In September 2020, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action for women’s rights celebrated its 25th anniversary. It was, however, a bittersweet commemoration, mixing joy for the progress in gender equality achieved since 1995, and the stark realization about the multidimensional gaps awaiting tackling and the new divides brought by the social consequences of COVID-19.
The internet has a pivotal role to play in empowering women and girls across Africa, but preexisting forms of gender discrimination and marginalization are underpinning a widening digital gender divide.
Low literacy levels, a high prevalence of outlawed Female Genital Mutilation, early marriages, forced marriages, low contraceptive usage, multiple births, as well as high maternal, infant and child deaths, define the life of a woman in Kenya’s vast North Eastern region.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the tremendous power of technology and innovation has become clear to the world.
However, it has also increased exclusion, discrimination, and inequalities -- especially for women and girls.
On International Women’s Day, let us remind ourselves of the power of education. We have all benefited from an education that less than a century ago was not a given for a girl and which still remains a distant utopia for millions of young girls.
From the earliest days of computing to the present age of virtual reality and artificial intelligence…
…women have made untold contributions to the digital world in which we increasingly live.
The accelerating pace of digitalization has ushered humanity into a whole different era of information and communication. Today, digitalization permeates every aspect of our lives, socio-economically and politically.
When it comes to land, gender inequalities are pervasive. Today, nearly half of the global agricultural workforce is female – yet less than one in five landholders worldwide are women
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She will be called Aya. This is the name that nurses gave to the infant baby pulled from the rubble of a five-story building in Jinderis, northern Syria. A miracle. Beside her, the rescuers found her mother, dead.
If you want to have a good reading on women and young girls’ activism, there is a high chance that you have missed an incredibly interesting report.
New technologies and innovations are reshaping our world and its future, often at a dizzying pace. Yet women and girls continue to be left behind in this burgeoning digital universe. How, then, can we harness these developments to create a better future for all of us?
While its origins may be
rooted in the discrimination faced by people living with HIV, Zero Discrimination Day has evolved to celebrate commitments to the fundamental human right of being treated equally in law and in practice.
The post-COVID-19 period has been a crucial one for members of parliament who have their work cut out to ensure that issues that arose during the pandemic are addressed, especially concerning the ICPD25 commitments and programmes of action for universal access to sexual and reproductive rights, gender-based violence and building peaceful, just and inclusive societies. Across the world, progress toward achieving the SDGs by 2030 was impacted during the pandemic.
A free health insurance initiative started in Pakistan has benefited poor patients, especially women who have outnumbered men in using the cashless health services under the Sehat Card Plus programme.
"The initiative is in line with the ICPD25 Programme of Action, under which 4.5 million people have received free services, with 62 percent of them women. In the last three years, we have been able to cut down maternal mortality rate from 186 deaths per 100,000 live births to 172," Dr Muhammad Riaz Tanoli, CEO of the Sehat Card Plus (SCP), told IPS.
Since researching the experiences of gender discrimination against women in poverty who belong to religious minorities, many fellow feminists have turned their back on me.
They began to arrive en masse in Argentina in the second half of 2022, a few months after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They are pregnant Russian women who land in the capital to give birth, with the hope of gaining an Argentine passport, given the fact that so many countries refuse to let in people with Russian passports today.
Many Ghanian Members of Parliament (MPs) champion adolescent reproductive health rights to stop the practice of child marriage, which is prevalent in some areas of the country even though the country’s Constitution and Children’s Act outlaw it, Dr Rashid Pelpuo (MP) told IPS in an exclusive interview.
As the effects of COVID-19 on Africa’s health sector become clearer, it looks the continent will need to take urgent steps to overcome the disruptions suffered in the breakdown in antenatal and postnatal care for women and newborns and neonatal intensive care units. The pandemic brought some setbacks to the gains achieved in maternal mortality over the past decade.
Damaris Anyango* was recently discharged from Kenyatta National Hospital, battling the twin challenge of cervical cancer and HIV. She is 50 years old and was diagnosed with HIV nearly ten years ago.
How are the multiple shocks and crises the world is facing changing how we respond to gender-based violence? Almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic triggered high levels of violence against women and girls, the recent
Sexual Violence Research Initiative Forum 2022 (SVRI) shed some light on the best ways forward.