeply troubling shutting down of a vital locus for dialogue and collective action, alongside a growing anxiety that this will not be the last such disruption of an essential global forum.

RightsCon: a unique mix of diverse voices

RightsCon is the only global, civil society-led convening focused on the intersection of technology and human rights. Other international gatherings on the internet, emerging technologies, and digital governance are generally complex, exclusionary multilateral processes dominated by governments and the tech companies whose products and power are meant to be scrutinised.

Discussions about digital harms, inequality, and the future of our online world are often relegated to the margins or excluded completely, despite their far-reaching consequences. In contrast, RightsCon is where activists set the agenda, and lived experience is central.

Participants working towards safer, inclusive digital futures can share insights and learn from others’ successes and challenges across diverse contexts. The summit’s activist spirit prioritises voices often excluded elsewhere: women and girls, LGBTQI+ communities, Indigenous peoples, and those resisting surveillance and authoritarian rule.

Holding RightsCon in Zambia was a deliberate choice by Access Now intended to lower barriers to participation. For people from Global Majority countries, visa requirements and travel costs to Europe or North America are routinely insurmountable, and increasingly restrictive visa policies are making access evermore difficult. Equality Now staff have been unable to attend UN gatherings in New York for exactly this reason.

The impacts of widespread exclusion from attending consultative and decision-making settings cannot be overstated. That Zambia’s government sought to justify postponing RightsCon on visa grounds, saying some speakers and participants were “subject to pending administrative and security clearances”, is a stark illustration of how bureaucratic levers can be wielded to stifle dissent.

Tech-facilitated gender-based violence

In an increasingly digital world, women and girls face distinct and escalating threats to their rights, safety, privacy, and freedom. The rapid advance of technologies is opening new frontiers for human traffickers, coercers and abusers, but existing legal systems everywhere are ill-equipped to handle these multi-jurisdictional harms.

At RightsCon 2026, we were going to jointly explore legal solutions to the explosion of tech-facilitated gender-based violence. Online violence is rarely, if ever, confined to a ‘virtual’ space; it follows women and girls into their homes and workplaces, and often involves real-world harm including physical violence.

Emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence risk deepening existing inequalities and amplifying misinformation and bias, while expanding surveillance and online exploitation and abuse place fundamental rights and freedoms at risk.

Without civil society-led convenings that centre human rights in digital technologies, it becomes harder to build the intersectional, integrated, responsive movements needed to defend online rights, especially for marginalised communities.

That is precisely why losing this moment hurts so much, and why the issues that RightsCon sought to elevate, including those that governments seek to suppress, must be debated in the global spotlight. At Equality Now and AUDRi, we are planning alternative ways to hold conversations with even wider audiences than a conference format allows. We will not be deterred.

Standing against the pushback on human rights

Equality Now has been tracking the pushback against human rights advocates globally, particularly those working on gender equality and against misogyny and gender-based violence. Even knowing how organised that pushback has become, it is devastating to watch RightsCon become a casualty of it.

The cancellation and the speed of it set a worrying precedent for future international human rights convening. No forum is truly safe from political scrutiny, interference, or silencing.

This is the moment for a coordinated response. Funders must step up to prioritise digital rights and engage with organisations at the convergence of human and digital rights and development. Regional gatherings and alternative spaces need resourcing to replace this year’s RightsCon.

Democratic governments need to defend the right to assemble across borders and scrutinise international pressure that may have shaped RightsCon’s cancellation.

To our peers across the digital rights community: we stand with you. Silencing one convening will not silence the movements behind it. We will continue to organise, collaborate, and defend the freedoms and human rights at stake, because the price of allowing authoritarian pressure to determine who gets to participate, speak, and assemble is simply too high.

S. Mona Sinha, Chief Executive Officer, Equality Now, and Mrinalini Dayal, Global Coordinator of the Alliance for Universal Digital Rights (AUDRi)

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Overcoming political divisions between Pro-France Loyalists and the Pro-Independence movement is a major challenge in ongoing negotiations between the French Government and leaders in New Caledonia to define the territory's future political status. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, Jun 17 2026 (IPS)

The French overseas territory of New Caledonia in the Pacific will hold elections on 28 June in the wake of the latest agreement on its political status with France being rejected. The representatives elected in the three provincial assemblies and territorial congress will then determine a new round of negotiations as the mission of achieving consensus on New Caledonia’s future continues.

New Caledonia is one of 17 non-self-governing territories due for decolonisation according to the United Nations. However, its highly divided politics is a major obstacle to reaching a unified agreement on its future. An estimated 41 percent of New Caledonia’s population of about 265,000 people are Kanak islanders, of whom most are Pro-Independence supporters, and about 24 percent are European, predominantly Loyalist voters.

“Our people are entitled to the exercise of their inalienable right to self-determination… with a cycle of inclusive dialogues open to all components of our society, including youth, women, customary authorities and economic actors,” Pierre Chanel Tein Tutugoro, President of the Pro-Independence UC (Caledonian Union) Party in the FLNKS (Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front) coalition, stated last year.

It is a view that resonates widely across the Pro-Independence movement. “Whatever the outcome [of the election], the state must play a strictly neutral role, working towards the emancipation of the Kanak people,” Maurice Sitrita, an Independence supporter in Noumea, told IPS. And in any future agreement, “the inclusion of Kanak sovereignty in the French constitution must not be called into question so that we can build the country together.”

Doriane Nonmoira of the Union of Francophone Women of Oceania, in New Caledonia, told IPS that there are currently five women candidates vying for primary seats in the June vote, including three Kanak women. “The upcoming elections will be the scene of a significant political transition for the country,” she said, emphasising that “decolonisation from France” was essential.

Meanwhile, the Pro-France Loyalists bloc is campaigning to strengthen security, the economy and unity while defending their place in the French Republic.

New Caledonia is considered a wealthy territory. Its GDP per capita is USD 29,213, compared to USD 6,425 in the nearby Melanesian state of Fiji, according to the World Bank, but there is deep inequality. A high standard of living, most visible in the capital, Nouméa, is supported by major annual funding of about 1.5 billion euros (USD 1.7 billion) by the French Government. Despite efforts to bridge the development gap, the poverty rate is still 30 percent higher in the outer Loyalty Islands, where the population is mostly Kanak, compared to the central Southern Province.

The last pact with France was the Noumea Accord, signed in 1998, following Kanak protests about dispossession and disenfranchisement in the 1980s. It stipulated the right of New Caledonia to hold referendums on its future. And following indigenous opposition to France’s policy of encouraging European migration to the islands, the territory’s electoral roll was restricted to Kanaks and long-term settlers only.

Kanaks are now better represented in the territory’s politics. From 2004 to 2014, the number of Loyalist seats held in the 54 seat New Caledonia Congress diminished from 36 to 29, while those held by Pro-Independence members increased from 18 to 25. And the current representative of New Caledonia in the National Assembly in Paris, Emmanuel Tjibaou, is a Pro-Independence Kanak leader from the rural North Province.

But three referendums on Independence have not led to a political solution. The first vote held in 2018 resulted in Loyalists securing 57 percent of votes, followed by 53 percent in the second 2020 referendum. The third vote in 2021, boycotted during the pandemic by the majority of Kanaks, saw an overwhelming 96.5 percent oppose Independence, an outcome that has never been accepted by the Independence movement.

Today a new strain of activism for self-determination is driven by the younger Kanak generation. They were a major presence in street protests that erupted in May 2024 following the French Government’s plan to expand the territorial electoral roll to include thousands of recent settlers. The electoral reform bill was then suspended after unrest resulted in loss of life, the destruction of homes, infrastructure and a shattered economy.

Last year, Manuel Valls, Minister for Overseas France, led new talks with both political camps to work toward a new pact on relations. The outcome was the Bougival Accord, an agreement of compromises, signed on 12 July 2025. It offered a New Caledonian ‘state’ within the larger nation of France with a further devolution of powers, such as foreign affairs, although France would retain defence and security. However, after further consultations, the UC party rejected the agreement in August. ‘As far as we’re concerned, Bougival, it’s over,’ Mickaël Forrest, UC Vice-President, told local media, claiming that ‘the document is perceived as a project for an agreement to integrate (New Caledonia) into France under the guise of a decolonization.’

France is unwilling to severe ties with New Caledonia, which represents a major strategic asset in the Pacific. It expands France’s exclusive economic zone, provides an important military and naval base in the region and inclusion in Pacific leadership forums.

However, Dr Pierre-Christophe Pantz, a researcher at the University of New Caledonia, told IPS that “the trauma of the events of 2024 has also played an important role [in negotiations], producing a coercive effect on national political leaders, who are often led to seek a rapid stabilisation of the local political system” rather than a sustainable long-term solution. But he added that “it is questionable whether there is any likelihood of an agreement that will have the unanimous support of all New Caledonian political forces.”

Yet the final failure of the Bougival Accord occurred in the French National Assembly, when parties across the political spectrum, legal experts and New Caledonia’s representative rejected the constitutional reform bill on 2 April.

Final preparations are now being made for this month’s election in which, despite protests two years ago, there will be an increased number of voters. In May, the French Constitutional Council approved the voter roll to include an extra 10,500 residents, both Kanak and non-Kanak, who were born in New Caledonia after 1998. French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said the reform was imperative to recognize the democratic rights of all people living in New Caledonia, with the restricted roll now denying 17 percent their right to vote.

The vote “should contribute to reshuffling the cards of the political balance of power in New Caledonia”, Pantz predicted, and “future negotiations will depend very directly on their updated electoral weight, which could strengthen or weaken certain political lines.”

At the same time, Nonmoira stressed there was a need for women’s voices, especially Kanak women’s, to be heard in political discussions, with their current absence leading to their exclusion in the territory’s future. “In a future agreement, France should be committed to legal and institutional decolonisation; New Caledonia should be accountable to CEDAW (Committee on Elimination of Discrimination against Women) and it should be stated that gender equality is an essential lever for building a peaceful future,” she declared, adding that “there will be no decolonisation without gender justice.”

After the election, all parties have committed to resume talks with France in July. But they will occur in an environment of uncertainty until the outcome of the next French Presidential Election in 2027.

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The Russian state has, through legislation and stigmatising rhetoric, systematically worked to isolate the LGBTQ+ community. Graphic: IPS

By Ed Holt
BRATISLAVA, Jun 16 2026 (IPS)

LGBTQ+ people in Russia are being forced to increasingly use self-censoring strategies in their daily lives as they struggle with systemic vulnerability, one of the largest surveys of the LGBTQ+ community in the country has shown.

The latest annual survey of more than 6,000 people across Russia by the Coming Out and Sphere Foundation organisations showed that, in 2025, the situation for the community had neither improved nor significantly worsened.

But it showed a reinforcement of existing adaptive strategies among LGBTQ+ people, including selective approaches to coming out and avoidance of situations in which their gender identity or sexual orientation could be revealed.

There was also an increase in some forms of abuse, particularly in online spaces, and threats of violence, extortion, denunciation, and pressure from close circles continued to contribute significantly to the everyday vulnerability of LGBTQ+ people.

The groups say the findings reinforce the perception that LGBTQ+ people in Russia – where a series of repressive laws demonising and persecuting the community – are likely to face persistently high levels of vulnerability and threats to their safety, health, and quality of life for some time to come as they come under attack simply for being who they are.

“Our data shows that repression of LGBTQ+ people has moved from persecution for specific actions to persecution for their identity, for who a person is, not what they do. There are more and more legal cases against people who are living their lives, not doing anything against the government or trying to promote human rights,” Denis Oleinik, Executive Director at Coming Out, told IPS.

“What we have seen in 2025 is a “normalisation” or “routinisation” of catastrophe. LGBTQ+ people now just live with [the situation], with these things happening. It’s as if this has become normal life. It’s absolutely horrible,” he added.

Russia’s LGBTQ+ community has faced increasing discrimination and marginalisation for more than a decade.

While there has historically been a degree of anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment in Russian society, this has deepened significantly with the introduction of a series of laws and increasingly hostile government policies against the community.

In 2013, not long after Vladimir Putin had returned to power as president, a law was implemented banning “the propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations” to anyone under the age of 18.

The start of what critics say has been a decade-long campaign by the Kremlin to marginalise and vilify the LGBTQ+ community in the country, the law was extended in 2022 to cover all public information or activities supporting LGBTQ+ rights or displaying non-heterosexual orientation, regardless of age.

A ban on same-sex marriage was also written into the constitution, and in 2023, legislation was passed banning transgender people from officially or medically changing their gender.

The same year also saw a ruling by the Supreme Court, which outlawed the non-existent ‘international LGBT movement’, declaring it ‘extremist’ – allowing people to be fined or prosecuted for anything that could be construed as promoting “non-traditional sexual relations”.

At the same time, homophobic political discourse has become increasingly normalised, as the Kremlin has looked to promote ‘traditional family values’ in society and cast LGBTQ+ activism as a product of a degenerate West and a threat to Russia.

This has fuelled a growingly virulent and often violent rejection of LGBTQ+ people in large parts of society and has left many in the community fearing for their physical and mental health.

Grigory*, an LGBTQ+ student from a major city in Russia, said they were selective in revealing their sexuality and gender identity and that while they do not live in permanent fear of physical attacks, they have adjusted their behaviour to avoid certain locations.

“Sometimes in the evenings I avoid certain places because I could be considered stereotypically gay, perhaps because of my voice or the way I walk. I don’t hide my sexuality in public, but I don’t manifest it either,” they said, adding that this was easier for them than for some other members of the LGBTQ+ community.

“Transgender people suffer the worst problems. It must be very hard for someone to be transgender in Russia. They are so brave and strong. I’m astonished they can keep going,” they said.

The Coming Out and Sphere Foundation showed the situation for transgender people in the vast majority of indicators for quality of life, including specific measures of discrimination and well-being, was worse than for other members of the LGBTQ+ community. Notably, they were significantly more likely to face physical threats and experience actual physical violence, including sexual and domestic violence, more frequently than other LGBTQ+ people.

“A lot of trans people right now live their whole lives at home without even going outside to the shops if they have access to courier services or some relatives or friends who can help them buy what they need. We’re seeing this more and more,” said Oleinik.

Grigory said they felt, along with many others in the community, if not fear of physical attacks, a specific sense of aggression towards them.

“I feel it indirectly. It comes through government narratives in the media and in the public sphere, or in something an acquaintance might say. Queerphobia in Russia is mainly government-induced. Of course it existed before all these awful laws, but it wasn’t that strong. The laws have made it much worse,” they said.

LGBTQ+ rights campaigners say the patterns of behaviour among the community in Russia described in the report are unsurprising given the years of growing repression against them.

“When marginalisation and criminalisation on any grounds are a long-term feature of daily life, people develop ways of managing their daily exposure to harm,” Anastasia Smirnova, Deputy Director and Director of Programmes at rights group ILGA-Europe, told IPS.

She added, though, that LGBTQ+ people in Russia were facing a very specific challenge, as the Russian state has, through increasingly harsh legislation and stigmatising rhetoric, systematically worked to isolate LGBTQ+ human rights defenders and then LGBTQ+ people from each other and from everyone around them as part of a broader dismantling of the conditions for free association and dissent.

“This is what makes it different from social prejudice: it is not a reflection of society, it is a project of the state, and its target is civic life. For many people living through this, the daily acts of self-censorship described in the report are the lived reality of that project,” Smirnova said.

The potential harms of such actions on individuals and the wider community are severe, with impacts on both mental and physical health as individuals are left isolated and in some cases afraid to access healthcare.

“The impact on children is particularly severe. State propaganda targeting schools, the absence of age-appropriate relationship and sex education, and the climate of fear surrounding LGBTI topics leave young people exposed to extreme harm and isolation, especially children who are themselves LGBTI or have LGBTI family members, but also any child who might be perceived as LGBTI,” said Smirnova.

While the report did not show a significant deterioration in a number of indicators compared to previous years – in fact there was a slight improvement in some areas – its authors warn this could be misleading, highlighting that the report relied on the willingness of respondents to “share sensitive information in an increasingly oppressive environment” and that real levels of discrimination and violence could be higher.

Whatever the true levels of discrimination against the community are in Russia, many people are suffering gravely in the current environment.

Grigory said they are currently in therapy, partly to help them deal with the challenges of being LGBTQ+ in Russia.

They said that among the community, “thoughts of killing oneself and suicide attempts are pretty common.”

LGBTQ+ people and activists in touch or working directly with members of the community who spoke to IPS said substance abuse, or self-medication through unsupervised use of anti-depressants, was not uncommon either.

Trying to get help for such problems is difficult though amid mistrust of state health institutions because of widespread homo- and transphobia and concerns over staff potentially breaching patient confidentiality about sexuality.

As the pressure on LGBTQ+ people continues, many feel they have had no choice but to leave the country.

The annual report included responses from hundreds of people who had emigrated, both in 2025 and in the last few years before that.

Severe anxiety and psychological discomfort were the most commonly cited reasons for emigration (66%), while other major reasons included intensified censorship (59%), personal safety risk (57%), and increased homophobia and transphobia in Russian society (57%).

Tellingly, the majority of participants who had emigrated (63%) did not consider returning to Russia an option – a rise of 8 percentage points on the previous year.

This is perhaps unsurprising, given that many in the community see little or no prospect of the situation in Russia improving for many years.

“Many things have changed in the last few years, not just in Russia but all around the world – the far right is winning everywhere, and LGBTQ rights are under attack all over the world. I’m not expecting anything good to happen inside Russia in the next five to ten years,” said Oleinik.

But others say that despite, or perhaps because of, the report’s findings, there is an even greater need now for LGBTQ+ people in Russia and groups both inside and outside the country to do whatever they can to resist the state’s ongoing repression of the community.

“There is an important distinction to draw between acknowledging that a democratic reversal in Russia is not on the near horizon and concluding that nothing can or should be done in the meantime. The power of the Russian state, backed by resource wealth and a willingness to use every available instrument of repression, is real and cannot be minimised. And yet what we see from our position, working in support of human rights organisations, defenders, organisers, and activists, is not resignation, but realism paired with determination,” said Smirnova.

“People are continuing to organise, even though the time horizons are long and murky and the measures of ‘value’ of the organising are different from what they might be somewhere else. But keeping the lights on for the possible forms of civic engagement, critical thought, and solidarity is a form of resistance that does have long-term value,” she added.

Oleinik vowed his organisation would not be giving up on LGBTQ+ people in Russia.

“We need to continue our work, our support, because we know that LGBTQ+ people in Russia need us. Right now it might look like there is little hope of positive change, but that does not mean we should stop what we are doing,” he said.

*Name changed for security reasons

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Afghan media workers face growing restrictions under Taliban rule, with women journalists pushed further from reporting, broadcasting and public visibility. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Jun 11 2026 (IPS)

Afghanistan ranks 175th in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index this year. Out of 180 countries on the list, only Iran, Syria, China, North Korea and Eritrea ranked lower than Afghanistan.

Arrests narrow opportunities for work

The Taliban’s arrests and imprisonment of journalists have further narrowed opportunities for journalism.

Several prominent journalists are currently in prison. They include Shakib Ahmad Nazari, who is reportedly being held for collaborating with international media outlets. He was arrested in 2025 and sentenced to three years in prison according to sources.

Spokespersons for government ministries and agencies are reluctant to speak to female journalists and often do not even provide basic information or short statements. In the past, we had to sit in the last row of benches at press conferences, but recently we have not even been allocated seats anymore

Hamid Farhadi, a prominent freelance journalist, was arrested in September 2024 while working for foreign media outlets and the Afghan Etilaat Roz media outlet. He was sentenced to two years in prison. According to the human rights organization Amnesty International, Farhadi was sentenced without right to legal representation.

His arrest was allegedly related to a report he made for foreign media outlets about the situation of women and girls in Afghanistan.

The media in Afghanistan is overseen by the Taliban-run Audit Commission. Journalist and former member of the commission, Bashir Hatef, was arrested in 2025 for collaborating with foreign media and sentenced to two years in prison.

Self-censorship has become a daily routine

The arrests of male journalists, however, pale in comparison to the situation of female journalists, who face professional restrictions and are subject to gender-based discrimination. Over the past four years, many have been threatened, arrested, banned from work or treated violently.

Samandar (name changed) has 13 years of experience in television and radio. According to her, journalists currently do not have the right to criticize the Taliban, officials or state institutions.

Journalists are also not able to choose their guests freely. Only experts approved by the Taliban can be invited to programs that cover politics. Regular street interviews are practically impossible.

“We are forced to self-censor or our employer gets into trouble and we are threatened with imprisonment. So we remove criticism of the Taliban from our programs,” says Samandar.

Self-censorship is also visible in practice. A well-known television channel in Kabul – whose name will not be revealed for security reasons – was planning a program on the role of women journalists in communication.

Everything was ready and guests had been invited. However, the program had to be canceled because it was feared that the discussion would cause problems for both the channel and the guests.

Female journalists face double restrictions

Salma (name changed) is a female journalist with a journalism degree and nine years of work experience. She describes how spokespersons for government ministries and agencies are reluctant to speak to female journalists and often do not even provide basic information or short statements.

Routine press conference arrangements have also changed, she says. “In the past, we had to sit in the last row of benches at press conferences, but recently we have not even been allocated seats anymore.”

According to her, separate rooms have been built for women, from where they can follow the events but not participate in them equally.

“A partition has been erected in the hall, and we are forced to sit in a separate booth. We can only listen to the speeches of officials but are not allowed to ask questions.”

Even when questions are allowed in exceptional cases, limits are placed on what can be asked. “On rare occasions, when questions are allowed, we are not allowed to ask anything critical.”

Questions can only be asked at certain events where Taliban-approved officials, such as Zabihullah Mujahid, are present. He is considered somewhat more flexible in his approach to female journalists.

According to Salma, the restrictions do not end there. Movement and work are closely monitored.

“At press conferences, officials from the Taliban’s Ministry of Virtue and Prevention of Vice demand to know who we are with and whether we have a male escort.”

Salma also criticizes news directors who favor male journalists. According to her, it is well known in newsrooms that women are practically prevented from doing normal journalistic work and that Taliban representatives do not want to talk to female journalists.

“In most media outlets, we are not treated as employees but rather as interns who are paid only for our travel expenses. The media outlets take advantage of the restrictions imposed by the Taliban on female journalists.”

According to Salma, many women accept the situation because there are few options.

“In addition to the restrictions imposed by the Taliban, we are forced to tolerate this abuse so that we are not completely excluded from editorial and media work.”

No more female journalists in many provinces

Due to Taliban restrictions, female journalists are required to be accompanied by a male guardian even when they are supposed to be at work elsewhere, which is often practically impossible. Some women have left their jobs for fear that their family members could be arrested.

A writer in Kandahar, “Shazia,” uses a pseudonym. According to her, the restrictions on interviews imposed by the Taliban have significantly changed the way they work.

Male colleagues conduct the interviews, and female journalists have to rely on their recordings when writing their articles. Male colleagues are not always willing to cooperate in situations when follow-up questions or supplementary interviews are needed for a story.

Articles written by women are often published under the names of male colleagues. Women’s voices are not even allowed to be heard on the radio.

According to Reporters Without Borders, four out of five female journalists and media workers in Afghanistan lost their positions after the Taliban returned to power.

Before August 2021, there were 2,490 women working in the media, of whom only about 410 continued to work after the Taliban took power. According to the organization, there are no active female journalists in 15 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces.

Ban on image further tightens surveillance

Freedom of speech in Afghanistan is also significantly restricted by the ban on the display of images of living beings.

According to the Afghan Journalists Center, the ban is in force in at least 23 provinces. Reports indicate that many media outlets have been forced to switch to audio-only format and at least 20 television stations have been closed.

Dwindling female journalists work in the media industry

Recent data highlights the scale of decline in Afghanistan’s media workforce. According to Naeem (not real name), a member of association of media organization, there are currently 4,073 male journalists and 746 female journalists working across the country.

Another female journalist, Nabila (not real name) provided similar figures, estimating that more than 4,700 journalists remain active, around 700 of them women.

These figures reflect a sharp contraction compared to previous years. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), there were previously around 700 women journalists working in Kabul alone; that number has now dropped to fewer than 100

Laila (name changed) was previously part of one of three women-led journalist associations and unions that supported female journalists before the Taliban returned to power.

She says none of these groups is active anymore. According to her, institutions and organizations can no longer be officially registered in women’s names under the Taliban regime.

The media sector in Afghanistan is also structurally restricted. There is no clear legal framework, live broadcasts are prohibited, the number of guests on programs is limited, and access to information is difficult.

Excerpt:

Monika Stankiewicz, Executive Secretary of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, learns how to pan for gold in a free-mercury mine in Baguio, the Philippines, in 2024. Credit: Minamata Convention on Mercury

By Kizito Makoye
SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Jun 5 2026 (IPS)

Ask any woman miner in the Katoro goldfield in Tanzania’s northern Geita region, and she will tell you that she touches toxic mercury with her bare hands when extracting gold from crushed ore.

Many also say they carry the mercury-gold amalgam home and burn it in kitchens, exposing themselves and their families to toxic fumes that waft into the air.

For many women in Tanzania’s artisanal mining communities, the use of mercury is deeply embedded in their survival.

Globally, mercury used in artisanal gold mining contaminates rivers, enters fish and travels through Indigenous food systems – affecting distant communities.

Monika Stankiewicz, the United Nations’ Executive Secretary of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, warned this week that mercury pollution linked to artisanal gold mining continues to wreak havoc globally, with some women so fearful of the toxic metal’s effects that they are delaying motherhood.

During visits to mining communities in different countries, Stankiewicz said she heard stories that exposed the hidden human cost behind the global gold rush – where poverty often leaves families choosing between earning a living and protecting their health.

“I’ve heard women saying they are afraid to get pregnant because they are afraid their children will be affected by mercury,” Stankiewicz tells IPS on the sidelines of the Eighth GEF Assembly. “So it was really heartbreaking.”

Her account paints a grim picture of women and children exposed to hazardous mercury in domestic settings as the human toll of the global gold rush continues to grow, from Geita to Brazil’s Amazon despite visible risks to human health and ecosystems.

For Stankiewicz, the challenge extends beyond environmental regulation to the harsh reality facing millions of low-income miners worldwide, whose families struggle to survive today while carrying health risks that may last for generations.

“It is always a different context,” Stankiewicz said, recalling her years of interactions with artisanal miners.

“In different countries where I met with miners, the situation was quite specific. So it’s difficult to have one story that represents the entire informal sector,” she said.

Mercury pollution linked to artisanal and small-scale gold mining remains one of the world’s largest sources of human-generated mercury emissions.

In Tanzania, where roughly 1.2 million artisanal miners depend on gold for income, mercury is still widely used because it is cheap, accessible and effective at recovering gold.

Mercury is a toxic substance that attacks the central nervous system. According to Stankiewicz, exposure to the liquid metal may cause neurological damage, including memory loss and tremors, respiratory illness from inhaling mercury vapour, reproductive health impacts and harm to children’s developing nervous systems.

Children are particularly vulnerable.

Monika Stankiewicz, Executive Secretary, Minamata Convention on Mercury at the Eighth GEF Assembly in Samarkand, Uzbekistan. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

“Even low levels can affect brain development, learning and memory, and motor skills,” she said.

The consequences can be lifelong.

“We know from past experiences, such as the Minamata disease in Japan, that high levels of mercury exposure, particularly during pregnancy, can lead to severe and permanent neurological damage in children.”

In many artisanal mining communities, women process ore, store mercury and supervise the burning of amalgam to prevent theft.

“If they are not processing directly, they are often most trusted to either store the mercury or watch over the amalgam as it gets burnt to ensure it is not stolen,” Stankiewicz explains.

“They also face compounded risks during pregnancy, as mercury can affect the developing foetus they carry.”

The unsafe disposal of mercury in Tanzania has created a toxic mix in the country’s river system, exposing people downstream to serious health risks due to water and fish contamination, she added.

Mercury enters rivers, fish and agricultural systems, exposing communities who may never set foot inside a mine.

“For families and communities relying on fishing or farming, the impact can mean reduced food safety and food security, loss of income from contaminated natural resources and long-term degradation of ecosystems they depend on,” Stankiewicz says.

She notes that Indigenous communities in the Arctic continue to experience mercury contamination, even though they do not engage in mercury-intensive artisanal mining, because mercury circulates globally through the atmosphere before accumulating in colder ecosystems.

In Brazil, the crisis carries another dimension.

“Despite their distance and very different contexts, both regions reflect a similar underlying reality: artisanal and small-scale gold mining exists at the intersection of livelihoods, informality, and, in some cases, illegality,” she says.

“In the Brazilian Amazon, we are seeing a growing presence of organised criminal networks linked to illegal gold mining, including money laundering, gold laundering, illegal mercury supply chains, and operations in protected and Indigenous areas.”

“In East Africa, including Tanzania, the situation is different in scale and structure, but the sector is still affected by widespread informality and illicit trade, such as smuggling and unregulated cross-border flows, which limit oversight and undermine efforts to control mercury use.”

For Stankiewicz, criminalising poverty does not solve the mercury problem.

She recalls meeting miners who had already stopped using mercury but remained trapped outside formal markets.

“They still struggled to formalise their activities and to have access to formal markets, to have a fair price for their gold and also to protect themselves from illegal activities.”

The lesson, she said, is that governments must avoid pushing miners deeper underground.

“It’s important to work directly with miners and not push them underground so that activity becomes fully illegal, because then it’s difficult to reach out with capacity building and awareness raising.”

Her message to a miner in Geita or the Brazilian Amazon is grounded in empathy rather than judgement.

“First of all, I would say that this is a very difficult choice for any family member or parent to either think of earning money or then also put at risk their own health.”

“So I do not wish anyone to be in a situation to make such a choice.”

Still, she urges immediate protective action.

“The most immediate and practical advice is really for miners to protect themselves from mercury exposure and to avoid certain practices that really may affect their health.”

“This is like burning amalgam in residential areas and also open burning.”

She believes the long-term answer lies elsewhere.

“Formalisation is the way to go.”

The Minamata Convention, which entered into force nearly a decade ago, has increasingly focused on helping countries move in that direction. Between 1 July 2022 and 30 June 2025 the GEF committed USD 174.0 million for programming to support the implementation of the Convention under its eighth replenishment.

Earlier this week, the 71st Council of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) also acknowledged USD 200 million for smaller projects, including support for countries’ national implementation plans under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants and work to address mercury in artisanal and small-scale gold mining under the Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Under Article 7 and National Action Plans, governments are encouraged to eliminate the most dangerous practices, strengthen public health responses, formalise mining operations and introduce mercury-free technologies.

Progress, Stankiewicz says, is visible.

More countries have adopted action plans, more governments have recognised ASGM as a significant sector, and communities are becoming increasingly aware of mercury’s risks.

“On the ground, this is translating into concrete measures: the introduction of mercury-free technologies in some mining areas, stronger regulatory frameworks, efforts to formalise parts of the sector, and increasing integration of health considerations into national responses.”

But she warns against celebrating too early.

“The next phase, and the real test, is ensuring that these efforts are aligned with realities on the ground, sustained, scaled, and translated into lasting improvements in the lives of mining and downstream communities.”

For communities in Tanzania and Brazil that depend on gold, the challenge remains unresolved.

Gold still brings income.

Mercury still brings risk.

And between the two lies a difficult question millions of families continue to confront every day: how to survive today without sacrificing tomorrow.

Note: The Eighth Global Environment Facility Assembly is underway until June 6, 2026, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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In the hard-to-reach rural community of West Pokot, Kenya, 156 young women crossed a threshold that once seemed out of reach. Their graduation from HER Lab, a workforce skills programme for marginalized rural young women, was more than a ceremony. It demonstrated the power of targeted investment, trusted local partnerships and women’s economic empowerment.

Neven Mimica

The EU’s budget crossroads

The European Union faces a critical moment as it negotiates its post-2027 Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). While the European Commission has described the draft as its “most ambitious ever”, rising debt repayments and interest costs mean that, in real terms, funding for external action and development is stagnating or declining.

The new MFF prioritises competitiveness, industrial policy and defence. These priorities are understandable in a volatile geopolitical context, but they risk coming at the expense of development cooperation, Official Development Assistance (ODA), and gender-focused programmes — particularly those supporting Africa.

This is not abstract. Cohesion and Common Agricultural Policy budgets are shrinking, while development funding is increasingly consolidated into broader external action instruments. Member states have warned that any real increase is marginal and that adjustment costs will fall on the most vulnerable, within and beyond Europe.

Strategic partnerships: promise and pitfall

The Global Gateway Initiative, launched to mobilise up to €300 billion by 2027, with half for Africa, was presented as a new partnership model. Yet it has generated concern among civil society and parliamentarians.

Its focus on “bankable” projects and private sector-led delivery risks sidelining the actors best placed to deliver inclusive development: local communities, women’s organisations and grassroots NGOs. Civil society engagement remains inconsistent, funding flows lack transparency, and safeguards to ensure gender equality as a core objective are weak.

Strategic partnerships may therefore displace direct support for proven grassroots models, undermining the local capacity and social trust Europe claims to champion.

A global aid crisis

This policy drift comes at a dangerous moment. In 2025, global aid fell by a record margin following a 9% decline in 2024. France cut ODA by 11%, Germany by 17%, the UK reduced bilateral aid to Africa by 12%, and the United States slashed overseas aid contracts by more than 90%.

The consequences are immediate. Programmes supporting girls’ education, health services and women’s economic empowerment across Africa are being scaled back or closed.

The EU, long a champion of gender equality and development, cannot afford to follow this path. Grassroots gains are under threat. Since 2013, the Global Give Back Circle’s HER Lab programme alone has transitioned more than 800 rural young women in Kenya, into employment, entrepreneurship or further education. These are not isolated successes, but foundations of resilient societies and credible European engagement.

This is not an isolated case. The Women Action Foundation (WAF) has enabled women’s economic participation by addressing a critical but often overlooked barrier in Kenya: childcare. By establishing community-run childcare hubs alongside skills training and livelihood support, WAF has enabled women in low-income communities to enter work, launch micro-enterprises and sustain economic independence — demonstrating again that locally designed solutions can deliver high impact with modest resources.

Responsibility and opportunity

Europe’s global credibility rests on aligning values with action. As negotiations on the post-2027 MFF intensify, the EU must decide whether to uphold its commitment to development cooperation and gender equality or allow them to be diluted within broader strategic priorities.

HER Lab shows what works. Graduates are launching businesses, saving collectively, and mentoring others, with 74 per cent moving into employment, entrepreneurship or further education and unemployment falling sharply after programme completion. These are not abstract gains, but measurable outcomes.

The Global Gateway can still play a vital role if it moves beyond large scale infrastructure and meaningfully integrates grassroots, locally led and gender-focused partnerships. To remain credible, the EU must ring-fence funding for development cooperation and gender equality, make civil society co-designers of programmes, and insist on transparent impact reporting.

Beyond its own budget, it should also use its diplomatic influence to help reverse the global aid decline and mobilise private and impact investment behind women’s empowerment.

A beacon worth protecting

The graduation ceremony in West Pokot shows what is possible when civil society and local partners work directly with communities. Locally led, women-centred programmes deliver lasting impact, often with modest resources but deep social trust.

Europe’s promise to marginalised women is not made in communiqués, but in the funding and partnership decisions taken now. Investing in African women through proven, grassroots-led models strengthens communities, builds resilience from the ground up, and underpins the credibility the European Union seeks to project as a global actor.

If Europe is serious about matching its values with action, it must choose to support and scale what works. That means protecting funding for development cooperation and gender equality, and ensuring that grassroots organisations are partners of choice, not afterthoughts, in EU external action.

Neven Mimica is a Croatian politician and diplomat who served as European Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development from 2014 to 2019. He previously was Deputy Prime Minister of Croatia.

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Monika Stankiewicz, Executive Secretary of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, at the 71st GEF Council Meeting. Credit: Stella Paul/IPS

By Stella Paul
SAMARKAND, Uzbekistan, Jun 2 2026 (IPS)

On day 2 of the Global Environment Facility’s 71st Council Meeting, which focused on process and procedure, a clear message emerged: global environmental governance cannot afford fragmentation.

With six major multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) under its financial mechanism – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (UNCBD), the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs), the Minamata Convention on Mercury, the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), and the emerging Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction – the GEF sits at the centre of a complex reporting architecture.

For many convention secretariats, reporting requirements have become increasingly difficult for countries, constrained by limited staffing and multilayered requirements. Calls for greater synergies, including simpler processes across conventions, have taken on new urgency.

“This is the year of three COPs – a great opportunity for us to create synergies,” said Asad Naqvi, representing the CBD, setting the tone for discussions.

A System Under Strain

Across conventions, similar challenges surfaced: fragmented reporting, misaligned data requirements, and duplication, especially for smaller secretariats and developing countries.

Monika Stankiewicz, Executive Secretary of the Minamata Convention on Mercury, highlighted the gap between global commitments and local realities while acknowledging GEF’s progress in integrating Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs). She pointed to artisanal and small-scale gold mining – one of the largest sources of mercury emissions – that often occurs in indigenous territories. Yet many affected communities remain unaware of how the issue is addressed under the convention. Without meaningful engagement, broader goals such as biodiversity conservation become difficult to achieve.

“If Indigenous Peoples are not adequately engaged in combating mercury pollution, even biodiversity goals will fall short,” she warned, calling for stronger integration across conventions.

Delegates at the 71st GEF Council Meeting debated how to remove fragmentation in the management of funding across six major multilateral environmental agreements. Stella Paul/IPS

The ‘Minefield’ of Reporting

The complexity of reporting was underscored by Dr Rolph Payet, Executive Secretary of the Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm (BRS) Conventions. Despite efforts to build synergies within the chemicals and waste cluster, reporting remains what he described as a “minefield”.

“We have one convention where reporting has started and others where reporting formats have changed; some stakeholders still prefer paper-based systems, while others want digital platforms – and they do not always share data,” Payet explained.

The result is a system that remains difficult for countries to navigate. Still, Payet struck a cautiously optimistic note, pointing to ongoing efforts to harmonise compliance mechanisms and streamline data collection.

“This is not something we should run away from,” he said. “We have a unique opportunity to bring our heads together and find ways to make reporting easier, more effective, and more useful for measuring impact.”

From Silos to Systems

For Naqvi and others, synergies go beyond administrative efficiency; they are essential for addressing interconnected global crises.

Synergies are not just about efficiency but addressing interconnected crises, says Naqvi. The Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is often viewed as a conservation blueprint.

“All these challenges – climate, biodiversity, land degradation, pollution – are interconnected,” he said. “The global financial landscape does not allow us to continue with siloed projects.”

He urged the GEF to leverage its role as a financial mechanism for multiple conventions to deepen integration. Existing coordination platforms, such as the Joint Liaison Group among the three Rio Conventions, could be expanded to include chemicals, waste, and emerging issues.

Equally important, he added, is shifting the focus from outputs to systemic change – understanding and addressing the economic drivers behind environmental degradation.

“We must not only fight the flames but also turn off the tap that fuels the fire,” Naqvi said.

Financing the Transition

Across conventions, the scale of investment required far exceeds available grant resources, creating an urgent need for innovative financing.

Stankiewicz highlighted the funding gap for mercury pollution and hazardous chemicals, noting that grants alone are insufficient. She pointed to blended finance – combining public, private, and sovereign capital – as a key pathway.

“Grants can catalyse,” she said. “They can crowd in larger investments and unlock development opportunities while addressing environmental challenges.”

According to her, emerging examples reflect this approach. For example, the GEF-supported PCB animation project not only reports on the destruction of Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) but also on co-benefits such as emissions reduced through energy efficiency.

“That will be integration in practice. And I hope the implementation agencies will also join us on this important job,” Stankiewicz said.

Land, Drought, and Resilience

From the UNCCD perspective, synergies closely link to scaling investment and building resilience, particularly in vulnerable regions.

Cathrine Mutambirwa, Programme Coordinator at the UNCCD’s Global Mechanism, stressed the need to mobilise private capital and expand blended finance models beyond pilot initiatives. This is especially critical in drylands and drought-prone regions where financing remains limited.

She welcomed the proposed integrated programmes on drought and land restoration under GEF-9 as a timely response to country needs.

“These are precisely the kinds of cross-sectoral approaches that affected countries are asking for,” she said.

Mutambirwa also highlighted partnerships with multilateral development banks and regional institutions, showing how coordinated financing can bring together resources – including GEF, climate funds, and development banks – into cohesive programmes.

Speakers also stressed that integration must be inclusive, placing Indigenous Peoples, women, youth, and vulnerable communities at the centre and supported by accessible information and simplified systems.

“There has been too much fragmentation,” Naqvi of UNCBD acknowledged. “We need to ensure that our processes work for those who are custodians of biodiversity and natural resources.”

A Pivotal Moment

The Eighth GEF Assembly comes at a critical time. With multiple COPs scheduled in the same year and the GEF entering its ninth replenishment cycle (GEF-9), there is a rare alignment of political attention, financing, and institutional momentum.

Speakers were clear: this moment must not be missed.

Greater synergies in reporting, financing, and programme design are essential to reduce burdens and improve their impact.

If implemented effectively, such integration could transform global environmental governance from parallel efforts into a coherent system capable of addressing the world’s most pressing challenges.

As Naqvi put it, the opportunity is clear: to move beyond fragmentation and build a system where sustainability is not just a goal but a pathway to inclusive and resilient development.

The speakers revealed that UN agencies and conventions were cutting operational costs – through reduced travel and the use of technologies like AI. At such a time, they are expected to push for simpler reporting systems that align with tighter budgets, smaller teams, and growing workloads. It will be telling to see how the GEF-9 cycle reflects these constraints in both design and implementation.

Note: The Eighth Global Environment Facility Assembly is underway until June 6, 2026, in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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A hospital in Kabul. Afghanistan faces an already dire shortage of female doctors as women medical graduates remain barred from taking the final exam required to practice medicine. Credti: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, Jun 1 2026 (IPS)

While Afghanistan faces a serious shortage of female doctors, the country’s Islamist regime has placed restrictions on female students from graduating, further exacerbating the situation. Female medical graduates are barred from writing their final exams, which provide them with the professional qualification to practice as medical doctors.

Nilab (name changed) from Afghanistan, graduated as a doctor three years ago from Al-Birun University in Parwan province. She has not been able to practice her profession because the Taliban have banned women from taking the final medical exam.

The final exam is an assessment that aims to measure the competence of medical graduates. It is conducted after seven years of study. Once the exam is passed, the graduate is granted a license to practice medicine. Those who have received the license can also apply for specialization training at teaching hospitals.

“If a doctor does not pass the required final exam, the situation is the same as if they were a student who had just finished high school. When applying for a job at any health center, the first question is: ‘Have you taken the final exam?’ Without it, you cannot work in any hospital, not even as a nurse,” says Nilab.

The final exam was last held for women in 2021. Since then, only men have been allowed to take the exam. The situation is exacerbating Afghanistan’s already dire shortage of female doctors

“I studied for 19 years. Of that time, I lived in a dormitory in another province for seven years, far from my family. It was a difficult time. In the final stage, only one exam, the final exam, has stopped all my progress. Now my future has been taken away from me.”

The final exam was last held for women in 2021. Since then, only men have been allowed to take the exam. The situation is exacerbating Afghanistan’s already dire shortage of female doctors.

Nilab lives with her mother in Kabul, and her family has seven siblings: four girls and three boys.

Two of her sisters and two brothers have also graduated from university, but their futures are uncertain.

Her younger sister scored one of the highest in the national university entrance exam and was accepted to study medicine, but she was unable to complete her studies. Another of Nilab’s brothers graduated in Russian literature but is unemployed.

The family’s only income comes from her mother and one of her siblings, a doctor named Khalida (name changed), who both work as teachers for primary school girls in a public school. With their meager salaries, they shoulder the financial burden of the entire family.

Nilab has tried to earn a living through other means. Until recently, women were allowed to study in non-university health schools.

“Despite all the challenges, I worked as a teacher in a two-year medical school. However, in January 2025, I also lost that opportunity when the Taliban closed medical schools,” Nilab says.

The years of education wasted have caused her a heavy psychological burden, stress and anxiety.

“We have seen how many young women have taken their lives in recent years. Young women’s trust in government, justice and human rights has plummeted to zero. When women’s voices are silenced and they remain imprisoned within us, it becomes unbearable pain. The pain wears us down, it becomes an unhealing wound,” she describes.

The Taliban’s decision has affected all female final-year medical students who completed their studies in 2022 and beyond. There is now a shortage of women in internal medicine, dentistry, surgery, cardiology, and even obstetrics and gynecology.

Khalida graduated from a private medical university in Kabul in 2022.

A street in Kabul, where restrictions on women’s education and employment are deepening Afghanistan’s health crisis. Credit: Learning Together.

“Our lives have been completely destroyed by not being able to take the final exam. The future we once dreamed of is gone. We worked hard for this future, which included 12 years of school, a year of preparing for the university entrance exam, and seven years at the university, but all that work has now been lost.”

After graduating, Khalida worked for a while in a few private hospitals without pay to gain experience in the field. At the same time, she specialized in ultrasound examinations. However, the final exam or the exam required for specialization was not organized, and she was eventually forced to stay home.

Sometimes, female doctors are forced to do jobs that are not in line with their training and are very poorly paid.

“I also worked for a while in a hospital distributing nutritional supplements to malnourished patients. However, this is a job that even a high school graduate can do. We are doctors who studied medicine for seven years, and we should serve women in the fields related to our profession.”

Khalida is currently studying English outside of university, hoping to pass the national English proficiency test so that she can get a scholarship and continue her studies abroad. She says that 19 years of studying in Afghanistan have not allowed her to alleviate the suffering of others or herself. She still depends on her family’s financial support. Without it, she fears that she will be forced to stay inside the four walls of her home.

As a result of the Taliban’s numerous restrictions on women, many have lost interest in their own lives. Some have lost faith in marriage, while others have been forced into marriage.

“I am single and have no desire to get married in Afghanistan under the current circumstances. I do not want to allow society to have a new generation that is even more unhappy than my own,” says Khalida.

UN experts have warned that restrictions on women’s education and employment in Afghanistan are deepening the country’s health crisis, particularly by reducing the number of female doctors and other female health professionals who could treat women.

“We female doctors are unable to serve the women of our society despite our years of education. Instead, we have become a burden on our families. There is nothing more difficult for an educated woman than this. We suffer simply because we are women living under Taliban rule,” says Khalida.

Excerpt:

Elongo, 12, washes her hands at Epo‑Ville Primary School in Bunia, Ituri Province, DR Congo, on 22 May 2026. She had just taken part in a handwashing demonstration led by UNICEF WASH Officer Ciza Nyalundja. Credit: UNICEF/Carmel Ndomba Mbikayi

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, May 26 2026 (IPS)

Since May 16, there has been a significant increase in the number of laboratory-confirmed and suspected Ebola cases reported across the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), primarily in Ituri Province, with additional unrelated cases identified in Kampala, Uganda. Although the outbreak has remained largely confined to that region, it has been heavily linked to areas affected by insecurity, civilian displacement, and mining-related migration, raising concerns among global health experts that the outbreak could spread without effective monitoring and response efforts.

As of May 17, the World Health Organization (WHO) has determined that the Ebola outbreak caused by the Bundibugyo virus in the DRC and Uganda constitutes a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC), while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has issued health alerts to healthcare workers and travelers regarding the spread in the region. Current projections of the virus spreading to other continents remain low at this time, with WHO stating that the outbreak does not meet the criteria of a pandemic, as defined in the 2005 International Health Regulations (IHR).

“We are now revising our risk assessment to very high at the national level, high at the regional level, and low at the global level,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of WHO, on May 22 at a United Nations (UN) press briefing in Geneva, noting that there have been 82 confirmed Ebola cases and seven deaths in the DRC. However, these figures are expected to be far higher, with nearly 750 suspected cases and 177 reported suspected deaths.

Two additional confirmed cases linked with travel from the DRC have also been reported in Uganda, one of which ended in death. Furthermore, two American nationals have been transferred to Europe for treatment after being suspected of contracting the virus following prolonged “high-risk contact.”

Response efforts have been largely limited as a result of widespread civilian displacement and prolonged conflict. On May 21, the UN reported that a hospital in the Ituri province was set on fire by angry relatives after the local police refused to release the body of an infected individual to the family due to concerns of contamination.

Additionally, the outbreak has been most pronounced in the Ituri and North Kivu provinces, which have historically been the center of armed conflict and humanitarian suffering in the DRC. Over the past few months alone, there have been more than 100,000 civilians displaced in this region as a direct result of violence, which has severely constrained humanitarian response efforts.

“These are some of the most difficult operating environments in the world for our life-saving work,” said Tom Fletcher, UN Under Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, in a statement shared to X. “We face conflict and high population movement. We are working to secure safe and sustained access for frontline responders, including to areas controlled by armed groups. It is essential that there is no obstruction to our response. We must have access to all routes — air, land, and water — across the affected areas.”

According to Ghebreyesus, approximately four million people are in dire need of humanitarian intervention, two million are displaced, and ten million are facing acute food insecurity. Women will be disproportionately affected, as they often serve in caregiving roles, domestic labour, and frontline services, all of which increase their risk of infection. Pregnant women are particularly vulnerable, while quarantine measures have been linked with rising rates of gender based violence.

These risks have been exacerbated by the collapse of health systems in the North Kivu and Ituri provinces, where needs are most dire. In 2025, WHO recorded more than 1.5 million people across these provinces who lost access to primary healthcare facilities. Approximately 85 percent of healthcare centers face critical drug shortages.

“Even if people are sick, they may be suspected cases, they cannot access health services, and therefore they cannot be detected, they cannot be diagnosed,” said Teresa Zakaria, WHO’s Unit Head of Humanitarian Operations. “Within the outbreak response as well, we need to really make sure that essential health services for everyone in the two provinces are safeguarded, especially for those who have been forcibly displaced and extremely vulnerable.”

Humanitarian experts have stressed that restoring the public’s confidence in agencies’ capability to contain the outbreak will be crucial moving forward. Following the 2013-2016 Western Africa Ebola epidemic, many communities are still carrying trauma and have harbored a deep distrust in the humanitarian response.

Many residents across the region continue to seek treatment, while others believe that Ebola is “fabricated,” according to Gabriela Arenas of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

“They remember the fear. They remember the rumours spreading to villages. They remember neighbours disappearing into treatment centres,” said Arenas. “During an Ebola outbreak, trust and community acceptance can mean the difference between containment and wider transmission.”

Supplies handed over by UNICEF Chief Field Office Ibrahim Abdi Shire hands over supplies to the Provincial Health Directorate in Bukavu, South Kivu Province, DR Congo, on 20 May 2026. Credit: UNICEF/Christian Kalengera

On May 22, Fletcher announced that up to $60 million USD from the UN’s Central Emergency Response Fund will be allocated to support containment, treatment, and monitoring efforts in DRC and surrounding countries. WHO also announced that it has deployed 22 international staff to provide direct frontline assistance and released $3.9 million USD from its contingency fund. The agency, in collaboration with Africa’s CDC, has established a continental incident management team to support frontline responders and protect vulnerable communities.

“We are applying lessons from previous outbreaks,” said Fletcher. “Containment depends on fast, coordinated action at the community level. We need strong communication with governments and effective early warning and detection systems across affected countries. Community trust is essential: we will continue delivering wider humanitarian support to people affected, engage closely with them to understand their needs, preposition supplies where possible, and avoid militarised delivery of support.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

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Deborah Nyokabi speaking at the 81st African Commission on Human & Peoples' Rights

By Deborah Nyokabi
NAIROBI, Kenya, May 25 2026 (IPS)

The theme of Africa Day 2026, “63 years of unity, integration and development,” offers a stark reminder of the gap that often exists between rhetoric and reality. While commendable regional legal frameworks have advanced legal protections for millions of women and girls, injustice remains written into the fabric of national family laws in many African countries, entrenching gender inequality in the home.

Such is the reality for the young woman in Kampala whose marriage was never legally registered and who, in the eyes of the State, does not exist as a wife.

For the woman in Lagos whose husband took their children after a divorce she did not want, and the law backed him.

For the Muslim widow in Nairobi who cannot inherit the home she shared with her husband for thirty years because property passes to his male relatives.

How the global anti-rights movement is targeting women’s rights in Africa

African countries have made laudable advances in legal rights for women and girls, but many laws governing marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance remain stubbornly unequal.

Deborah Nyokabi

Reform remains slow, uneven, and increasingly obstructed by a coordinated anti-rights movement that includes transnational ultra-conservative Christian organisations, populist political actors from the Global North, billionaire-funded conservative foundations, and right-wing think tanks and legal advocacy groups. They have found fertile ground in Africa, forging alliances with conservative organisations, religious leaders, and politicians who promote illiberal agendas.

Operating in plain sight and dressed in the language of culture, tradition, and sovereignty, these groups target parliaments, constitutional drafting processes, and regional human rights bodies. They draft model legislation, deploy strategic litigation, lobby policymakers, and cultivate relationships with heads of state and cabinet ministers.

They infiltrate international and regional human rights spaces to weaken protections, and run expensive communications campaigns while channeling cross-border funding to local organisations to portray coordinated efforts as grassroots.

Anti-rights groups seeking to reshape African policy

At the second Pan-African Conference on Family Values, held in Nairobi in May 2025, a declaration was adopted calling the family “not a flexible or negotiable construct” and committing to translate their discriminative doctrine into enforceable laws and regional partnerships. High-ranking Kenyan government officials delivered the opening and closing addresses.

The conference was co-sponsored by Family Watch International, C-Fam, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, all of whom served on the advisory committee of Project 2025, an initiative by the US-based Heritage Foundation seeking to roll back reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and diversity initiatives. These are not fringe actors. They are well-funded, politically connected, and pushing into the mainstream.

These groups have also drafted a proposed African Charter on Family, Sovereignty, and Values, which undermines gender equality by rejecting universal definitions of gender, sexuality, and sexual and reproductive health rights. Tabled at an inter-parliamentary conference in Entebbe in 2025, it calls for withdrawal from international human rights instruments and seeks to shield states from obligations under the Maputo Protocol, the African Union’s legally-binding women’s rights treaty.

Applications for observer status at the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights from organisations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom signal an intent to infiltrate the very bodies designed to hold States accountable to their obligation to ensure equality, including in the family.

Harmful bills pass fast while equality bills stall

One of the most devastating patterns is the speed at which homophobic ‘family protection’ legislation moves, while paralysis grips laws to advance gender equality. In Uganda, the Anti-Homosexuality Act was passed in under three months. In Ghana, lawmakers are promoting the Human Sexual Rights and Family Values Bill; in Kenya, political support for the Family Protection Bill is growing. Backed by far-right organisations in the US, these bills seek to criminalise sexual minorities and promote a rigid, exclusionary vision of the family centred on heterosexual marriage and conservative social structures.

Meanwhile, family law reform bills that would give women equal rights in marriage, divorce, and custody have stalled for decades in Uganda, Cameroon, and Ghana. The contrast is not coincidental. The same movement blocking equality for women and girls in family laws is the one pushing legislation against LGBTQI+ people. It uses the same language: family values, cultural integrity, sovereignty, national cohesion. But when you trace the money and the actors, the strategy becomes clear. The goal is not to protect the family. It is to protect the patriarchy within it.

How African civil society and coalitions are fighting back

None of this goes unanswered.

When the Pan-African Conference on Family Values convened in Nairobi, over twenty Kenyan human rights organisations petitioned for the venue to refuse to host it. Billboards celebrating diverse families lined the road from the airport. Activists disrupted the social media narrative and organised in the streets.

Strategic litigation has compelled the government to reinstate safe abortion guidelines in Kenya. International coalitions, including African women, have pushed back against anti-rights infiltration at the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. Survivors, lawyers, activists, and advocates are refusing to cede ground.

Working in coalitions is one of the most powerful tools available to those defending gender equality. The anti-rights movement succeeds in part because it is coordinated across borders, sectors, and institutions. The response must be equally organised. Equality Now’s coalition work is grounded in this understanding. Through the Africa Family Law Network, we join with civil society organisations, legal networks, faith communities, survivor advocates, and parliamentarians to build and sustain a stronger common front.

What African governments must do to reform family laws

This year’s Africa Day should serve as a call to action to prioritise family law reform. We are at a perilous moment of global regression in women’s rights, where hard-won legal safeguards are being deliberately dismantled. Discriminatory family law sits at the heart of that regression. The ask is not complicated. The political will is what is missing. We stand ready to work with you to change that:

To the African Union: Advocate for the universal ratification and implementation of the Maputo Protocol, a floor, not a ceiling. Push for lifting of reservations on equality in marriage, family, and reproductive rights by member states. Resist attempts to water down its provisions through model reservations crafted by anti-rights legal networks.

To African parliaments and parliamentarians: Reform discriminatory laws on marriage registration, equal divorce rights, child custody, and inheritance that have been stalled for too long. Every year of inaction is a year of harm. Do not allow parliaments to be used as platforms for movements that entrench inequality in the family under the disguise of protecting it.

To African governments: Enforce the Maputo Protocol, and ratify if not already undertaken. Conduct awareness-raising campaigns on family law rights. Invest in legal aid that reaches women in rural communities and informal settlements. Allocate sufficient budgets to gender equality and family law reform. Recognise unpaid care work. National family protection policies must protect all family members, not only those who fit a narrow ideological template.

To civil society, lawyers, journalists, and advocates: Build and sustain coalitions across borders. Expose the funding and actors behind anti-rights campaigns. Tell the stories of the women these laws fail. Make the abstract concrete. Keep going.

“Until family laws are equal, there is no equality in African society.”

This Africa Day, let us be clear about what we are celebrating, and honest about what still needs to change.

Deborah Nyokabi is a Legal Advisor on Legal Equality at Equality Now, a global human rights organisation dedicated to ending discrimination against all women and girls. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.

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Excerpt:

Credit: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, May 22 2026 (IPS)

Narges Mohammadi, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her human rights activism in Iran, has been allowed to go home. After guards found her unconscious in her cell, the apparent victim of a heart attack, she was granted temporary release from prison and transferred to a hospital. However, she still faces the threat of being taken back to jail once her condition has improved.

Mohammadi has been repeatedly imprisoned for criticising the theocratic regime, demanding women’s rights, advocating for prison reform and campaigning against the death penalty. Over her lifetime she’s been sentenced to a total of 44 years. She’s already spent more than a decade behind bars, including 161 days in solitary confinement, and has also been sentenced to 154 lashes. In February she was handed a further seven-and-a-half-year sentence. From prison – where she experienced cardiac and blood pressure problems and severe weight loss – she has documented systematic rights violations against political prisoners, including sexual and physical abuse of women detainees, torture and extensive use of solitary confinement.

Mohammadi’s case is one among many. While her ordeal has rightly drawn international attention, others more distant from the spotlight are in danger. Three more women human rights activists – Pakhshan Azizi, Sharifeh Mohammadi and Varisheh Moradi – are on death row at imminent risk of execution. The dangers they and countless others face have grown sharply since the current war began.

Repression tightens

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made clear he wants regime change in Iran. On 1 March, an Israeli strike killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. But if the intention was to topple the regime, it didn’t happen. Iran’s ruling theocratic structures run deep, with multiple layers of planned succession. Khamenei’s son Mojtaba Khamenei, injured in the same attack, was quickly named his replacement, despite Iran’s official ideology formally rejecting hereditary succession.

While clerical leaders have been killed, Iran’s coercive apparatus has gained in its day-to-day power, hardening the theocracy into something closer to a military dictatorship, with the Basij, the paramilitary volunteer force long deployed to crush public dissent, now front and centre.

Israeli and US hopes that Iranians would rise up against the regime have been disappointed. Iran has seen successive mass protest waves, each crushed with large-scale lethal violence. They include the Green Movement that demanded democracy in 2009 and 2010 and the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that demanded women’s rights in 2022 and 2023. The latest uprising came in December 2025 and January 2026, triggered by economic collapse, forging a movement that united broad sections of society to demand an end to the theocratic regime. The state suppressed it with shocking brutality, killing thousands and detaining tens of thousands.

By February, the uprising had been crushed. The Israeli-US intervention was unlikely to reignite a meaningful mass protest movement. If anything, for some Iranians the war has stoked patriotism and more intense enmity towards Israel and the USA. The anticipated revolt simply hasn’t happened.

Much of Iran’s vast diaspora has rallied in support of the war as a means of toppling the regime. But while the diaspora is united in demanding change, its array of ethnic minority organisations, Islamist factions, leftists, monarchists and republicans is bitterly divided over what should come next. Reza Pahlavi, son of the last shah, enjoys some support but others are wary about monarchical nostalgia and his close ties to Israel and the USA. The most credible potential unifying figures inside Iran are imprisoned or otherwise silenced.

Instead of losing control, the regime has tightened its repression. Even as Iran’s leaders wage a social media propaganda war abroad, at home they’ve imposed a near-total internet shutdown, including a block on VPN services. The blackout has caused immense economic harm, disrupting businesses and financial transactions and hitting women the hardest. This comes on top of the economic effects of the current US blockade of Iranian ports, sending inflation and unemployment soaring.

Under the cover of war and the internet shutdown, the government has accelerated executions of political prisoners. While precise figures are hard to get, rights groups report close to 200 executions so far this year, most preceded by prolonged torture to extract false confessions. Secret hangings are reportedly being carried out on an almost daily basis. Among those killed are people detained during the January protests. On 4 May, it was reported that three people arrested at protests on 8 and 9 January – Ebrahim Dolatabadinejad, Mohammadreza Miri and Mehdi Rasouli – had been hanged. For families, the suffering doesn’t end there, as authorities reportedly refuse to return bodies and pressure relatives to stay silent.

Local priorities

Democracy and human rights in Iran depend on the regime’s departure. But the latest war isn’t about any of this. For Netanyahu, with an election impending and anger remaining at his corruption charges and Israel’s security failures around the 7 October Hamas attacks, permanent warfare is a political strategy. Donald Trump’s many social media announcements provide little clue of what motivates a president who promised not to mire the USA in foreign wars, but distraction from low popularity ratings and his many appearances in the Epstein files may be a factor.

This war isn’t the way to achieve change. The regime appears entrenched and capable of surviving a longer conflict. Any peace deal would leave it intact, which its rulers would treat as a victory.

Real change will come when protests can grow into a mass movement large enough to withstand the lethal repression the state will inevitably deploy. That can only happen with sustained support that respects the autonomy of local civil society leaders and strengthens their capacity. The immediate priorities must be to protect credible local sources of information amid the information blackout and ensure the safety and security of Iran’s democracy and human rights activists.

Above all, states must press the Iranian government to halt executions and release everyone detained for speaking out, protesting and demanding change, beginning with Narges Mohammadi. Temporary medical release is nowhere near enough. The Iranian regime must let her be free.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Nooria, a 13-year-old Afghan girl, appears in a video in which she says she disguised herself as a boy to work and support her mother and sisters under Taliban restrictions on women. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
KABUL, May 19 2026 (IPS)

Nooria is a young girl who, because of poverty and the absence of a man in her family, had to dress in boys’ clothes so she could work and feed her family. It was not a choice, it was survival. But she was eventually caught by the Taliban.

A widely circulated video on social media in early February 2026 shows part of Nooria’s story, though the exact date of the footage is not clear. Many people online believe it was recorded and published recently. From what is said in the video, it appears that Nooria had been wearing boys’ clothes for about four years, which suggests she may have been doing so since the beginning of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.

During questioning, the thirteen-year-old is treated like a criminal, not a child. The Taliban officer keeps asking her whether her clothes and her hair are those of a woman or a man. Each time, she answers in a quiet and pleading voice. She says she had no choice. She says she did it for her mother and her sisters, so she could work and support them, because they had no one else.

Since they regained power in 2021, the Taliban have banned women from participating in the labour market and confined them to the home.

In the video, Nooria repeatedly stresses that she had no choice. She had to wear men’s clothes and work in order to feed her mother and sisters. Yet the Taliban officer keeps pressing her with the same questions: “are you a man or a woman, and who do your clothes and hair resemble?”

Here is a portion of the video conversation, originally recorded in Pashto, with a Dari translation. Nooria sits in a dark corner, her face innocent and very vulnerable. A Taliban officer behind the camera shines a harsh light on her and questions her in an intimidating tone. Throughout the conversation, Nooria tries to make him understand that she is acting out of necessity.

Taliban: What is your name? Tell me your name.
Nooria: Nooria.
Taliba: Is Nooria your real name?
Nooria: Yes.
Taliban: Which province are you from?
Nooria: I am from Ghor province.
Taliban: Which district?
Nooria: From Nad Ali district.
Taliban: Where exactly in Nad Ali?
Noria: I am from Zarghun.
Taliban: By what name are you known around here?
Nooria: The people in the market call me Noor Ahmad.
Taliban: Are you wearing men’s clothes?
Nooria: Yes.
Taliban: Are you a man or a woman right now? Explain your situation in your own words.
Nooria: I am a woman, but I wear these men’s clothes out of necessity. I wear them because I must, to enable me work and provide for mother and my sisters. I have no one else to fall on for help. I had to wear this shirt out of necessity and for survival.
Taliban: How long have you been working in the café?
Nooria: It has been three years.
Taliban: Three years? Whom do you work with?
Nooria: With Hikmatullah.
Taliban: How much does Hikmatullah give you per month?
Nooria: At first, he used to give me seven thousand afghanis (USD109.48). But later, I asked him to help me with a little more because it was not enough. He added three thousand, so now it is ten thousand(USD156.40). For the past eight months, he has been giving me ten thousand and that includes his help.
Taliban: Okay, so these clothes you are wearing, are they men’s or women’s?
Nooria: Right now, they are men’s. I wear them because I have to, out of necessity.
Taliban: Look at your hair. Is this the hair of a man or a woman? Take a look yourself—is it man’s or woman’s?
Nooria: I have no one except God. I did this not out of desire but out of necessity. My father has passed away.

In this forced confession video, Nooria says she is thirteen years old and does not know who reported her to the Taliban or why. She explains that she acted only to save her life and feed her mother and sisters.

The video of Nooria’s forced confession went viral on social media, drawing widespread reactions from users across multiple platforms.

Gulchehra Yaftali, a women’s rights activist, shared Noria’s photo on her personal page and wrote: “This image is a blatant crime. A girl has been forced to hide her female identity for over three years to work under the terrorist and misogynistic Taliban regime, just to keep her fatherless family from going hungry. By denying women access to education, work, and public life, the Taliban have pushed them into the shadows and taken away their right to live with dignity.”

It was not the first time a girl in Afghanistan had to disguise herself in boys’ clothes out of necessity. During the first Taliban regime, many households without men resorted to dressing their daughters as boys so they could leave the house safely, have a male guardian, and work to support their families. Even in the current Taliban regime Nooria is not the only girl forced to take this step to protect her family and survive.

Despite my efforts, I was unable to interview Nooria’s relatives or acquaintances. In most cases involving the Taliban, people are too afraid to speak and do not want to risk talking to the media.

In spite of that, I still managed to talk with Noorullah (not her real name), a resident of Ghor province, who gave me the background story of Nooria and her family.

According to her, after Nooria’s mother lost her husband, she left Nad Ali village with her daughters and moved to Ghor. Since they were not well known in that locality, they could not find a male guardian. She therefore had to dress her daughter as a boy and send her to work in the market.

Initially, her daughter Nooria worked in a dairy shop, and later went to work at Hikmatullah’s restaurant.

“Hikmatullah was a good man”, Noorullah says. “He would give Nooria a ride home on his motorcycle in the evening, and whenever he took his own children to school, he would also bring her along on the way to the restaurant.”

I could not get any comments from the Taliban because in most cases involving women, they do not comment to the media. Repeated attempts to obtain comment are often met with silence.

Nooria says at the end of the video confession that Hikmatullah, the restaurant owner for whom she worked, did not know she was a girl. It remains unclear what the Taliban may have done to him, I was not able to find any information about his situation.

It is also not known what happened to Nooria after the video was released. Many human rights activists and social media users believe the Taliban may have forced her into marriage, as was done during their previous rule. However, despite all efforts, no one has been able to find any information about her current situation.

Meanwhile, a number of Taliban critics, women’s rights activists, former government officials, human rights advocates, and social media users have condemned this action, calling it inappropriate. They point out that the Taliban once carried out suicide attacks disguised in women’s clothing. But now, when a girl wears men’s clothes simply to protect and support her family out of necessity, because of restrictions imposed by the Taliban, they respond with such appalling treatment.

Excerpt:

Khaled Khiari, UN Assistant Secretary-General for Middle East, Europe, the Americas, Asia and the Pacific, Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and Peace Operations, addresses the Security Council meeting on maintenance of peace and security of Ukraine. Credit: UN Photo/Loey Felipe

By Oritro Karim
UNITED NATIONS, May 18 2026 (IPS)

Four years after the start of the Russo-Ukrainian War, 2026 has marked a significant escalation in hostilities, with intensified bombardments from both sides causing immense destruction across the region, complicating humanitarian operations, and deepening an already severe humanitarian crisis. As exchanges of attacks have intensified in recent days, the United Nations (UN) warns that women and girls will be disproportionately impacted as violence disrupts access to basic, lifesaving services.

Last week on May 13, Russian forces launched a massive barrage of approximately 800 drones, targeting western regions of Ukraine, including areas that surround the Hungarian border. Local authorities informed the UN’s country office in Ukraine that the attacks resulted in multiple civilian casualties and extensive damage to critical infrastructure, including energy facilities and railway hubs. Significant destruction was reported in the Rivne, Volyn, and Ivano-Frankivsk regions, where several sites came under fire.

This attack triggered what UN Ukraine described as “one of the most intense and prolonged attacks of the war to date,” with continuous hostilities from Russian forces reported across the country for nearly 24 hours. Violence intensified the following day in Kyiv, where drone and missile strikes targeted major residential neighborhoods and key civilian infrastructure.

Ukrainian authorities reported that at least 140 Ukrainians were killed, including six children, with figures expected to rise as rescue operations continue. Officials also stated that a high-rise residential building in Kyiv’s Darnytskyi district sustained significant damage following a direct strike, leaving numerous residents trapped beneath the rubble.

Approximately 24 civilians were killed and 48 others were injured in the strike, including three children who were found dead. UN Ukraine reported that emergency teams carried out search-and-rescue operations and extinguished fires despite immense risks, as strikes continued to land. That same day, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported that a “clearly marked” UN vehicle was struck twice in Kherson City while delivering aid to vulnerable communities.

“Families should always feel safe,” said Bernadette Castel-Hollingsworth, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees’ (UNHCR) Representative in Ukraine. “Mothers should not be waiting to know if their children are alive under the rubble after these missile attacks,” she continued, stressing that attacks that target civilians are a violation of humanitarian law.

According to the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) , civilian casualties in Ukraine over the first four months of 2026 were higher than any four-month period recorded in any of the last three years. The Mission found that this is primarily due to a massive rise in the use of long-range weapons, which carry a far greater capacity for destruction and civilian harm, especially when used in densely populated urban areas.

HRMMU found that in April of this year, at least 84 civilians were killed and 628 others were injured as a direct result of long-range weapons use, accounting for approximately 43 percent of the total civilian casualties recorded during that period.

“I deplore the resumption of these large-scale attacks which have resulted in civilian casualties across the country,” said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk on May 14. “Attacks by long-range weapons are one of the leading causes of civilian casualties in Ukraine. Their expanded use in populated areas will only increase the already mounting toll on civilians,” Turk added, urging for an immediate de-escalation of hostilities.

Ukrainian women and girls have been severely and disproportionately impacted by the war, with the first three months of 2026 marking the deadliest winter for women and girls since the full-scale Russian invasion in 2022. According to figures from UN Women, approximately 199 women and girls were killed between January and March of this year. This follows a 27 percent increase in casualties among women between 2025 and 2024.

More than four years into the Russian invasion, women and girls in Ukraine are facing immense stress under the threats of war and subsequent attacks on energy infrastructure. Credit: UN Women/Aurel Obreja

During a press briefing at the Palais des Nations in Geneva on May 12, UN Women’s Representative in Ukraine Sabine Friezer Gunes informed reporters that attacks on energy infrastructure have devastated mental and physical wellbeing for women across Ukraine, particularly those in caregiving roles. Gunes noted that many of these women are struggling to manage increasing household responsibilities, growing financial pressures, and shrinking access to essential resources, such as reliable electricity.

“Women are significantly more likely than men to report having no backup energy supply during disruptions – 73 per cent of women say that they have no alternative energy sources,” said Gunes. “Nearly eight in ten women’s organisations in Ukraine told UN Women that funding reductions are seriously affecting their work, including some organisations reporting having to reduce the number of women and girls supported by their services. Official donor assistance to support women has reduced, and inequalities in Ukraine are increasing.”

Over the weekend, on May 17, Ukraine launched one of its largest long-range drone offensives against Russia in over a year, mainly targeting Moscow. This attack, described by reporters as retaliation for the missile and drone strikes in Kyiv, killed at least three people and injured 12 others, while local authorities reported damage to several unspecified infrastructure and numerous high-rise buildings.

“Our responses to Russia’s prolongation of the war and attacks on our cities and communities are entirely justified,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a statement shared to X (formerly Twitter). “This time, Ukrainian long-distance sanctions have reached the Moscow region, and we are clearly telling the Russians: their state must end its war.”

Nigel Gould Davies, a senior fellow for Russia and Eurasia at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, warned that Ukraine’s retaliatory strikes against Russia will only work to exacerbate regional tensions going forward.

“There is no ongoing peace process to disrupt. What (the attack) is more likely to do is add to the darkening cloud of anxiety over Russia, which has developed palpably over the last three or four months,” said Davies. “The fact that Ukraine is reminding the Moscow population that it is vulnerable to these attacks is likely to intensify the mix of concerns now. I see no prospect, though, in the shorter term, that even these factors together will induce Russia to consider the compromises that will be necessary for peace negotiations.”

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Parliamentarians from Africa, Asia, and the Arab world gathered to assess pledges made at last year’s TICAD9 summit in Yokohama. Credit: APDA

By Hisham Allam
CAIRO, May 14 2026 (IPS)

The word heard most often at a two-day parliamentary forum in Cairo last week was not “commitment”; it was “follow-up.” And the difference mattered.

Parliamentarians from Africa, Asia, and the Arab world gathered 28–29 April not to renew pledges made at last year’s TICAD9 summit in Yokohama, but to ask what had actually been done. The answer was uneven, and delegates said so plainly.

The meeting, organised by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) and the Forum of Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAPPD) with support from UNFPA, the Japan Trust Fund, and IPPF, focused on sexual and reproductive health, universal health coverage, youth investment, and gender equality. It convened against a difficult backdrop: shrinking donor budgets, deepening demographic pressure across Africa, and a persistent gap between legislation and delivery.

Japan’s Makishima Karen, a member of the House of Representatives, Vice Chair of the Japan Parliamentarians Federation for Population, and former Minister for Digital Affairs, set the tone early. “Once a conference is finished, it’s no longer the finish – we should follow up the outcomes and the concrete actions,” she told IPS on the sidelines.

Makishima was direct about where progress begins. “Wherever you live or wherever you are born, the right to live healthily is a human right,” she said. “That is why I focus on the necessity of universal health coverage (UHC) for all.” She argued that UHC cannot be achieved without bringing finance ministries into the conversation: “The understanding of the Minister of Finance is necessary. We are encouraging ministries of finance to join the process.”

On what actually drives change at the community level, she was equally clear: “When mothers cannot read, it must be difficult for their communities to live healthily and safely. Education of women and girls is essential to protect the next generation.”

She also raised a dimension of the agenda that often goes unstated: the role of digital tools. Drawing on her background in digital governance, she argued that technology is not a separate track but integral to delivery: “With one smartphone, every person can access information, check their own data, and have the ability to control it. That is part of democracy.”

Meeting chairs set the tone, demanding asking for action, not new pledges, at a recent two-day forum in Cairo. Credit: APDA

On the wave of aid cuts hitting development programmes globally, she did not deflect. “I believe in the necessity of multilateral organisational frameworks; otherwise, it is very difficult to continue the necessary programmes in each region.” The longer-term answer, she said, is not to wait for donors to return. “Within five or ten years, each government should take on the responsibility to continue these programmes. We must have a very long-term perspective.”

Tanzania’s Jackson Kiswaga, MP, offered the clearest example of what domestic ownership can look like. His country, with 71.5 million people, 60 percent under 24, growing at nearly three percent a year, has been moving fast. In 2023, Tanzania passed the Universal Health Insurance Act, integrating reproductive health services into mandatory coverage spanning formal and informal sectors. A dedicated Youth Ministry was established under the President’s Office. A national scholarship programme has since supported over 400 girls in science education, with measurable reductions in early marriage and pregnancy.

“Institutional innovations are models for other countries,” Kiswaga said. “Strong partnerships in the health sector are key to ensuring sustainability.”

Morocco’s Soukaina Lahmouch, MP, offered a sharper warning. Her country enacted landmark legislation against gender-based violence in 2018, but seven years on, implementation has stalled. Procedural complexity, weak enforcement, and cultural resistance, particularly in domestic violence cases, have blunted the law’s impact.

“Women in Morocco still suffer discrimination and exclusion,” she said, “despite the progress made.” She called on TICAD to support not just the drafting of laws but their enforcement through court reform, rural health infrastructure, and access to financing for women.

Parliamentarians were reminded that the outcomes from Cairo would be reported to the Global Conference of Parliamentarians on Population and Development in Tokyo 2027. Credit: APDA

Two other delegates raised pressures that seldom receive equal billing. Tunisia’s Ezzeddine Tayeb, MP warned that his country’s rapidly ageing population is straining its pension system and called for a comprehensive law guaranteeing the rights of elderly citizens, including enforceable standards for long-term care. Algeria’s MP Khaled Bourenane placed the forum’s agenda inside Africa’s continental trajectory: a population heading toward 2.5 billion by 2050, with over 20 million people displaced by climate events annually. Demographic challenges at this scale, he argued, cannot be addressed in silos.

JICA representative Yo Ebisawa pointed to Egypt as a live test case. In 2017, Egypt ranked the third globally in out-of-pocket health spending as a share of household budgets.

Since passing its Universal Health Insurance Law, the country has been rolling out coverage across all 27 governorates, targeting completion by 2030. So far, six million people across six governorates have been enrolled. In Port Said, the share of households facing catastrophic health expenditure has fallen by 40 percent. Japan has backed the rollout with a $400 million development policy loan and an $8 million joint JICA-WHO project providing equipment and training, including for facilities serving Sudanese refugees and medical evacuees from Gaza.

APDA Vice Chair Prof. Kiyoko Ikegami closed the first day with a pointed reminder: the outcomes from Cairo will be reported to the Global Conference of Parliamentarians on Population and Development in Tokyo 2027. The chain of accountability, she said, must hold.

Whether the commitments made in Cairo translate into budget lines, legislation, and services – that is the only measure that counts.

Note: The meeting was organised by the Asian Population and Development Association (APDA) and the Forum of Arab Parliamentarians on Population and Development (FAPPD). It was supported by the Japan Trust Fund (JTF), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Arab States Regional Office (ASRO),  and the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), in collaboration with the African Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development (FPA).

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Despite the newfound discovery of sexual harassment and the taxpayer-funded settlements, the United States Congress has failed to implement any lasting policy reforms to protect staff from sexual misconduct. Credit: Shutterstock

By Joseph Chamie
PORTLAND, USA, May 11 2026 (IPS)

After more than two centuries of independence, it appears that the United States Congress, or at least certain parts of it, has finally discovered the existence of sexual harassment within the institution.

This discovery by Congress is noteworthy in a country where sexual harassment is widespread. Nationally, 81% of women have reported experiencing some form of sexual harassment and/or assault in their lifetime. Moreover, as of early 2026, reports indicate that 25% of individuals have witnessed or experienced sexual harassment in the workplace within the past 12 months.

Sexual harassment in Congress is believed to be driven by a combination of interrelated factors. These include extreme power disparities within a hierarchical framework, a decentralized workplace structure, the abuse of position to coerce or manipulate, burdensome reporting processes, the use of taxpayer funds for settlements, fear of retaliation, staff members’ career dependency, gender imbalance, lack of oversight, and a perceived culture of tolerance with a historical lack of accountability.

Despite Congress passing reforms to require sexual harassment training and streamline reporting, the underlying factors and cultural issues continue to pose challenges for ensuring a safe workplace free of sexual misconduct.

Throughout much of its recent history, there have been reported claims and personal accounts of sexual harassment and misconduct in Congress. For example, in the 2010s, there were 16 instances of sexual harassment reported (Figure 1).

Source: GovTrack.US.

In addition to the alleged claims and personal accounts, Congress has conducted investigations and awarded settlements for sexual misconduct within the institution. For example, since 2017, the U.S. House Ethics Committee has undertaken 20 investigations into allegations of sexual misconduct by members of the House.

However, approximately 80% of the individuals who have reported sexual misconduct to their respective offices about sexual misconduct choose not to report it to the Office of Compliance due to fears of retaliation and negative consequences on their employment and careers.

Many of the settlements involve non-disclosure agreements, which have been criticized for protecting the identities of the perpetrators. Between 1996 and 2018, 349 settlements and awards were made involving 80 House and Senate offices (Table 1).

Source: GovTrack.US.

Despite numerous alleged claims, personal accounts, settlements, and awards, Congress has been hesitant to openly acknowledge the prevalence of sexual harassment within its branch of government.

However, with the recent surge in allegations, high-profile resignations, and investigations into taxpayer-funded settlements, leaders of both parties in the House and Senate are under increasing pressure to address and prevent sexual misconduct. As a result, the U.S. Congress seems to have finally discovered the existence of sexual harassment within its ranks.

With the recent surge in allegations, high-profile resignations, and investigations into taxpayer-funded settlements, leaders of both parties in the House and Senate are under increasing pressure to address and prevent sexual misconduct

Additionally, three Republican women in Congress have recently launched a campaign against sexual harassment. Their main goal is to uncover and hold accountable predators in Congress from all parties. Besides advocating for transparency, they are demanding that members of Congress face consequences for their sexual misconduct.

Furthermore, these women are urging Congressional lawmakers to acknowledge the pervasive culture of sexual harassment and misconduct on Capitol Hill. They are also calling for lawmakers to take action to change the environment where such behavior has been accepted as an unfortunate but unchangeable reality.

One of these Republican lawmakers has claimed that the sexual misconduct in Congress goes much deeper than the public realizes.

Additionally, these Congressional lawmakers are committed to dismantling the unwritten rules of political expediency and tribal loyalty that have historically kept sexual harassment concealed.

One of the lawmakers introduced a resolution (H.Res.1100) directing the committee to preserve and publicly release records and reports on all investigations into Congressional members for sexual harassment. Additionally. these Republican lawmakers are demanding the release of documents detailing any settlements related to sexual harassment involving members of Congress.

However, the party’s male leaders, including the president and top Republican congressional leaders, have chosen to support the accused men whose votes are necessary to maintain their majority in the House of Representatives.

Furthermore, numerous women in the United States have publicly accused the country’s current president of various acts of sexual misconduct, including rape.

In 2023, a New York jury found the U.S. president civilly liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages. Currently, no other person serving in the U.S. federal government has as many credible accusations and a jury conviction for sexual misconduct as the president.

Additionally, in a rare statement, the Congressional House Ethics Committee defended its handling of sexual harassment charges following the resignations of two lawmakers facing sexual misconduct. The committee operates in secrecy and typically takes years to complete its inquiries.

While acknowledging flaws in the reporting process, the committee cited the challenges it faces and urged employees with sexual harassment claims to come forward. However, Congressional staffers are understandably reluctant and afraid to make accusations of sexual harassment against lawmakers to a panel controlled by their peers.

Congressional lawmakers are predominantly men. In 2026, men make up 71% of the House of Representatives and 74% of the Senate (Figure 2).

Source. U.S. Congress. Gov.

In addition to the women in Congress who are objecting to the sexual harassment taking place within Congress, advocacy groups across the country are demanding more transparency and easier reporting processes. They maintain that sexual harassment typically goes undisclosed because of the power dynamics within Congress, with many incidents going unreported because of fear of retaliation.

For example, the National Women’s Defense League reported that there have been fifty-three allegations of workplace sexual harassment made against at least 30 lawmakers in the House and Senate over the past two decades. Nearly all of these documented cases involve men harassing women, with 77% of the allegations involving members of the legislative staff.

Furthermore, the issue of sexual harassment in Congress is bipartisan. Of all the allegations, 60% are made against Republicans and 40% against Democrats. The recent cases of sexual harassment in 2026 have prompted calls for accountability, stricter ethics investigations, and public disclosure of misconduct records.

In April and May 2026, prominent lawmakers, including Rep. Eric Swalwell and Rep. Tony Gonzales, resigned due to allegations of sexual misconduct and ethics violations. In addition, the Ethics Committee is currently investigating Rep. Chuck Edwards for reportedly having an improper relationship with a subordinate and sexually harassing staff.

Moreover, documents released since 2004 reveal that over $338,000 in taxpayer funds have been used to settle confidential sexual harassment claims involving 13 claims against members of Congress. The process of filing complaints in Congress has been criticized for being opaque and largely unknown.

The recent resignations of lawmakers along with the use of taxpayer funds to settle harassment claims have contributed to Congress’s discovery of sexual harassment committed by its members.

It appears that Congress is now beginning to address some of the immediate issues of sexual misconduct taking place within the institution. However, despite the newfound discovery of sexual harassment and the taxpayer-funded settlements, the United States Congress has failed to implement any lasting policy reforms to protect staff from sexual misconduct.

Joseph Chamie is a consulting demographer, a former director of the United Nations Population Division, and author of many publications on population issues.

LDC Future Forum Banner. Credit: OHRLLS

By Rabab Fatima
UNITED NATIONS, May 8 2026 (IPS)

The future of the world’s least developed countries (LDCs) will be shaped by a critical choice they make today- strategic investment in their youth. Rich in human potential, the young people in LDCs embody ingenuity, resilience and ambition. With the right opportunities, they can transform challenges into opportunities and put their countries strongly on track to sustainable development.

In the 44 LDCs, more than 60 per cent of the population is under 25. That is more than 315 million young people – innovators, entrepreneurs and problem-solvers – in a world being reshaped by technology, climate pressures and shifting economic realities. Their energy, creativity and ambition represent an extraordinary opportunity not only for national development, but for global prosperity and stability.

The question is simple: will we act with the urgency this moment demands? In May 2026, governments, development partners, private sector leaders, researchers and young changemakers will convene in Helsinki for the Fourth LDC Future Forum, under the theme “Transforming LDCs by Empowering the Youth Population through Education, Innovation, and Inclusive Growth.”

Rabab Fatima, USG and High Representative, OHRLLS. Credit: OHRLLS

Opportunity is expanding—but unevenly

The global economy is evolving at speed. Artificial intelligence, digital platforms, green technologies and geopolitical shifts are reshaping how we live and work. By 2030, an estimated 170 million new jobs will be created worldwide, even as 40 per cent of core workplace skills are transformed.

Youth in LDCs are ready to be part of this future. Already, they demonstrate remarkable entrepreneurial initiative: nearly 70 per cent are engaged in self employment, compared to about 50 per cent in other developing countries.

Yet opportunity remains deeply uneven. Tertiary enrolment in LDCs stands at just 11 per cent. Fewer than a quarter of graduates specialize in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Millions of young people—especially girls and rural youth—remain excluded from quality education, digital connectivity and formal employment. Without urgent and targeted investment, demographic strength risks becoming a demographic strain.

The DPOA: Investing in youth as a development imperative

The Doha Programme of Action (DPoA) is unequivocal: investing in people – especially youth – is central to sustainable development and smooth graduation from the LDC category.

It places strong emphasis on education, skills and science, technology and innovation (STI) as engines of structural transformation. Critically, it advances concrete deliverables, including the establishment of an Online University for LDCs, designed to expand access to quality, affordable higher education – particularly in STEM fields. It also promotes digital learning, innovation ecosystems, and stronger linkages between education systems and labour market needs.

The Fourth LDC Future Forum will focus squarely on these priorities. It will advance practical solutions to close skills gaps, expand digital learning, strengthen innovation hubs and promote inclusive growth models that leave no young person behind.

Inclusion must be intentional

True transformation cannot happen if opportunity is accessible only to a few.

Gender gaps in education, skills acquisition and labour force participation continue to hold back progress. The digital divide—between countries, communities and genders—threatens to widen existing inequalities unless deliberately addressed. Inclusive growth requires inclusive design: policies and investments that actively reach girls, marginalized youth and those in rural and underserved areas.

By placing equity at the centre of youth empowerment, LDCs can ensure that growth is not only faster, but fairer—and therefore more sustainable.

A shared responsibility

No country can undertake this transformation alone. Governments must lead by prioritizing youth in national development strategies and aligning education with future economic needs. Development partners must scale up predictable, high quality financing for education, skills and digital infrastructure. Academia must help generate evidence based solutions. And the private sector must play a central role—by investing, mentoring, innovating and creating decent jobs.

The LDC Future Forum exists to forge these partnerships. Through rigorous research, policy dialogue and multi stakeholder collaboration, it aims to deliver actionable recommendations that will inform both national action and the 2027 Midterm Review of the Doha Programme of Action.

The choice before us

History will judge this generation not by the challenges we faced, but by the choices we made. We can allow structural barriers and underinvestment to hold back millions of young people—or we can unlock the dynamism that resides within them.

Empowering youth is not a long term aspiration. It is the fastest, most reliable path to sustainable growth, resilience and global stability.

The message from Helsinki must be clear: invest in young people now – and they will transform their countries, and our shared future.

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Excerpt:

A street scene in Herat, where calls to reopen schools and universities for girls have exposed activists and educators to Taliban detention. Credit: Learning Together.

By External Source
HERAT, Afghanistan, May 5 2026 (IPS)

Qadoos Khatibi, an Afghan university lecturer, and Fayaz Ghori, a civil society activist, also from Afghanistan, were detained by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Their crime? Advocating for girls’ right to education.

Their arrest came as Afghanistan began a new academic year in the last week of March. Schools reopened across the country, but girls above primary school level remain barred from classrooms for the fifth consecutive year.

Khatibi had posted a video urging the Taliban to reopen educational institutions for girls, emphasizing that a country cannot develop without girls’ education. Ghori, for his part, had written that, “We are looking forward to the day when the doors of education will be opened for the girls of this country.”

In Afghanistan today, even civic, non-political advocacy can carry extreme risk. Critics and activists risk arrest, forced disappearance and sometimes worse, simply for sharing a video, writing a post, or speaking out. Online spaces are closely monitored, and critical voices are swiftly suppressed

Nearly five years have passed since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, a period marked by the closure of secondary schools and universities to girls and women. During this time, girls’ education has come to a complete halt, and anyone who dares to speak out in protest often faces swift and harsh punishment.

Sediq Yasinzada, a civil society activist in Herat province and friend of both men, said they had spoken out against the closure of schools and universities for girls. They had shared posts on Facebook calling for the reopening of schools beyond grade six, and for universities to once again re-admit female students.

More than 2.2 million girls in Afghanistan are currently denied access to education due to restrictions, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef), highlighting the magnitude of the problem.

In March this year, both men were summoned by the Taliban’s Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Herat. After interrogating them, they were handed over to Taliban intelligence. They spent 24 hours in detention, a fate that has become all too familiar for critics of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

This time, however, the response was different. Because Khatibi and Ghori are well-known figures in Herat, their detention sparked a wave of support on social media. Ordinary citizens, activists, and local influencers called for their immediate release, bringing the issue to a wider public attention.

Alongside the social media outcry, several local elders and influential figures intervened directly with the Taliban, and after about 24 hours, both men were released.

Sarwar Khan, a prominent elder from Herat, says he has repeatedly urged the Taliban in meetings to reopen schools. He is the father of four daughters, all of whom are now denied access to education. “Send your sons to study”, was the Taliban’s mocking response, fully aware that Sarwar Khan has no sons.

When he pointed out that he has no sons, and that education is a right for both women and men, he was threatened with expulsion or even imprisonment if he continued to speak.

After his release from detention, Khatibi shared a statement on Facebook that underscored the core of their demand:

“What we asked for was a human, national, and Islamic request… Knowledge is the foundation of development and does not conflict with religious values. Knowledge does not have a gender. Our women and girls have the right to education.”

The arrests of Qadoos Khatibi and Fayaz Ghori are not isolated incidents. They reflect a broader pattern in Afghanistan, where even peaceful advocacy for girls’ education can be treated as a crime. Families like Sarwar Khan’s, as well as activists and ordinary citizens, face constant threats simply for demanding a basic human right.

In Afghanistan today, even civic, non-political advocacy can carry extreme risk. Critics and activists risk arrest, forced disappearance and sometimes worse, simply for sharing a video, writing a post, or speaking out. Online spaces are closely monitored, and critical voices are swiftly suppressed.

Many men avoid protest not out of indifference, but out of fear. In a situation whereby university professors and civil society activists can be scrutinized and ultimately criminalized simply for sharing a video or written text, many choose silence.

Yet despite this environment of repression, women, girls, and some men continue to protest. In recent years, dozens of women have been detained for weeks or even months without access to lawyers or contact with their families simply for demanding a fundamental right to education.

Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Afghanistan has entered a harsh new era. Progress made over two decades, during which millions of girls entered schools and universities, has abruptly halted. The closure of schools beyond grade six and the suspension of higher education have created not only an educational crisis, but also a deep social and human challenge. In this climate, any form of civic protest is met with security crackdowns, shrinking the space for public expression.

Taliban authorities have repeatedly detained critics and civil society activists over the past several years, particularly those who have spoken out against their policies.

Excerpt:

In the low tide, an i-Taukei fisherwoman gathers cockles along the Nasese sea wall in Fiji, a tradition weathered by time and tide. The assessment Climate Change Implications for Fisheries and Aquaculture in the Pacific Island Region looks at women’s contributions across fisheries and aquaculture systems, from harvesting to trade. Credit: Josh Kuilamu/SPC

By Sera Sefeti
SUVA, Fiji, May 4 2026 (IPS)

For generations, Pacific people have understood the ocean not as a resource but as identity, sustenance, and survival. Today, that relationship is being tested in ways science is only just beginning to fully capture.

For the first time in the region’s history, every Pacific Island country now has a clear, data-driven picture of what climate change will mean for its waters and its own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).

This shift marks more than just a scientific milestone. It is a turning point in how the Pacific can understand, manage, and defend its ocean in a rapidly changing climate.

From Regional Averages to National realities

The updated assessment, “Climate Change Implications for Fisheries and Aquaculture in the Pacific Island Region”, builds on a 14-year-old vulnerability study. But unlike its predecessor, this version moves beyond broad regional trends.

It goes deeper into country-specific realities.

In a region where ocean territories dwarf landmass, this matters. The Pacific controls around 27 million square kilometres of ocean, yet only about 2 percent of that is land. Fisheries are not just an industry – they are the backbone of economies, cultures, and food systems.

“This is quite amazing,” says SPC Climate Change Project Development Specialist Marie Lecomte, referring to the ability to assess climate impacts at the EEZ level. “The ocean is so big, and land masses are so tiny… it has always been very difficult to downscale ocean models to something meaningful for countries.”

Now, that gap is beginning to close.

Rising ocean temperatures and changing chemistry are reshaping marine ecosystems, impacting people’s livelihoods and national economies. Credit: Douglas Picacha/IPS

Why This Science Matters Now

For Pacific leaders, the climate crisis is not abstract. It is negotiated in global forums, defended in policy rooms, and lived daily in coastal communities.

Yet one persistent challenge has been the lack of evidence.

This report begins to change that.

It provides:

• Updated scientific data on ocean conditions
• Country-level projections of fisheries decline
• A clearer understanding of how climate change cascades from ocean systems into economies and livelihoods

In doing so, it transforms science into something actionable:

• A diagnostic tool showing what lies ahead
• A planning guide for adaptation
• A negotiation tool for global advocacy

For a region often described as the moral voice of climate negotiations, this evidence adds weight to that voice.

The Pacific controls around 27 million square kilometres of ocean, yet only about 2 percent of that is land. Now each country in the region will have a data-driven picture of the effects of climate change in its waters. Credit: Francisco Blaha/SPC

What the Science Reveals

The findings are sobering.

Rising ocean temperatures and changing chemistry are already reshaping marine ecosystems. The report maps, with unprecedented clarity, a chain reaction: warming waters alter fish biology, leading to fish stocks’ decline, which will ultimately result in the impact on people’s livelihoods and national economies.

At the centre of this crisis are coastal ecosystems, i.e. coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass beds, the ecological foundations of Pacific fisheries.

These systems are under intense pressure from both climate change and human activity.

“For mangroves, they are also constrained by infrastructure development,” Lecomte explains. “If you build a new hotel, then you get rid of the mangrove.”

For scientists, the assessment Climate Change Implications for Fisheries and Aquaculture in the Pacific Island Region offers the most comprehensive dataset for policymakers and communities. Credit: John Nihahuasi/SPC

Across the Pacific, the risks are not evenly distributed.

Low-lying island nations, already facing sea-level rise and extreme weather, are doubly exposed. Their dependence on fisheries for food and income leaves little buffer against decline.

The consequences are stark:

• Reduced food security
• Declining incomes
• Increased vulnerability of coastal communities

Yet even in this “doom and gloom” narrative, the report resists fatalism. Instead, it offers a framework for adaptation and resilience.

However, in the Pacific, the situation is not starting from zero.

For centuries, communities have managed fisheries through customary practices like tabu areas, seasonal closures, and community governance.

The report reinforces these approaches while introducing new strategies:

• Climate-smart aquaculture
• Diversifying target species
• Improving value chains (earning more from less catch)
• Protecting and restoring coastal/blue ecosystems

It also highlights a critical but often overlooked dimension, which is women’s contributions across fisheries and aquaculture systems, from harvesting to trade work that remain under-recognised despite their central role.

Science, Power, and the Politics of Survival

Perhaps the most powerful implication of the report lies beyond science — in politics.

Despite being one of the most climate-impacted sectors, fisheries are largely absent from global climate negotiations.

This is where the findings become more than a report. It becomes leverage.

With pre-COP discussions and COP31 on the horizon, Pacific countries now have something they have long needed.

“If Pacific delegations can come to pre-COP saying we have the latest science… and we all agree on how we want to act with the regional climate change strategy for coastal fisheries being pre-endorsed,” Lecomte says, “it’s a unique chance to showcase fisheries as part of the ocean–climate nexus.”

Beyond the Data: A Call to Act

This report does not just document change but also demands a response.

It bridges worlds:

• Between science and storytelling
• Between policy and lived experience
• Between global negotiations and village shorelines

For scientists, it offers the most comprehensive dataset yet when it comes to the Pacific and its EEZ; for policymakers, it is a roadmap; for communities, it is a validation of what they already know.

That the ocean is changing and so must we.

But in that change lies something powerful. For the first time, the Pacific is not just speaking from experience. It is speaking with scientific evidence.

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Credit: UNICEF/Giacomo Pirozzi
 
The niqab is a full-body Islamic piece of clothing, worn by some women in devout Muslim communities, and which covers the whole body, leaving only a narrow slit for the eyes. French full-body veil ban, violated women’s freedom of religion, says the UN Human Rights Committee.

By Lina AbiRafeh, Azza Karam and Henia Dakkak
NEW YORK, Apr 28 2026 (IPS)

The veil has been lifted—but not the one you think.

Not the veil the West has spent decades weaponizing. The veil now exposed is the one that concealed Western feminism’s selective solidarity—its silence on the women it was never truly fighting for. The “othering” of women from the South West Asian and North African region. In other words: us.

In Against White Feminism, Rafia Zakaria offers a powerful critique of how mainstream feminism often reinforces white supremacist, colonial, and patriarchal logics. The suffering of women of color becomes useful—deployable.

The image of the veiled, victimized woman, waiting to be saved, has long justified wars, interventions, and foreign policies driven not by liberation, but by imperial ambition. When these women resist on their own terms, they are ignored or discredited.

This pattern is not new. It is structural. Discrimination is embedded in the system. Palestine has simply made it undeniable. The silence that followed stripped away any remaining illusion that “we are in this together.” Feminist solidarity, it turns out, has limits—and some of us were never included.

That is the veil we lift today.

We speak as Arab women aged 50–65, activists and feminists with over a century of combined experience across 90 countries. We now live in the United States, where these contradictions are stark. We have paid a price for insisting on integrity. So have many others.

Across conversations with colleagues and communities, the message is consistent: the system is not broken—it functions exactly as designed.

Early feminist movements everywhere have grappled with patriarchy, sometimes resisting it, sometimes accommodating it. In the West, this struggle has often aligned uncomfortably with white supremacy.

In formerly colonized regions, patriarchy cannot be separated from colonialism, racism, or imperialism. These systems are intertwined; dismantling one requires confronting them all. This is where Western feminism consistently falls short.

Today, little has changed. The language is more polished. The imagery more diverse. But the underlying structures—and the values sustaining them—remain intact. Nowhere is this clearer than in how women from the South West Asian and North African region are treated by movements that claim to champion them.

The same logic that invoked Afghan women to justify military intervention now watches Palestinian women document their own destruction while offering silence—or excuses.

The data reflects this reality.

In the United States, anti-Muslim and anti-Arab discrimination rose sharply in 2024. The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,658 complaints—the highest since it began tracking in 1996. Employment discrimination alone accounted for 15.4% of cases. In 2025, these numbers climbed again. Rhetoric has consequences.

But numbers only tell part of the story. Women’s voices tell the rest.

One Arab aid worker described being sidelined after speaking publicly about Palestine following October 7:

“When I spoke about Ukrainian women, it was welcomed. When I spoke about Palestinian women, it was suppressed. I lost my work.”

Others describe being silenced on social media, accused of saying too much—or too little. Some were advised to remove their hijab for safety. Others were warned to avoid expressing views altogether to protect institutional reputations.

Yet another was denied the right to exercise leadership among her own staff, because as a Muslim from the Arab region, her ability to clearly articulate opinions, exercise judgement, and make decisions, was deemed ‘abusive’. One woman was denied employment because her call for “ceasefire and humanitarian aid” was deemed “too political.”

Western feminism often recoils at these truths. Yet Palestine is not only a political issue—it is a feminist one. All struggles against oppression are interconnected. Justice cannot be selective, even if its application often is.

Feminism demands confronting power, violence, and dehumanization wherever they occur. Palestinian women live at the intersection of multiple forms of oppression—patriarchy, occupation, militarization—and resist across all of them.

A feminism that ignores this reality is not feminism. It is complicity.

As Teju Cole describes, this is the logic of the “white savior industrial complex.” It operates through what can be called gendered orientalism: women from the South West Asian and North African region are portrayed as victims of culture, religion, or men—but rarely of bombs, sanctions, or occupation. This framing preserves the West as liberator while erasing its role in producing violence.

In the United States, the language differs but the outcome is the same. Conservatives fear Islam; liberals seek to save us from it. Both deny our agency. Both silence our voices.

We are rarely represented as we are: organizers, scholars, community leaders, mothers, activists, feminists.

This silence must be named clearly. It is not neutrality. It is complicity.

The credibility of any feminist movement rests on whether it stands with all women—especially when doing so is politically inconvenient.

We have paid the price for this failure: in erasure, in exclusion, in lost friends, in being told our grief is too complex and our politics too divisive.

What passes for solidarity is often conditional. It appears when it costs nothing and disappears when it demands accountability. Women from the South West Asia and North Africa were welcomed when our oppression reinforced dominant narratives. We became inconvenient when our liberation required confronting Western power itself.

Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced intersectionality to describe how overlapping identities produce compounded forms of discrimination. What we are witnessing now is an intersectional crisis: women from those regions face discrimination based simultaneously on race, religion, gender, and geopolitics. The very movement best equipped to confront this has gone largely silent.

From decades of work in conflict settings, one truth is clear: women from South West Asia and North Africa do not need to be singled out for ‘saving’.

We need the violence to stop.

We need colleagues to speak our names when it is difficult. We need those marching for human rights to recognize that feminism that excludes Gaza, Beirut, or Tehran is neither feminism nor human rights. It is branding—a convenient narrative that avoids confronting deeper structures of power.

Palestine has revealed a deeper truth: these systems were never designed to serve everyone. They were built by—and for—those in power.

What is required now is not reform at the margins, but a reckoning.

Solidarity demands accountability. If women’s rights are human rights, then they must apply to all women—without exception.

Lina AbiRafeh – Better4Women – Azza Karam and Henia Dakkak– Lead Integrity: House of Wisdom.

IPS UN Bureau

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Credit: Phil Nijhuis/ANP via AFP

By Andrew Firmin
LONDON, Apr 27 2026 (IPS)

Yasmin Ullah, from Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority, is determined to see justice. On 13 April, she filed a complaint alleging genocide against Myanmar’s president, Min Aung Hlaing, to Indonesia’s Attorney General’s Office. Min Aung Hlaing led the 2021 coup that ousted a democratically elected government and this month was named president following a sham election held amid intense repression, rubber stamping the army’s continuing grip on power. However secure he appears in his position, Yasmin Ullah’s legal action offers hope his impunity may not be guaranteed.

The complaint accuses Min Aung Hlaing of genocide against Rohingya people, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group denied citizenship despite being long established in Myanmar. He’s accused of being responsible for the burning of Rohingya villages, forced evictions, killings and mass rape in a 2017 military operation, during which around 24,000 Rohingya people were killed and over 700,000 forced to flee. The UN’s fact-finding mission and its Independent Investigative Mechanism for Myanmar have extensively documented atrocities. Civil society has played a key role in gathering testimonies from survivors and preserving evidence.

The case was made possible by changes to Indonesia’s criminal code that came into effect in January. While civil society has raised concerns about revisions to other parts of the code that restrict Indonesian people’s ability to speak out and protest, this particular change stands out as a positive development, enabling people to bring charges against alleged perpetrators of atrocities in other countries under the principle of universal jurisdiction.

Universal jurisdiction on the rise

Universal jurisdiction applies to crimes under international law, such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, on the grounds that these crimes are an offence against humanity as a whole and as such aren’t bound by borders.

Some states, including France and Germany, have passed laws to enable universal jurisdiction prosecutions. Many powerful states however still refuse to recognise the principle, citing national sovereignty, the long-established doctrine of immunity for heads of state and the potential for prosecutions to be politically motivated.

Yet the question of whether government leaders should be immune from prosecution has increasingly been contested. Immunity wasn’t granted when leaders of Sierra Leone and former Yugoslavia were prosecuted for crimes committed during civil wars, and the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC), removed the principle of immunity where it has jurisdiction. Ironically, the Trump administration, which resists international accountability over its officials, may have contributed to further eroding the doctrine of immunity by abducting Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro and placing him on trial for drug trafficking.

Universal jurisdiction cases have increased since the end of the Cold War. Belgium, Finland and Germany convicted people for their role in the Rwanda genocide. Switzerland secured the first guilty verdict for crimes committed in the Liberian civil war, while France convicted another Liberian war criminal in 2022. Germany convicted a Bosnian paramilitary soldier of genocide and, in 2021 and 2022, found two Syrian officials guilty of atrocity crimes.

Hopes of justice

Rohingya people have no hope of justice in a country that refuses even to recognise them as citizens, so diaspora civil society organisations are seeking it wherever they find opportunities. In 2025, an Argentinian court issued arrest warrants against Min Aung Hlaing and other senior Myanmar officials on crimes against humanity and genocide charges, in a case brought by a Rohingya organisation. Earlier this year, a human rights organisation filed a criminal case against the Myanmar regime in Timor-Leste. When authorities appointed a senior prosecutor to examine the case, Myanmar retaliated by expelling Timor-Leste’s ambassador.

These efforts complement proceedings in international courts. In 2024, the ICC issued an arrest warrant against Min Aung Hlaing for crimes against humanity, while in January, hearings began at the International Court of Justice in a case brought by the Gambian government accusing Myanmar of breaching the Genocide Convention. It isn’t a question of choosing between national jurisdictions and international courts, but rather of taking every avenue available to demand justice.

Universal jurisdiction has its limits. Those accused tend to be safe when they hold power; when states have successfully prosecuted perpetrators, it’s after they’ve lost the power that enabled their crimes. Currently, this means attempts to hold Israel’s leaders accountable for the genocide in Gaza, such as arrest warrants a Turkish court issued against 37 officials, only have symbolic value. Cases motivated by political point-scoring also risk discrediting the principle, as when a body created by Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad found an array of US officials guilty in absentia, without legal basis or consequence.

Actions under universal jurisdiction, when targeted at evident offenders, can nonetheless help build moral pressure and signal that justice may eventually come. At a time when the brutal and illegitimate Myanmar regime is buttressed by China, India and Russia, and with the USA easing its pressure in pursuit of economic benefits, it matters that other countries keep holding the line, isolating the junta and exposing its atrocities.

It matters all the more when pressure comes from Southeast Asian countries, depriving the Myanmar regime of the excuse that human rights accountability is a western imposition. Two members of the Association of Southeast Asian nations, Indonesia and Timor-Leste, have now taken action against a fellow member. But other attempts in the region have faltered. Philippine authorities declined to proceed when five survivors of atrocities filed a case in 2023, while an investigation civil society filed with Indonesia’s national human rights commission that same year, alleging that Indonesian companies were supplying military equipment to Myanmar, has so far seen no progress.

As 2026 president of the UN Human Rights Council, Indonesia is uniquely placed to take the lead in the pursuit of justice for atrocity crimes. Indonesian authorities must treat this case as a priority and give it the attention and resources it needs.

Andrew Firmin is CIVICUS Editor-in-Chief, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Beekeepers harvest honey from an ABL hive in the Tana Delta, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

By Chemtai Kirui
GOLBANTI, Kenya, Apr 23 2026 (IPS)

Lydia Hagodana stands next to a bee yard (apiary) in Golbanti, Tana Delta, where she lives. The air carries a low, steady hum as bees move in and out in a constant stream. She lifts the back of one hive slightly, gauging its weight.

“This hive is mine,” she says. “I have two.”

Hagodana is one of 25 members of the Golbanti women’s group, which manages about 50 hives shared between them. Each member keeps a pair, harvesting honey a few times a year. Some of the income is kept individually, while a portion is pooled into group savings to support a small communal vegetable farm.

The apiaries sit along the southern banks of the Tana River, where it begins to split into the channels that form the lower delta. In the rainy season, the land opens into floodplains, drawing migratory birds and supporting wildlife, including hippos, crocodiles and the rare Tana River topi.

Lydia Hagodana in the area where she keeps one of her beehives in the Tana Delta, Kenya. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

Patches of gallery forest along the riverbanks are home to two critically endangered primates – the Tana River red colobus and the crested mangabey.

In recent years, beekeeping has offered an alternative source of income in a place where livelihoods have long depended on farming, fishing and livestock. For women in particular, managing hives marks a shift from more physically demanding work and from roles traditionally dominated by men.

Before the bees, these same floodplains were at the centre of proposals for large-scale biofuel plantations – plans that raised concerns about converting wetlands into industrial agriculture.

“This was linked to the European Union policy to blend biofuels with fossil fuels,” said Dr Paul Matiku, executive director of Nature Kenya. “Africa was seen as a place with ‘idle’ land that could be converted to these crops, including jatropha and sugarcane.”

At the time, the Kenyan government framed the projects as part of vision 2030 – a way to bring development and jobs to what officials described as an “empty” region.

Land clearing had begun. In some places, fields were ploughed before indigenous families had gathered their belongings. A wildlife corridor used by elephants and other species was carved into plantation blocks.

Tensions Rose

By 2012, violent clashes had erupted, turning the delta into what investors began calling a “red zone”.

“We woke up to a challenge about where the Tana Delta was going,” said Matiku, who helped lead the legal fight to stop the expansion. “You cannot convert wildlife land and food-producing land into fuel for cars. We had to unleash every bit of machinery we had to stop it.”

A coalition of conservation groups and local communities took the government to court.

In February 2013, Lady Justice Mumbi Ngugi halted the proposed large-scale developments in the delta, ruling that the state had failed to account for the rights of local people.

“The court said no one could move forward without a land-use plan developed with the people,” Matiku said.

Over the next two years, communities, county officials and conservation groups worked together to map the delta – dividing the landscape into zones for grazing, farming and conservation under what became the Tana Delta Land Use Plan (LUP).

For the first time, the delta had a formal set of rules.

But another question followed: could conservation pay?

A group of community members gather outside an African Beekeepers Limited facility in Kenya’s Tana Delta to discuss the business of beekeeping. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

From Idle Land to Natural Economy

With support from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), researchers began calculating the economic value of the delta’s ecosystems – reframing them from “idle land” into a functioning natural economy.

The partners approached the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the world’s largest multilateral fund for the environment. In 2018, after a technical review process, the fund approved a USD 3.3m grant for restoration in the Tana Delta under the Restoration Initiative.

The funding aimed to stabilise a landscape long marked by land disputes and failed biofuel schemes. Working with UNEP and Nature Kenya, the program supported consultations, legal drafting, and the work needed to turn the land-use plan into law.

Between 2019 and 2024, the county enacted 29 policies and legislative instruments aimed at regulating land use, conservation and climate action.

“We have moved from loosely coordinated conservation projects to a law-driven governance framework that integrates land use, climate change and community engagement,” said Mathew Babwoya Buya, Tana River county’s environment executive.

Tana River county has set aside at least 2% of its development budget for climate resilience and ecosystem restoration.

For the 2024/25 fiscal year, the county’s total budget is about KSh 8.87 billion (USD 68.76 million). Of that, roughly KSh 3 billion (USD 23 million) is development spending, implying annual allocations of about KSh 60 million (USD 460,000) for restoration programmes.

The commitment helped secure new funding from the GEF, which approved a grant of about USD 3.35 million for the Tana Delta under its Restoration Initiative.

Project documents show the program mobilised roughly USD 36.8 million in co-financing, about eleven dollars for every dollar of GEF funding, a commonly cited measure of leverage in conservation finance.

“The Tana Delta project shows what is possible when country ownership is strong and priorities are clearly aligned. This level of leverage reflects deep national commitment, strong engagement from a wide range of stakeholders, and clear links to value chains and local business opportunities. The project’s integrated, landscape-based approach allows it to address multiple challenges at once, making it an attractive platform for partners to invest alongside GEF,” said Ulrich Apel, a senior environmental specialist at the GEF.

The composition of that financing shows that the bulk originates from public agencies and development partners, including multilateral programmes and philanthropic funding. Only about USD 341,000 – less than 1 per cent of the total – is attributable to direct private-sector investment.

Apel explained the figures do not necessarily capture the full extent of commercial activity.

“It is important to understand how co-finance is defined and recorded,” Apel said. “Only capital explicitly committed to a project through formal letters is captured. There can be private sector flows into these value chains that do not show up in the co-financing numbers.”

UNEP officials say the structure is intended to use public funding to reduce land-use risk and attract investment over time.

“The GEF grant was designed to play a catalytic role,” said Nancy Soi, a UNEP official involved in the project.

By funding land-use planning, cooperative structures, and governance systems, she said, the program has helped “derisk” the delta for commercial activity in sectors such as honey, chilli, and aquaculture.

In parallel, other partners are beginning to test that approach in specific value chains.

In aquaculture, the Mastercard Foundation, working with TechnoServe, is supporting a program aimed at about 650 young entrepreneurs in Tana River County.

How that model translates into sustained commercial investment is still being tested on the ground.

In Golbanti, where Hagodana’s hives sit along the riverbanks, one of the emerging value chains is honey production. The work is being developed through a partnership with African Beekeepers Limited (ABL).

Under the model, the company supplies modern hives and technical expertise, manages production, and buys the honey at a fixed price – removing one of the biggest risks in rural markets: price volatility.

Nature Kenya says it has deliberately avoided locking farmers into long-term contracts at this stage, allowing time to assess whether production volumes and pricing can prove viable.

“We managed to pay 76 farmers about KSh700,000 (USD 5,400) from honey harvested in the delta,” said Ernest Simeoni, director of ABL, referring to the project’s first production cycle.

Numbered beehives in a conservation area of Kenya’s Tana Delta. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

Not Just Beekeeping, It’s the Business of Beekeeping

Simeoni said the approach differs from many donor-led initiatives, which typically focus on training farmers to manage hives independently.

“There are hundreds of modern hives across Kenya, but they don’t produce honey,” he said. “The missing link is expertise.”

Instead, ABL keeps production under the company’s control, deploying its teams to monitor colonies, harvest honey, and oversee processing.

“We’re not training farmers how to do beekeeping,” he said. “What we’re doing is business – showing how to make money from honey.”

Community groups provide land and security for the hives, while the company manages harvesting and processing. Simeoni said that structure helps maintain consistent production volumes.

Even so, he cautioned that the model remains fragile. Access to affordable finance is limited, and much of the sector still depends on donor-backed projects to absorb early risk.

“If donor funding disappears tomorrow, most of these projects stop,” he said.

Looking beyond small-scale value chains, the county is also trying to attract larger investments through a proposed development plan known as the “Green Heart”.

A 60-hectare site in Minjila has been earmarked for an industrial hub intended to support agroprocessing, logistics and green manufacturing, according to Mwanajuma Hiribae, the Tana River county secretary.

“We are working to establish an investment unit to coordinate engagement with private firms,” she said. Funds have also been allocated to develop a masterplan for the site.

But the project remains at an early stage. The land has yet to be formally transferred to the county’s investment authority, and proposals from potential investors are still under review.

Officials say any future development will need to align with the delta’s land-use plan and environmental safeguards.

For now, however, the flow of private capital to the delta remains limited.

Experiences elsewhere in Kenya suggest the model, while technically replicable, depends heavily on political will, security conditions and sustained public financing – factors that vary widely between regions.

In western Kenya, a similar land-use planning approach has been introduced in Yala Swamp, with mixed results. While Busia county has formally adopted the framework, neighbouring Siaya has yet to approve it, with local officials citing competing political and commercial interests around large-scale agriculture.

“The science is replicable,” said Matiku. “But political interests can slow or block implementation.”

In Golbanti, the idea of a restoration economy is beginning to take shape in small ways.

Beekeepers at the African Beekeepers Limited facility in Kenya’s Tana Delta. Credit: Chemtai Kirui/IPS

Welcome Income

Income from honey, though modest and still irregular, is starting to filter into daily life.

For Hagodana, it helps pay school fees for her six children, supports a small farm, and contributes to a shared fund used to grow vegetables. Some of the money is spent, some saved, and some reinvested.

She has been keeping bees for two years. Before that, she says, life was harder. Now there is at least something to rely on.

She does not plan to stop. Whether or not outside support continues, she says she will keep the hives and hopes eventually to learn how to process honey into other products.

Back in the apiary, the bees move in and out of the hives in a steady rhythm.

Note: The Eighth Global Environment Facility Assembly will be held from May 30 to June 6, 2026 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan.

This feature is published with the support of the GEF. IPS is solely responsible for the editorial content, and it does not necessarily reflect the views of the GEF.

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We must demand societal change that transforms harmful power structures. Only then can we secure healthier, more equal lives and sustainable futures. Credit: Duncan Shaffer/Unsplash

By Johanna Riha and Asha George
KUALA LUMPUR, Apr 23 2026 (IPS)

The world of 2026 is marked by overlapping crises that continue to expose the fragility of our systems and the persistence of inequality. Geopolitical conflicts enrich a few while devastating many, intensifying the already catastrophic impacts of climate change. These political choices are not neutral—they shrink civic spaces, reinforce political extremism, and unleash coordinated assaults on gender equality and human rights. These attacks are not incidental; they are deliberate strategies to undermine multilateralism and global solidarity, eroding the foundations of peace and planetary well-being.

Against this backdrop, the struggle for gender equality and human rights cannot be timid or reactive, it must be as ambitious and bold as the attacks themselves—if not bolder. It must be transformative, deeply rooted in dismantling the harmful power structures that oppress, exclude, and discriminate. It does not require loudness and spectacle, but it does demand depth, strength, and unwavering resolve.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a wake-up call. Even before the virus spread, commitments to gender equality and human rights were far from realized. The pandemic exposed complacency in global health and revealed the limitation of institutions that claimed authority but failed to deliver equity. Mistrust grew, funding evaporated, and self-interest prevailed. Bilateral agreements driven by commercial interests vastly outstripped development funding, fueling nationalist responses and shaping uneven outcomes.

The struggle for gender equality and human rights cannot be timid or reactive, it must be as ambitious and bold as the attacks themselves—if not bolder. It must be transformative, deeply rooted in dismantling the harmful power structures that oppress, exclude, and discriminate

Yet, amid this devastation, experts, reflecting on the pandemic and responses, offered insights that remain vital today. They challenged dominant narratives that frame health preparedness as merely technical or emergency-driven. Instead, they emphasized that vulnerability and resilience are shaped by political choices. At the heart of these choices lies the indispensable need to continually invest in gender equality—not as a token gesture, but as a non-negotiable priority.

Today, more evidence than ever supports the need for structural transformation. Research demonstrates how gender inequalities exacerbate health vulnerabilities, undermine resilience, and perpetuate cycles of poverty and exclusion. Evidence also shows that when women’s rights organizations and women-led organizations are empowered, societies become more resilient, equitable, and prosperous.

This evidence enables us to strategically address blind spots, confront deeply rooted structural challenges, and build a stronger foundation for gender equality and human rights as central health sector priorities. It underscores that change is not optional—it is urgent.

Transforming harmful power structures requires alliances that cut across regions, sectors, and movements. Feminist organizations must connect with climate justice advocates, disability rights groups, and grassroots activists and unions to build collective strength. Solidarity is not just a moral imperative; it is a strategic necessity.

These alliances must be grounded in trust, diversity, and shared vision. They must resist co-optation by market interests and remain steadfast in their commitment to justice. Only through such alliances can we counter the fragmentation that continues to weaken movements and confront the global forces that seek to divide and dominate.

The path forward is clear: we must demand societal change that dismantles harmful power structures. This requires personal development, legislative reform, representative leadership, and unwavering political commitment. It requires investment in feminist movements, particularly in regions where civic space is shrinking and pushback is intensifying.

Change will be uncomfortable. It will challenge entrenched interests and disrupt familiar patterns. But it is necessary. The alternative is a world where oppression deepens, exclusion widens, and discrimination becomes normalized.

The crises of 2026 reinforce that gender equality, and human rights are not peripheral concerns—they are central to health equity, economic and social justice, and sustainable development. Gender equality and human rights are under attack precisely because they challenge entrenched, exploitative power structures.

Their transformative potential threatens the preservation of existing systems of power, making them targets of deliberate and coordinated attacks. Our response must be equally bold, ambitious, and transformative. It is not enough to defend what has been achieved. We must reimagine and rebuild. We must demand societal change that transforms harmful power structures. Only then can we secure healthier, more equal lives and sustainable futures.

Many of these challenges will be addressed at the Women Deliver 2026 Conference, taking place from April 27 to 30 in Melbourne, a key platform to advance gender equality and strengthen collective action globally.

The event will bring together diverse stakeholders to foster strategic alliances, strengthen feminist leadership, and advance concrete solutions in areas such as sexual and reproductive health and rights, sustainable financing, and accountability. At a decisive moment for the global agenda, it offers an opportunity to translate dialogue into tangible action and measurable commitments.

Johanna Riha is Policy Research Lead, United Nations University International Institute for Global Health (UNU-IIGH)

Asha George is Professor, School of Public Health, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town

The period after Armenia’s 2018 “Velvet Revolution” maintains a fragile status which presents both substantial democratic and feminist achievements and rising internal and external international pressures.

Gulnara Shahinian, Founder & Director, Democracy Today

The Women, Peace, and Security agenda in Armenia shows progress through its needs of bigger changes. According to Shahinian, the current National Action Plan of the country demonstrates its participatory approach because civil society members helped create it. Shahinian considers this moment to be the most important time, she said “this is the first time that NGOs have taken part in implementation work. The government accepted the action plan as it was without changes. People who create this method of ownership work together to establish their rights beyond permanent presence to full active involvement. NGOs have shifted from their previous role as side organizations to become key partners in developing public policy,” Shahinian said.

The national action plan, according to Shahinian, established its first dedicated section to address diaspora participation. “They are part of our independent statehood. The knowledge and experience of these people will help to build our future developments. The expanded participation model enables Armenia to handle its domestic and international issues more effectively.”

Women who previously faced restrictions now participate in law enforcement and diplomacy and governance roles. Shahinian explains this as a fundamental transformation, “we passed through not only quantitative changes, but qualitative changes, the quality of roles for women has been changed.” The most pronounced transformation in security concepts shows itself through the changing security definitions which Armenia has adopted. The 2020 conflict with Azerbaijan compelled the country to confront its national identity crisis which particularly affected displaced women who lost their loved ones. Shahinian explains that women began to understand the connection between human security and democracy development for their cities. This brought about new ways for society to approach decision making processes. “Security now extends beyond its previous definition which focused on military aspects to include human rights and protection and fundamental service delivery rights,” Shahinian states.

The increasing number of women who work in defense demonstrates the new trend that exists in society. Shahinian says that women join the military because they choose to do so instead of needing to fulfill any requirements: “Women go to the army because they speak about equality, and equality means responsibility.” She explains that their organization works to create a more compassionate military system which protects people through non-violent methods instead of using weapons.

Armenia’s democratic and feminist development path remains unpredictable, and both its internal factors and external forces will shape its progress. The ongoing Iranian war has created multiple dangers which include trade disruptions inflation and the possibility of people fleeing the country. Armenia stays mostly out of the conflict yet its location exposes the country to potential spillover effects.

The crisis coincides with the timing of Armenia’s scheduled political events. Armenia has made democratic advancements yet the country now experiences increasing difficulties within its own borders. Citizens face restrictions on their rights to protest as authorities use more legal methods against their opponents. Reports of journalist mistreatment and increased police activity during demonstrations.

Certain factors provide grounds for optimistic but careful expectations. A younger generation, Shahinian notes, is deeply committed to democratic values: “They are speaking the language of human rights, they know what freedom means. Women remain at the forefront of these efforts to maintain progress. Women actively participate in community organizing and national policymaking to redefine security and governance practices.”

Armenia’s experience shows a wider lesson because it demonstrates how democracy develops through different paths which cannot be predicted. The process of democracy requires public participation because different forces fight against it while dedicated individuals work to protect and reinvent democratic systems. The country faces a decisive political period which will determine its future based on its ability to build permanent strength through systems that include all people and through ongoing dedication to security based on human needs.

“The only way for Armenia to survive is democracy,” Shahinian emphasizes. “And that’s what we will be fighting for.”

Sania Farooqui is an independent journalist and host of The Peace Brief, a platform dedicated to amplifying the voices of women in peacebuilding and human rights.

IPS UN Bureau

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