A teenage mother and her toddler in Bonpland, a rural municipality in the northern province of Misiones in Argentina. Latin America has the second highest regional rate of early pregnancies in the world, after sub-Saharan Africa. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
BUENOS AIRES, Jul 8 2016 (IPS)

In plain and simple language, an Argentine video aimed at teenagers explains how to get sexual pleasure while being careful. Its freedom from taboos is very necessary in Latin American countries where one in five girls becomes a mother by the time she is 19 years old.

“For good sex to happen, both partners have to want it and this is as much about being sure they want it, as about being in the mood or ‘hot’ with desire,” said psychologist Cecilia Saia who made the video “Let’s talk About Sex” (Hablemos de sexo), aimed at adolescents and preadolescents and posted on social networks.

The video was produced by Fundación para Estudio e Investigación de la Mujer (FEIM – Foundation for Women’s Studies and Research) as part of a Take the Non-Pregnancy Test campaign. It was also distributed to teenagers so they “would be able to take free and informed decisions about becoming mothers and fathers.” “Keeping children in the education system or bringing them back into it would be effective interventions to prevent teenage pregnancy. In the same way, creating conditions within the education system to ensure that pregnant teenagers or adolescent mothers can continue their education, would be another intervention with a positive impact” - Alma Virginia Camacho-Hübner.

During the campaign, teenagers of both sexes were given boxes similar in appearance to pregnancy test kits, containing information about teenage pregnancy and the myths surrounding how it is caused, as well as condoms and instructions on how to use them, Mabel Bianco, the president of FEIM, told IPS.

The campaign was broadcast on YouTube and other social networks, with candid messages in the language used by adolescents. “This meant we could reach a large numbers of 14-to-18-year-olds, an age group that such campaigns usually find hard to reach,” she said.

According to FEIM, in Argentina 300 babies a day, or 15 percent of the total, are born to mothers aged under 19.

“This percentage has shown a sustained increase over the last 10 to 15 years, and the proportion of births to girls under 15 years of age has also risen,” Bianco said.

Argentina exemplifies what is happening in the rest of Latin America, which is the world region with the second highest teenage fertility rate, after sub-Saharan Africa. The national rate in Argentina is 76 live births per 1,000 women aged 15-19 years, according to United Nations’ demographic statistics.

In order to call attention to this problem and to the general need to promote the equal development of women, Investing in Teenage Girls is the theme of this year’s World Population Day, to be celebrated July 11.

The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) states that one in five women in the Southern Cone of South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay) will become a teenage mother, in an area where over 1.2 million babies a year are born to adolescents.

“Early pregnancy and motherhood can bring about health complications for mother and baby, as well as negative impacts over the course of the lives of adolescents,” says a UNFPA report about fertility and teenage motherhood in the Southern Cone.

The report says that “when pregnancy is unplanned, it is a clear indication of the infringement of teenagers’ sexual and reproductive rights and hence of their human rights.”

Alma Virginia Camacho-Hübner, UNFPA sexual and reproductive health adviser for Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS that teenage pregnancy has implications for individual patients, such as maternal morbidity and mortality associated with the risks involved with unsafe abortions, among other factors.

Prematurity rates and low birthweights are also several-fold higher, especially among mothers younger than 15.

For health services, the costs of prenatal care, childbirth, postnatal care and care of the newborn are far higher than the cost of interventions to prevent pregnancy and promote health education.

“For society as a whole, from a strictly economic point of view, in countries that enjoy a demographic dividend, early motherhood represents an accelerated loss of that demographic dividend,” Camacho-Hübner said from the UNFPA regional headquarters in Panama City.

This is because “instead of increasing economic productivity by having a larger economically active proportion of the population, a rise in early motherhood causes a rapid rise in the dependency ratio, that is the proportion of the population that is not economically active and requires support from family or society,”she said.

The Southern Cone study found that dropping out of school usually preceded getting pregnant.

“Therefore, keeping children in the education system or bringing them back into it would be effective interventions to prevent teenage pregnancy. In the same way, creating conditions within the education system to ensure that pregnant teenagers or adolescent mothers can continue their education, would be another intervention with a positive impact,” Camacho-Hübner said.

In her view, teen pregnancy and motherhood are an issue of inequality which mainly affects women in lower socio-economic strata.

“It is teenagers from the poorest families and with the least education, living in underprivileged geographical regions, that are most prone to becoming adolescent mothers,” she said.

“Becoming mothers at an early age reinforces conditioning and the inequalities in the process by which teenagers who are, and who are not, mothers, effect the transition into adulthood,” she said.

“The main consequence of pregnancy is the interruption of schooling, although in many cases they have already dropped out by the time they become pregnant. But they do not go back to school afterwards because they have to look after the baby,” Bianco said.

“This makes for a poorer future, as these girls will have access to lower-paid jobs and will be able to contribute less to the country’s development. On the personal level, they will have to postpone their adolescence, they cannot go out with friends, go dancing and other typical teen activities,” she said.

Federico Tobar, another UNFPA regional adviser, said that “in addition to strengthening health, education and social services, there must be investment to promote demand, with interventions to motivate young people to build a sustained life project.”

“This involves incorporating economic incentives as well as symbolic remuneration, and also concrete childcare support for teenage mothers so that they can finish school and avoid repeated childbearing, which is frequently seen in these countries,” he told IPS.

Among other positive experiences, Tobar mentioned the Uruguayan initiative “Jóvenes en red” (Young People’s Network) which includes returning to school and work, and promotion of sexual and reproductive health.

“I believe it is important to invest in the education of teenage women, including comprehensive sex education and the capacity to decide whether or not they wish to have children. It is not a question of eliminating all pregnancy in adolescence, but of making it a conscious choice rather than an accident,” Bianco said. 

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez. Translated by Valerie Dee.

By Samuel Musyoki
LUSAKA, Zambia, Nov 26 2015 (IPS)

The long-awaited African Girls’ Summit on Ending Child Marriage is here.

It presents an opportunity to share experiences and reflect on what we need to do differently if we want to step up our efforts towards ending child marriage, an issue close to my heart.

I’ve seen what being a child bride can do to a girl.

I have five sisters, three of whom were married as children. As such, my sisters did not get a good education. They gave birth at an early age and now they are faced with challenges and limited opportunities. Now I am a father to three girls. I want a different life for them and for all the other girls growing up across Africa – and the rest of the world.

The summit, hosted by the Government of the Republic of Zambia, is taking place in Lusaka this week. It follows the launch at the May 2014 Africa Heads of State meeting in Addis Ababa of the campaign to end early and forced child marriage.

Both the campaign and summit are significant for a continent, home to an estimated 7 million child brides.

While we have made good progress working in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and national levels to influence policy and legal changes, more needs to be done at the grassroots level.

Long-term engagement with communities is key if we want to end child marriage across Africa.

Child rights organisation Plan International is dedicated to tackling child marriage and we’ve learnt time and time again, the perception of this issue is almost universally negative.

Yet why does it still happen?

Marriage for a 14 year old girl should not be seen as the only option for parents or for children. That’s fundamentally flawed.

If we want to make a difference, we need to look at how governments and civil society can change with communities to help them realise the impact of child marriage. We need to work with girls to help them understand the value of education and the benefits of the life they can have if they stay in school. But transforming attitudes and practices that have become acceptable over time requires investment in innovative approaches that draw on and build on the knowledge of all relevant actors at policy and grassroots levels.

Plan International has been working against child marriages alongside community-based organisations, regional traditional leaders, media and national governments. By creating local and regional platforms to raise awareness, to discuss and to take action, the pressure is building up to eliminate early child marriage in Africa.

Focusing on Southern Africa, Plan International´s “18+ Programme” on ending child marriages in Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Zambia and Mozambique has been engaging with and transforming communities and societies. It contributed significantly to convince the Malawian Parliament, which recently passed a law to declare 18 as the minimum legal age for marriage.

Now, more than ever, is the time to bring all actors together and tackle the issue of early child marriage across the continent. After all, we can neither keep the promise of the African Children’s Charter, nor attain the new Sustainable Development Goals if young girls and women continue to suffer early child marriage.

Progress is being made and it’s heartening to seeing discussions taking place across the board. It gives us hope that it is possible to end child marriage within a generation.

(End)

Excerpt:

By Paloma Duran
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 16 2015 (IPS)

Increasingly gender equality, rooted in human rights, is recognized both as a key development goal on its own and as a vital means to helping accelerate sustainable development. And while the field of gender has expanded exponentially over the years, with programmes focused exclusively on women and girls and greater mainstreaming of gender into many development activities, a range of challenges remain.

Women are still facing unequal access to economic and environmental resources. They often face numerous barriers linked to clear discrimination as well as bear the burden of low wages or unpaid work, and are susceptible to gender-based violence.

So despite the significant advances for women, the fact is that unless women and girls are able to fully realize their rights in all facets of society, human development will not be advanced. The year 2015 is a crucial time to further equality and if the new post-2015 development agenda is to be truly transformative, women must be at the front and also at its centre.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) contain a stand-alone goal on achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls. All the goals are intrinsically interrelated and interdependant – and ideally gender will be adressed and mainstreamed amongst all goals. SDG 5 calls on governments to achieve, rather than just promote, gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls.

The proposed targets include ending violence, eliminating harmful practices, recognizing the value of unpaid care, ensuring that women have full participation – and equal opportunities – in decision-making, and calling for reforms to give women equal access to economic resources. The new post-2015 agenda is a universal idea with high hopes to “leave no one behind,” but to make this a reality, we must keep pressure on governments to follow through on their commitments.

The Sustainable Development Goals Fund (SDG Fund) has placed gender equality and women’s empowerment at the heart of its efforts to acceleterate progress towards the SDGs. By directly empowering women and by bringing a gender perspective to all development work we can build a more equitable, sustainable future for all.

Stemming from the comitments established in 1995 at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, the SDG Fund adopted a dual strategy for advancing gender equality to support both gender-targeted programmes while simultaneaously mainstreaming gender as a cross-cutting priority. Gender mainstreaming entails transforming existing policy agendas by integrating a gender perspective into all policies and programming.

There is no set recipe to creating programmes that will solve gender inequality and perhaps it would be good if there was one single universally applicable and empirically proven method for achieving gender equality in every country around the world. A multi-dimensional issue such as gender inequality is deeply rooted in economic and cultural structures of society and it requires comprehensive approaches. Furthermore, one needs to explore the issue in the specific context of the country in question to effectively improve the quality of life for women and girls everywhere.

The private sector, together with NGOs and governments, are key actors in addressing the variable causes of gender inequality. In other words, achieving equality and empowerment for women is a challenge that requires the synergistic intervention of multiple actors.

For example, the Fund is working in Bangladesh, where women are employed at the lower end of the productivity scale. Labor force participation of rural women is only 36.4 per cent compared to 83.3 per cent of men. Creating employment and income generating opportunities for women as well as enhancing women’s access to social protection will help reduce gender disparities which are exacerbated by women’s poverty and vulnerability.

The SDG Fund programme entitled “Strengthening Women’s Ability for Productive New Opportunities” is led by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in partnership with the International Labour Organisation (ILO), local governments and private partners with the overall goal to assist 2,592 women from ultra-poor households. As part of a pilot programme, women are trained in maintenance or rehabilitation of key community assets, public works and community service activities.

Furthermore, the programme is targeting 2,600 women in Kurigram District which has the highest incidence of poverty in Bangladesh. In particular, it aims to assist those who are alone because they are divorced, have been abandoned by their husbands or widowed and/or with low economic status including those with no assets or forced to beg due to poverty. The results will be replicated, targeting 1,900 women, in Satkhira district and the government is further committed scale-up this pilot in a further 20 districts. Overall, the 18 month programme is designed to:

– Helping primary beneficiaries permanently move out of poverty.
– Support human capital with activities to boost knowledge, skills, and confidence.
– Enhance economic inclusion with vocational skills training linked to viable job placement.
– Provide livelihoods options that are resilient in the face of climate change.
– Encourage wage saving or issued as a graduation bonus.
– Facilitate partnership linkages with small and medium enterprises and public-private partnerships to hire participant women after the programme ends.
– Integrate social protection, disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.
– Enhance good local governance and develop the capacity of local government institutions.
Gender equality is often seen as the key to addressing the unfinished business of the Millennium Development Goals and accelerating global development beyond 2015. There is strong evidence that closing gender gaps accelerates progress towards other development goals. Poverty, education, health, jobs and livelihoods, food security, environmental and energy sustainability will not be solved without addressing gender inequality.

Urgent action is needed to empower women and girls, ensuring that they have equal opportunities to benefit from development and removing the barriers that prevent them from being full participants in all spheres of society. In the words of UN Women’s Executive Director, “equality for women, is progress for all” and so let us embark on this journey together.

(End)

Excerpt:

The lack of jobs after graduation frequently pushes Cameroonian girls into searching for work opportunities, sometimes overseas and sometimes with horrific consequences. Credit: Ngala Killian Chimtom/IPS

By Ngala Killian Chimtom
YAOUNDE, Jul 15 2015 (IPS)

Her lips are quavering her hands trembling. Susan (not her real name) struggles to suppress stubborn tears, but the outburst comes, spontaneously, and the tears stream down her cheeks as she sobs profusely.

The story of this 28-year-old’s servitude in Kuwait is mind-boggling. Between her sobs, she tells IPS how she left Cameroon two years ago in search of a job in Kuwait.

“I saw job opportunities advertised on billboards in town. The posters announced jobs such as nurses and housemaids in Kuwait. As a nurse and without a job in Cameroon, I decided to take the chance.”"We were herded off to a small room. There were many other girls there: Ghanaians, Nigerians and Tunisians … [then] bidders came and we were sold off like property" – Susan, a young Cameroonian women who escaped from slavery in Kuwait

With the help of an agent whose contact details she found on the billboard, Susan found herself on a plane, bound for Kuwait.

She was excited at the prospect of earning up to 250,000 CFA francs (420 dollars) a month. That is what the agent had told her, and it was a mouth-watering sum compared with the roughly 75 dollars she would have been earning in Cameroon, if she had a job.

“We work in liaison with companies in the Middle East, so that when these ladies go, they don’t start looking for jobs,” Ernest Kongnyuy, an agent in Yaounde told IPS.

But the story changed dramatically when Susan, along with 46 other Cameroonian girls, arrived in Kuwait on Nov. 8, 2013.

“We were herded off to a small room. There were many other girls there: Ghanaians, Nigerians and Tunisians,” then “bidders came and we were sold off like property.”

Susan was taken away by an Egyptian man. “I think I got a taste of hell in his house,” she says, tears streaming down her cheeks.

She would begin work at five in the morning and go to bed after midnight, very often sleeping without having eaten.

Very frequently, she tells IPS, the man tried to rape her but when she threatened to report the case to the police, she met with a wry response from her tormentor. “He told me he would pay the police to rape me and then kill me, and the case wouldn’t go anywhere.”

Cut off from all communication with the outside world, Susan says that she found solace only in God. “I prayed … I cried out to God for help,” she recalls.

Susan’s is not an isolated case. Brenda, another Cameroonian lucky enough to escape, has a similar story. She had to wash the pets of her master, which included cats and snakes.

“I was sharing the same toilet with cats … I called them my brothers, because they were the only “persons” with whom I conversed.”

Pushed to the limits, both girls told their employers that they were not ready to work any longer. Brenda says that when she insisted, she was thrown out of the house.

“At that time I was frail, I was actually dying and I didn’t know where to go.” After trekking for two days, she found the Central African Republic’s embassy and slept for two days in front of it before she was rescued.

Susan was locked in the boot of a car and taken to the agent who had brought her from the airport.

“Events moved so fast and I found myself spending one week in immigration prison and an additional three days in deportation prison,” she says.

When both girls were finally put on a flight bound for Cameroon, all their property had been seized, except for their passports and the clothes they were wearing.

The scale of the problem is troubling. According to the 2013 Walk Free Global Index of Slavery, about three-quarters of a million people are enslaved in the Middle East and North Africa.

The report indicates that for the past seven years, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia have been ranked as Tier 3 countries for human trafficking and labour abuses. Tier 3 countries are those whose governments do not fully comply with the minimum standards in human trafficking and are not making significant efforts to do so.

Apart from Africa, people from India, Nepal, Eritrea, Uzbekistan, etc. … “migrate voluntarily for domestic work, convinced of the employment agencies’ promises of lucrative jobs,” said the report.

“Upon entering the country, they find themselves deceived and enslaved – within the bounds of a legal sponsorship system.”

Susan and Brenda are now back home, but they are suffering from the trauma of their horrible experience in Kuwait.

The Trauma Centre for Victims of Human Trafficking in Cameroon has been working to bring relief to the women. “We try to make them feel at home,” says Beatrice Titanji, National Vice-President of the Centre.

“They have been exposed to bad treatment. They have been called animals. They have been told they stink, and when they enter the car or a room, a spray is used to take away the supposed odour … I just can’t fathom seeing my child treated like that,” she told IPS.

She called on the government to investigate and prosecute the agents, create jobs and mount guard at airports to discourage Cameroonians from going to look for jobs in the Middle East.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Almost exactly two years ago, on the morning of Apr. 24, over 3,600 workers – 80 percent of them young women between the ages of 18 and 20 – refused to enter the Rana Plaza garment factory building in Dhaka, Bangladesh, because there were large ominous cracks in the walls. They were beaten with sticks and forced to enter.

Forty-five minutes later, the building collapsed, leaving 1,137 dead and over 2,500 injured – most of them women.

The Rana Plaza collapse is just one of a long series of workplace incidents around the world in which women have paid a high toll.

It is also one of the stories featured in the UN Women report Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights, launched on Apr. 27.

All too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.
Coming 20 years after the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, which drew up an agenda to advance gender equality, Progress of the World’s Women 2015-2016 notes that while progress has since been made, “in an era of unprecedented global wealth, millions of women are trapped in low paid, poor quality jobs, denied even basic levels of health care, and water and sanitation.”

At the same time, notes the report, financial globalisation, trade liberalisation, the ongoing privatisation of public services and the ever-expanding role of corporate interests in the development process have shifted power relations in ways that undermine the enjoyment of human rights and the building of sustainable livelihoods.

Against this backdrop, all too often women fail to enjoy their rights because they are forced to fit into a ‘man’s world’, a world in which these rights are not at the heart of economies.

What this means in real terms is that, for example, at global level women are paid on average 24 percent less than men, and for women with children the gaps are even wider. Women are clustered into a limited set of under-valued occupations – such as domestic work – and almost half of them are not entitled to the minimum wage.

Even when women succeed in the workplace, they encounter obstacles not generally faced by their male counterparts. For example, in the European Union, 75 percent of women in management and higher professional positions and 61 percent of women in service sector occupations have experienced some form of sexual harassment in the workplace in their lifetimes.

The report makes the link between economic policy-making and human rights, calling for a far-reaching new policy agenda that can transform economies and make women’s rights a reality by moving forward towards “an economy that truly works for women, for the benefit of all.”

The ultimate aim is to create a virtuous cycle through the generation of decent work and gender-responsive social protection and social services, alongside enabling macroeconomic policies that prioritise investment in human beings and the fulfilment of social objectives.

Today, “our public resources are not flowing in the directions where they are most needed: for example, to provide safe water and sanitation, quality health care, and decent child and elderly care services,” says UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka. “Where there are no public services, the deficit is borne by women and girls.”

According to Mlambo-Ngcuka, “this is a care penalty that unfairly punishes women for stepping in when the State does not provide resources and it affects billions of women the world over. We need policies that make it possible for both women and men to care for their loved ones without having to forego their own economic security and independence,” she added.

The report agrees that paid work can be a foundation for substantive equality for women, but only when it is compatible with women’s and men’s shared responsibility for unpaid care work; when it gives women enough time for leisure and learning; when it provides earnings that are sufficient to maintain an adequate standard of living; and when women are treated with respect and dignity at work.

Yet, this type of employment remains scarce, and economic policies in all regions are struggling to generate enough decent jobs for those who need them. On top of that, the range of opportunities available to women is limited by pervasive gender stereotypes and discriminatory practices within both households and labour markets. As a result, the vast majority of women still work in insecure, informal employment.

The reality is that women also still carry the burden of unpaid work in the home, which has been aggravated in recent years by austerity policies and cut-backs. To build more equitable and sustainable economies which work for both women and men, warns the report, “more of the same will not do.”

At a time when the global community is defining the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the post-2015 era, the message from UN Women is that economic and social policies can contribute to the creation of stronger economies, and to more sustainable and more gender-equal societies, provided that they are designed and implemented with women’s rights at their centre.

Edited by Phil Harris    

General Muhammadu Buhari holding a broom at a campaign rally. Photo credit: By Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Flickr: Wahlkampf in Nigeria 2015)/CC BY-SA 2.0

By Lisa Vives
NEW YORK/ABUJA, Apr 2 2015 (IPS)

After several tension-filled months, a majority of Nigerians swept in an opposition leader and former military man, Muhammadu Buhari, to succeed incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan, whose failure to contain a terrorist wave in the northern states doomed his re-election chances.

Buhari had previously ruled Nigeria from January 1984 until August 1985 – a period in which there were widespread accusations of human rights abuses – after taking charge following a military coup in December 1983.

The Mar. 28 elections were observed by teams from the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the African Union. Carl LeVan, an assistant professor at the School of International Service, American University in Washington, DC, took part in the National Democratic Institute’s election observation mission from the United States.“[President Muhammadu] Buhari has an unprecedented opportunity to recast the Muslim face of Africa at a time when violent terrorist movements have both perverted Islam and distorted Western foreign policies meant to be more multifaceted” – Carl LeVan, member of a U.S. observation mission for the Mar. 28 presidential election in Nigeria

Speaking with IPS, LeVan, author of Dictators and Democracy in African Development (2015), remarked on the surprise success of Buhari’s All Progressives Congress (APC) party that was only formed in February 2013.

“The defeat of Africa’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party, will bring the All Progressives Congress (APC) into power after barely two years of organising, mobilising and coalition building. (Muhammadu) Buhari will enter office with a strong mandate from the voters, having won four out of the country’s six geopolitical zones, and the APC will enjoy a comfortable majority in the Senate.

“Though a northern Muslim from Katsina, his support included the predominantly Yoruba southwest, where President Goodluck Jonathan recent delivered bags of cash to traditional rulers according to news reports and where the militant Odudwa Peoples’ Congress launched a wave of thuggery in recent weeks.”

The election upset was especially poignant for Nigerians of the northern states, the area most devastated by Boko Haram terror attacks. While some of the vote counting was impeccable, not all of the voting went smoothly. Observers told of protestors objecting to perceived rigging, harassment, ballot boxes snatched and over-voting.

“Even before the results were announced,” said LeVan, “voters in the north reacted with jubilation, and militant groups, including the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, began surreptitiously re-arming in the creeks of the south. Sources I met with over the weekend in Rivers State say they have seen caches of weapons in camps backed by militants such Ateke Tom and others.

“In addition to such seemingly minor procedural problems, the public was locked out of some collation (vote counting) centres. We also received credible reports of serious harassment. A soldier was killed in some of the violence in Port Harcourt, and a large protest took the state electoral commission by storm on Sunday.”

The opposition victory has been achieved but some are already wondering what the new leader, not known for his adherence to human rights, will prioritise.

According to LeVan, “Buhari has a mandate, and his most urgent challenge is to neither misinterpret nor abuse it.

“According to an Afrobarometer poll released on Mar. 23, 40 percent of Nigerians say the president ‘should be allowed to govern freely without wasting time to justify expenses’, and 25 percent say the president should ‘pass laws without worrying about what the National Assembly thinks’. Sixty-eight percent are not very or not at all satisfied with the way democracy is working.”

Recalling a recent national election won by a former dictator, LeVan said that “the last time Nigeria elected a former dictator, Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999, he spent his first term battling the National Assembly and quelling violence in the region that largely voted against him. But he also began building institutions and establishing trust with his sceptics.

“The last time Nigerians had Buhari at the helm, the jubilation quickly gave way to frustration, repression, and economic failure.

“Buhari’s ‘honeymoon’ will therefore be critical, and probably even shorter lived than his memories of 1984. He will need to do more than make grand rhetorical gestures to democracy; he’ll need to practice it and educate his own supporters about the advantages of the justice and fairness it offers, even where the cost may be the kind of efficiency the Afrobarometer respondents appear to be longing for.”

LeVan also urged the new president to “go south” in view of the fact that Nigeria has often been a divided country with loyalties to different regional centres and different religious and ethnic affiliations, because this would send a “valuable message to northerners that he is everyone’s president.”

By “going south”, he said, the newly-elected president “could also include a clear transition plan or policy for the status of the ongoing amnesty programme for the Niger Delta militants, who need reassurance that they do not need an Ijaw president [like President Goodluck Jonathan] in order to have “resource control” taken seriously, or to have environmental clean-up and developmental needs addressed.

“The sooner and more clearly they hear this message, the less likely will be the re-ignition of the Delta rebellions … This is also important because in a country partly divided along religious lines between north and south, Afrobarometer reports that trust in religious leaders at 29 percent is higher than in the National Assembly, governors, local governments, or even traditional rulers (16 percent).

“Christian Igbos in the east (who overwhelmingly rejected the APC) and minorities in the south need to know they can trust Buhari, and he needs their cooperation to govern peacefully and practically.”

LeVan also suggested that Buhari should “reset” national security strategy, perhaps by ”replacing key members of the national security establishment.

“While some continuity may help preserve institutionalised knowledge, particularly with regard to the recent ‘surge’ against Boko Haram, the mishandling of the Chibok girls’ kidnapping reduced confidence in the national security team, and the pressure applied to the electoral commission prior to the election delay has contributed to the perception that some soldiers and many advisers are partisan.”

Boko Haram has been displaced but not defeated, LeVan warned, and this means creating a “credible counter-insurgency strategy”.

Among others, such a strategy would include “sustained high-level interactions with the multinational coalition partners, and a repairing of bridges to the United States, United Kingdom and other allies with a stake in Nigeria’s peaceful prosperity.”

In this context, said LeVan, a visit to the United States and the United Kingdom would be beneficial to reconnect with a disenchanted diaspora. “This will be important in the United States, where leadership in Congress has interpreted Boko Haram as a war against Christians, rather than a complex insurgency with many different victims and deep historical and socio-economic roots.

“Buhari has an unprecedented opportunity to recast the Muslim face of Africa at a time when violent terrorist movements have both perverted Islam and distorted Western foreign policies meant to be more multifaceted.”

LeVan also advised Buhari to pick a “credible, competent and diverse economic team”, noting that “in early 2014, the government of Nigeria (along with the World Bank and others) highlighted trends in economic diversification. The near crisis triggered by the decline in oil prices since then suggests either these claims were overstated or much more work needs to be done.

Buhari could reform the refinery and oil importation mechanisms, commit to publishing all of the federal governments revenue transfers to subnational units each month (like it used to), and pick a combination of experts from academia, the private sector and the bureaucracy to get the economy back on track.”

“A few obvious steps,” concluded LeVan, “would go a long way: reaffirm the independence of the Central Bank (whose governor was replaced last year), stabilise the currency, and consult the National Assembly about budget plans and fiscal crises … The rest is up to the Nigerian people, who spoke on Mar. 28. Voting was just the beginning.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

Any views expressed by persons cited in this article do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Nasser Murad Safi, 15, was shot by Israeli soldiers with live ammunition breaking his leg during stone-throwing clashes between Palestinian youngsters and Israeli soldiers. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Feb 15 2015 (IPS)

Fourteen-year-old Malak al Khatib, one of the youngest Palestinian detainees and one of only a handful of girls, was released from an Israeli prison on Feb. 13 into the arms of emotional family members and supporters after being incarcerated in an Israeli prison for two months on “security offences”.

Details of what happened to the Palestinian minor were made public only after an Israeli gag order on the case was lifted on appeal after a global campaign for her release.

The slightly built, dark-haired girl, from the town of Beitin near Ramallah, was arrested in December last year and later charged with stone-throwing and possession of a knife. However, al Khatib says the confessions were coerced under duress during interrogation."[Palestinian] children have been threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member" – UNICEF

Al Khatib was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment, a suspended sentence of three months and fined 6,000 shekels (approximately 1,500 dollars).

According to volunteer organisation Military Court Watch, 151 Palestinian children are currently being held in Israeli detention for “security offences” in the Occupied Territories and within Israel.

The group added that 47 percent of these children were being held in jails inside Israel in contravention of the Geneva Convention because this limits the ability of family and legal representatives from the West Bank and Gaza to visit them.

Defence for Children International Palestine (DCIP) says that in December last year 10 Palestinian children aged between 10 and 15 were incarcerated. However, children as young as eight have also been arrested by Israeli soldiers or police. According to DCIP, Israeli forces arrest about 1,000 children every year in the occupied West Bank.

However, it is not only the large numbers of Palestinian children arrested which is of concern to human rights organisations but also their treatment during incarceration.

In 2013, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) was attacked by Israeli critics after releasing a report title ‘Children in Israeli Military Detention’, which slammed the Israeli authorities for using “intimidation, threats and physical violence to coerce confessions out of Palestinian children.”

Ahmed Othman Safi, 17, bears the scars after his skull was fractured by the back of a gun as Israeli soldiers were arresting him. Credit: Mel Frykberg/IPS

“Children have been threatened with death, physical violence, solitary confinement and sexual assault, against themselves or a family member,” the report said.

IPS spoke to two Palestinian boys from the Jelazon refugee camp, near Ramallah, who were beaten, abused during interrogation and jailed on allegations of throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israeli security forces and settlers.

One hundred heavily armed Israeli soldiers, their faces masked, broke down the door and stormed the home of Khalil Khaled Nakhli, 17, in the early hours of Aug. 11 last year, terrifying his six younger brothers and sisters.

“My arm was broken after the soldiers beat me as they arrested me. They accused me of throwing stones at Israeli settlers from the Beit El settlement near Jelazon camp,” Nakhli told IPS.

Nakhli was taken to an Israeli prison where he was roughed up during interrogation and eventually sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, despite refusing to admit to the charges against him.

The home of Nakhli’s friend Ahmed Othman Safi, 17, was similarly stormed in the early hours of Sep. 7 last year. This time the soldiers used explosives to blow the door open.

Safi was left bloody and his skull fractured when the arresting soldiers used the back of their guns to club him on the head. An inch-wide indentation, where the hair refuses to grow, remains on Safi’s skull to this day.

“I was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment even though they failed to force me to confess to anything,” said Safi.

Their treatment has only further angered the boys. “We all feel bitter at the way we were treated and this exacerbates our anger at living under occupation,” Safi told IPS.

Palestinian minors are treated harshly in comparison with how Israeli minors are treated following arrest.

“Two children, one Jewish and one Palestinian, who are accused of committing the same act, such as stone throwing, will receive substantially different treatment from two separate legal systems,” the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) said in a recently released report titled ‘One Rule, Two Legal Systems: Israel’s Regime of Laws in the West Bank’.

“The Israeli child will be afforded the extensive rights and protections granted to minors under Israeli law. His Palestinian counterpart will be entitled to limited rights and protections, which are not sufficient to ensure his physical and mental wellbeing and which do not sufficiently meet his unique needs as a minor,” said the report.

Moreover, in many cases, the criminal law applying to Palestinian minors is stricter and even more severe than the one applied to Israeli adults.

“If Malak al Khatib had been arrested for violent activity as an Israeli child she would have received certain rights. These were denied to her for being Palestinian,” ACRI spokesperson Nuri Moskovich told IPS.

Decades of ‘temporary’ Israeli military rule in the Occupied Territories have given rise to two separate and unequal systems of law that discriminate between Israelis and Palestinians. The legal differentiation is not restricted to security or criminal matters, but touches upon almost every aspect of daily life.

“A series of military decrees, legal rulings and legislative amendments have resulted in a situation whereby Israeli citizens living in the Occupied Territories remain under the jurisdiction of Israeli law and the Israeli court system, with all the benefits that this confers,” said ACRI.

“By contrast, Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to much stricter military legal law – military orders that have been issued by Israeli generals since 1967.”

Edited by Phil Harris    

As Juan Evo Morales Ayma, popularly known as ‘Evo’, celebrates his victory for a third term as Bolivia’s president on a platform of “anti-imperialism” and radical socio-economic policies, he can also claim credit for ushering in far-reaching social reforms such as the Bolivian “Law against Political Harassment and Violence against Women” enacted in 2012.

“In many countries women in the political arena, whether candidates to an election or elected to office, are confronted with acts of violence ranging from sexist portrayal in the media to threats and murder,” says the World Future Council (WFC), which monitors the gap between policy research and policy-making.

Speaking to IPS after the 2014 Future Policy Award for Ending Violence against Women and Girls ceremony, organised by WFC, the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) and UN Women on Oct. 14, WFC founder Jacob von Uexkull told IPS that the Bolivian law “is a visionary law, particularly for protecting women against political harassment and violence.”“Achieving gender equality and ending violence against women and girls is a matter for both men and women ... violence against women is a human rights violation but also a social and public health problem, and an obstacle to development with high economic and financial costs for victims, families, communities and society as a whole” – Martin Chungong, IPU Secretary-General

“For the first time we introduced the category of what are called visionary laws which aim to curb violence against women in politics and other professions,” he said, adding that the passing of such a law in Bolivia is “very significant”, suggesting that other should emulate the Bolivian example.

The law against political harassment and violence against women was enacted in Bolivia by the Morales government following the assassination of Councillor Juana Quispe after she had complained about the abuse she suffered from other councillors and the mayor of her town. The law defines political harassment and political violence as criminal offences which carry imprisonment ranging from two to eight years depending on the magnitude of the offence.

The WFC, which promotes the world’s best laws and solutions for implementation by policy-makers in countries all over the world, chose to offer the “honourable mention” for the Bolivian law in the visionary category.

Based in Hamburg, Germany, the WFC was set up in 2007 to pioneer the campaign for the spread of best laws in different areas. Beginning in 2009, the WFC has been offering the Future Policy Award (FPA) for the strongest laws in the field of sustainable development.

The WFC identified the Belo Horizonte Food Security Programme in 2009 as the best law for the FPA to address the right to food. In 2010, the FPA went to Costa Rica for the best law to strengthen biodiversity. In 2011, it was awarded to Rwanda for its laws to protect forests, and in 2012 it was awarded to the Republic of Palau in the Pacific Ocean for the best laws to protect coasts.

Last year, the FPA went to the treaty for the prohibition of nuclear weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean.

With 2014 having been designated by WFC as the year for ending violence against women and girls, UN Women Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka says that governments must adopt a “comprehensive legal framework” that addresses violence against women, by “recognising unequal power relations between men and women” and advocating a “gender-sensitive perspective in tackling it.”

According to Martin Chungong, Secretary-General of IPU, the key message is that “achieving gender equality and ending violence against women and girls is a matter for both men and women.” Moreover, “violence against women is a human rights violation but also a social and public health problem, and an obstacle to development with high economic and financial costs for victims, families, communities and society as a whole.”

Michael Paymar (centre), member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, along with others behind the ‘Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence’ programme of Duluth, Minnesota, winner of this year’s gold Future Policy Award (FPA). Credit: Courtesy of World Future Council

This year’s WFC gold award went to the “Coordinated Community Response to Domestic Violence” programme of the City of Duluth in the U.S. state of Minnesota. Among others, said von Uexkull, the “Duluth model” has a shared philosophy about domestic violence and a system that shifts responsibility for victim safety from the victim to the system.

The “Duluth model” has helped countries formulate laws and policies based on the principles of coordinated community response and paved the way for the intervention of criminal justice in cases of intimate partner violence.

Each year, an estimated 1.3 million women are victims of physical assault by an intimate partner.

According to von Uexkull, such violence entails huge human, social, and economic costs which are estimated to be around 5.18 percent of world GDP.

HBO (Home Box Office), a U.S. pay television network, has recently produced a documentary entitled Private Violence, which looks at domestic violence against women. In an interview with The Guardian, Cynthia Hill, the documentary’s director, said: “The thing that I did not know that was so revealing to me was that anywhere between 50 percent and 75 percent of domestic violence homicides happen at the point of separation or after [the victim] has already left [her abuser].”.

One of the biggest issues facing women and girls today in the world, says Nyaradzayi Gumbonzvanda, General Secretary of the Young Women Christian Association (YWCA), is violence. “I see the violence against women as a manifestation of inequalities, disempowerment and exclusion,” Gumbonzvanda told IPS. “It is the accumulation of many realities that women find in their own lives, particularly that of social disempowerment.”

To highlight the importance of enforcing and implementing existing laws to eradicate violence against women, the WFC gave awards this year to Austria and Burkina Faso for their stringent implementation of laws to protect women against violence. “When the justice system and specialised service providers work hand in hand, real progress can be made,” said von Uexkull.

However, as countries are preparing to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, there is not a single country in the world where we have succeeded in eliminating violence against women, warns Gertrude Mongella, Secretary-General of the Beijing conference, former President of the Pan-African Parliament and WFC Honorary Councillor from Tanzania.

“Many countries now have laws that protect women from violence,” Mongella told participants at the FPA ceremony. “However, women who report violence often face a range of challenges, including resistance or disbelief from law enforcement officers, judges and lawyers.”

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Rukia (in the foreground) recovers after a successful fistula operation at Malalai Maternity Hospital in Kabul (August 2014). Credit: Karlos Zurutuza/IPS

By Karlos Zurutuza
KABUL, Sep 2 2014 (IPS)

“The smell of faeces and urine isolates them completely. Their husbands abandon them and they become stigmatised forever” – Dr Pashtoon Kohistani barely needs two lines to sum up the drama of those women affected by obstetric fistula.

Alongside the health centre in Badakhshan – 290 km northeast of Kabul – Malalai Maternity Hospital is the only health centre in Afghanistan with a section devoted to coping with a disease that is seemingly endemic to the most disadvantaged members of the population: women, young, poor and illiterate.

“Given that a caesarean birth is not an option for most Afghan women, the child dies inside them while they try to give birth. They end up tearing their vagina and urethra,” Dr Kohistani told IPS. “Urinary, and sometimes faecal incontinence too, is the most immediate effect,” added the surgeon as she strolled through the hospital corridors where only women wait to be seen by a doctor, or just come to visit a sick relative.“Pressure mounts on them from every side, even from their mothers-in-law. They have to hear things such as `I had five children without ever seeing a doctor´. Many of these poor girls end up committing suicide” – Dr Nazifah Hamra

They are of practically all ages. Some show obvious signs of pain while others look almost relaxed. In fact, they are in one of the very few places in Afghanistan where the total lack of male presence allows them to uncover their hair, take off their burka and even roll up their sleeves to beat the heat.

According to Nazifah Hamra, head of Malalai´s Fistula Department, “malnutrition is one of the key factors behind this problem. You have to bear in mind that women from remote rural areas in Afghanistan always eat after the men. Girls often don´t get enough milk and essential nutrients for their growth. And add to it that they only get to see a doctor when they marry, and usually at a very early age.”

Dr Hamra told IPS that she attends an average of 4-5 patients suffering from a fistula at any one time. Rukia is one of the two recovering in an eight-bed ward on the hospital´s second floor.

“I was 15 when I got married and 17 when I got pregnant,” recalls the 26-year-old woman from a small village in the province of Balkh, 320 km northwest of Kabul.

“When I was about to give birth, I had a terrible pain but the road to Kabul was cut so I was finally taken to Bamiyan, 150 km east of Kabul.”

Sitting on the bed carefully in order not to obstruct the catheter that still evacuates the remaining urine, Rukia tells IPS that her son died in her womb. An unskilled medical staff only made things worse.

“What the doctors did to her is difficult to believe. She was brutally mutilated,” said Dr Hamra, adding that medical negligence was “still painful common currency” in Afghanistan.

In a 2013 report on the risks of child marriage in Afghanistan, Human Rights Watch claims that children born as a result of child marriages also suffer increased health risks, and that there is a higher death rate among children born to Afghan mothers under the age of 20 than those born to older mothers.

Brad Adams, Asia Director at Human Rights Watch, called on Afghan officials to end the harm being caused by child marriage. “The damage to young mothers, their children and Afghan society as a whole is incalculable,” Adams stressed.

Rukia´s husband left to marry another woman so she had no other choice but to move back to her parents´ house, where she has lived for the last nine years. But even more painful than her ordeal and the defection of her husband, she says, is the fact that she will never be a mother.

Dr Hamra knows Rukia´s story in detail, as well as those of many others in her situation. “Pressure mounts on them from every side, even from their mothers-in-law,” she told IPS. “They have to hear things such as `I had five children without ever seeing a doctor´. Many of these poor girls end up committing suicide.” However, preferring to look towards the future, she said that Rukia will do well after the operation.

“From now on she´ll be able to enjoy a completely normal life again,” stressed the surgeon, who also wanted to express her gratitude to the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) which “seeks to guarantee the right of every woman, man and child to enjoy a life of health and equal opportunity.”

Annette Sachs Robertson, UNFPA representative in Afghanistan, briefed IPS on the organisation´s action in the country:

“We started working in 2007, in close collaboration with the Afghan Ministry of Public Health. We train surgeons and we provide Malalai with the necessary equipment and medical supplies. Thanks to this initiative, over 435 patients have been treated and rehabilitated at Malalai Maternity Hospital and we have plans to extend the programmes to Jalabad, Mazar and Herat provinces,” explained Robertson, a PhD graduate in biology and biomedical sciences from the University of Harvard.

“You hardly ever see these cases in developed countries,” she added.

According to a 2011 report on obstetric fistula in six provinces of Afghanistan conducted by the country’s Social and Health Development Programme (SHPD), “the prevalence of obstetric fistula is estimated to be 4 cases per 1000 (0.4 percent) women in the reproductive age group. 91.7 percent of women with confirmed cases of obstetric fistula cannot read and write while 72.7 percent of fistula patients reported that their husbands are illiterate.”

“Twenty-five percent of women with fistula reported that they were younger than 16 years old and 67 percent reported they were 16 to 20 years old when they had got married. Seventeen percent of women with fistula reported that they were younger than 16 years old when they had their first delivery. Twenty-five percent of women with fistula reported that they developed the fistula after their first delivery, while 64 percent reported prolonged labour.”

Meanwhile, thanks to yet another successful operation, Najiba, a 32-year-old from Baghlan – 220 km north of Kabul – will soon be back home after suffering from a fistula over the last 14 years.

Born in a remote rural village, she was married at 17 and lost her first son a year later, after three days of labour. Despite the fistula problem, she was not abandoned by her husband and, today, they have six children.

“I was only too lucky that my husband heard on the radio about this hospital,” explains Najiba, with a broad smile hardly ever seen among those affected.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Fatema,15, sits on the bed at her home in Khulna, Bangladesh, in April 2014. Fatema was saved from being married a few weeks earlier. Local child protection committee members stopped the marriage with the help of law enforcement agencies. Credit: UNICEF

By A. D. McKenzie
LONDON, Jul 23 2014 (IPS)

Heightening their campaign to eradicate violence against women and girls, United Nations agencies and civil groups have called for increased action to end child marriage and female genital mutilation.

At the first Girl Summit in London Wednesday, hosted by the U.K. government and UNICEF, delegates said they wanted to send a strong message that there should be “zero tolerance” for these practices.

“Millions of young girls around the world are in danger of female genital mutilation and child marriage – and of losing their childhoods forever to these harmful practices,” Susan Bissell, UNICEF’s Chief of Child Protection, told IPS.“Millions of young girls around the world are in danger of female genital mutilation and child marriage – and of losing their childhoods forever to these harmful practices” – Susan Bissell, UNICEF's Chief of Child Protection

“FGM is an excruciatingly painful and terrifying ordeal for young girls. The physical effects can last a lifetime, resulting in horrific infections, difficulty passing urine, infertility and even death.”

Bissell said that when a young girl is married “it tends to mark the end of her education and she’s more likely to have children when she’s still a child herself – with a much higher risk of dying during pregnancy or childbirth”.

“Without firm and accelerated action now, hundreds of millions more girls will suffer permanent damage,” she added in an e-mail interview.

At the summit, the United Kingdom announced an FGM prevention programme, launched by the government’s Department of Health and the National Health Service (NHS) England. Backed by 1.4 million pounds, the programme is designed to improve the way in which the NHS tackles female genital mutilation and “clarify the role of health professionals which is to ‘care, protect, prevent’,” the government said.

According to British Prime Minister David Cameron, some 130,000 people are affected by FGM in the United Kingdom, with “60,000 girls under the age of 15 potentially at risk”, even though the practice is outlawed in the country.

The prevention programme will now make it mandatory for all “acute hospitals” to report the number of patients with FGM to the Department of Health on a monthly basis, as of September of this year.

U.N. officials said that the Girl Summit was a significant development because it marked the importance of the issues addressed.

“International leaders came together in one place and said enough is enough,” Bissell said.

While it is difficult to measure the impact of intensified campaigns on the reductions in child marriage and female genital mutilation/cutting over the past few years, the United Nations and other organisations have noted that the numbers of girls affected are in fact decreasing.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the percentage of women married before age 18 has dropped by about half, from 34 percent to 18 percent over the last three decades, UNICEF says.

In South Asia, the decline has been especially marked for marriages involving girls under age 15, dropping from 32 percent to 17 percent.

“The marriage of girls under age 18, however, is still commonplace,” Bissell told IPS.

“In Indonesia and Morocco, the risk of marrying before age 18 is less than half of what it was three decades ago. In Ethiopia, women aged 20 to 24 are marrying about three years later than their counterparts three decades ago,” she added.

Regarding female genital mutilation/cutting, Kenya and Tanzania have seen rates drop to one-third of their levels three decades ago through a combination of community activism and legislation, while in the Central African Republic, Iraq, Liberia and Nigeria, prevalence of FGM has dropped by as much as half, Bissell said.

However, officials stressed that with population growth, it is possible that progress in reducing child marriage will remain flat unless the commitments made at the Girl Summit are acted upon. Flat progress “isn’t good enough”, Bissell told IPS.

Recently released U.N. figures show that, despite the declines, child marriage is widespread, with more than 700 million women alive today who were married as children. UNICEF says that some 250 million women were married before the age of 15.

The highest percentage of these women can be found in South Asia, followed by East Asia and the Pacific which is home to 25 percent of girls and women married before the age of 18, UNICEF says.

Statistics also indicate that girls who marry before they turn 18 are less likely to remain in school and more likely to experience domestic violence. In addition, teenage mothers are more at risk from complications in pregnancy and childbirth than women in their 20s; some 70,000 adolescent girls die every year because of such complications, according to the United Nations.

The statistics on female genital mutilation are also cause for international concern, with the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) saying that about 125 million girls and women have been subjected to the practice, which can lead to haemorrhage, infection, physical dysfunction, obstructed labour and death.

According to UNFPA, female genital mutilation/cutting and child marriage are human rights violations that both help to perpetuate girls’ low status by impairing their health and long-term development.

UNFPA Executive Director Dr. Babatunde Osotimehin told IPS that a number of states have adopted legislation against female genital mutilation/cutting but that some perpetrators are still operating with “impunity”.

Participating in the London summit, Osotimehin said that certain governments were facing challenges within their own countries because of long-held cultural beliefs, but like Bissell, he said that the picture is not completely bleak, because civil society and grassroots organisations are amplifying their campaigns.

“Our message for girls who are affected by these practices is that they have support – moral, psychological, physical and emotional support,” he told IPS. “We also want to send a message that those who are affected should advocate to try and stop these practices.”

Meanwhile, U.N. officials said it was significant that the summit saw commitment from the African Union and the deputy prime Minister of Ethiopia, as well as from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.K. Department for International Development (DfID). The Government of Canada and several other financial supporters also made commitments.

For the executive director of UN Women, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the pledges show support for the message of “zero tolerance” of child marriage and FGM that her organisation wishes to send. They are also a strong signal that the practices can be ended in a generation, she told IPS.

Moselyn Muchena, one of the girls being given a chance under the TechWomen initiative. Credit: Mary Kashumba/IPS

By Mary Kashumba
HARARE, Jul 10 2014 (IPS)

For 22-year-old Moselyn Muchena, a final year computer science student at the University of Zimbabwe, it seemed obvious to create a mobile application offering easy access to services in the local catering industry, largely because of the huge number of female entrepreneurs in that sector.

“The kinds of problems these women are going through inspired me to come up with an innovative application for the industry called ORDER NOW, through which they can [post] their menus and specials, as well as their location and the prices of items.

“The application is also interactive, allowing customers to share [their reviews] on other social networks platforms … and it offers a platform for feedback, which is vital for businesses,” Muchena told IPS. The app also allows for advertising.“We want to tap into the creative and innovative base of 52 percent of the population. Imagine what the world has lost in innovation due to the lack of or fewer women in these creative spaces” – TechWomen Zimbabwe

“I am grateful to get this opportunity to create a culinary application that can be used by restaurants, where mostly women dominate the field,” she said, adding that she hoped her app will have a global reach.

According to Farai Mutambanengwe, president of the Small to Medium Scale Enterprises Association of Zimbabwe, women dominate the catering industry in Zimbabwe. He told IPS that while the association had no actual analysis “on the number of women who are in the culinary industry compared with men, generally women continue to grow in dominating this field.”

Muchena sees herself as paving the way for other girls to enter the fields of science and technology. “Being the only girl doing computer science in my class, I used to feel like an outcast and it took me time to blend in to become part of the class and not ‘the woman’ in the class. I said to myself I would also pave the way for young girls who aspire to have a career in technological innovations.”

The young innovator is just one of over 100 girls and women aged between 10 and 23 who are creating innovative technologies to address community problems in Zimbabwe. They are part of a U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs initiative called TechWomen, a programme designed to empower, connect and support the next generation of women leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).

Referring to her own experience in developing her software, Muchena pointed out that there was an urgent need for investors in the field of science. “Our plight as young science entrepreneurs is that there are no investors willing to engage youths who are coming up with innovations.” However, lack of investment in the science sector has dwindled as a result of a restrictive economy.

According to a 2008 report in the Economic Reform Feature Service  of the Centre for International Enterprise (CIPE), “the education system in Zimbabwe has long suffered from an insufficient focus on teaching practical skills, limited access to higher education opportunities, and unequal access for girls to specialised fields such as science.”

“Successful educational reform is a necessary step to create the basis for sustained economic growth and requires the involvement of all stakeholders, ranging from families and civil society into national and local governments as well as the private sector,” said the report.

National Zimbabwean statistics for 2012 show that the number of women who enrolled in faculties of engineering, computer science and science technology at university level were 17 percent, 35 percent and 22 percent respectively in 2009. A year later, women’s enrolment in these faculties were 17. 5 percent, 39 percent and 18 percent respectively.

Chemical technologist Aretha Mare, one of the members of TechWomen Zimbabwe, founded by five Zimbabwean women who graduated from the U.S. State Department’s TechWomen initiative, told IPS that its vision is to see gender parity, or 50 percent representation of women in all STEM professions.

“We want to tap into the creative and innovative base of 52 percent of the population,” says TechWomen Zimbabwe. “Imagine what the world has lost in innovation due to the lack of or fewer women in these creative spaces.”

Mare said that under the TechWomen initiative, “the women act as role models, mentors and teachers, creating a networking platform and peer-to-peer interaction with sharing of knowledge to keep them motivated and sharing of opportunities, thus avoiding the leaky pipe where a few women who pursue STEM careers also switch careers or leave due to frustrations in the workplace.”

According to Mare, “the girls’ programme aims to expose girls to STEM fields through experiential learning, where they identify problems, use STEM to solve them, recalibrate and ideate again. We try to do it in hands on, fun and engaging way.”

“We believe we are causing a revolution, transitioning Zimbabwe into a tech power house through girls and women as we target girls from marginalised backgrounds (both in school and out of school), some of them with no prior computer experience and most with limited access to technology. So far we have trained over 100 girls,” she added.

Meanwhile, under its Strategic Plan (2011-2015), Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education in partnership with the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has embarked on a massive programme to revive science teaching in the country. The programme is being funded through the Education Development Fund (EDF), a multi-donor funding mechanism.

The programme has already distributed 2,449 sciences kits and is currently working on the re-training of more than 5,000 science teachers from the 2,336 secondary schools in the country on the safe use and maintenance of the equipment in the kits.

For Muchena, it all comes down to convincing parents and the government to strive to ensure that talent is given a chance. “I encourage parents and the authorities to understand that sometimes it is not about the academic aspects but about realising a child’s ability and nurturing it into something big.”

A new toilet for girl students at a school in Murshidabad district in the eastern Indian state West Bengal. Credit: Sulabh International/IPS.

By Ranjita Biswas
KOLKATA, Apr 19 2014 (IPS)

In large parts of rural India, the absence of separate toilets for growing girls is taking a toll on their education. Many are unable to attend school during their menstrual cycle.

According to the country’s Annual Status of Education Report in 2011, lack of access to toilets causes girls between 12 and 18 years of age to miss around five days of school every month, or around 50 school days every year.“There is a sharp increase in the dropout rate, mainly among girls, as they move from primary to upper primary, because we cannot till date provide them proper toilets."

The country’s Supreme Court had ruled in 2011 that every public school has to have toilets. But a pan-India study, ‘The Learning Blocks’, conducted by the NGO CRY in 2013, shows that 11 percent of schools do not have toilets and only 18 percent have separate ones for girls. In 34 percent of schools, toilets are in bad condition or simply unusable.

Atindra Nath Das, regional director of CRY East, told IPS, “Children do not have safe drinking water, schools still do not have their own building and toilets are missing. No wonder 8.1 million children in India are still out of school.

“There is a sharp increase in the dropout rate, mainly among girls, as they move from primary to upper primary, because we cannot till date provide them proper toilets,” he said.

A 2010 report by the U.N. University Institute for Water, Environment and Health noted, “Once girls reach puberty, lack of access to sanitation becomes a central cultural and human health issue, contributing to female illiteracy and low levels of education, in turn contributing to a cycle of poor health for pregnant women and their children.”

According to India’s 2011 census data, national sanitation coverage is 49 percent but the rural figure is worse, at 31 percent.  It is even lower for Dalits or socially marginalised communities (23 percent) and tribal people (16 percent).

Lack of sanitation facilities is still a stumbling block for the effective spread of health and education programmes in many parts of rural India.

Mahila Jagriti Samiti (MJS), an NGO working in Jharkhand, an economically backward state in eastern India with a large tribal population, has been conducting awareness programmes on the use of sanitation, but is not very happy with the results.

Mahi Ram Mahto, director of MJS, told IPS: “We have done 300 sanitation programmes, even helping to build toilets in homes with funding from government agencies, but only 15 to 20 percent of the beneficiaries use them.”

Without a cistern for flushing, the toilets pose a problem, he says. “People have to carry water in buckets from a common water source like a hand pump or a pond; most households do not have taps. They say they might as well go to the open field.”

In 1999, India launched the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan or Total Sanitation Campaign, a community-based programme, under which it gives an equivalent of about 80 dollars to a household to set up a toilet. But many poor people say that is not enough and still defecate in the fields or by railway lines.

The campaign has “provisions for toilet facility and hygiene education in all types of government rural schools (up to higher secondary or class 12) with emphasis on toilets for girls.”

But provisions alone do not help, activists say.

Access to water for toilets is a major problem in many rural schools in the eastern state of West Bengal, says Vijay K. Jha, honorary controller at the state branch of Sulabh International. The NGO leads one of the world’s biggest and most successful sanitation programmes.

“We have worked in 50 schools in Murshidabad district of India’s eastern state West Bengal, providing infrastructure and running awareness programmes on hygiene. Plans are afoot to extend the work to 100 more in the near future,” Jha told IPS.

Despite separate toilets for girls, the results are not satisfactory. As in the case of Jharkhand, non-availability of water hinders toilet use. Most schools do not have water pipes running up to the compounds.

Diara Hazi Nasrat Mallick High School in Murshidabad district, where Sulabh has constructed a separate toilet, is a typical example.

Alaul Haque, the school headmaster, told IPS, “We are happy that this facility has been built. But girls still have to bring water from the tubewell because there’s no water pipe connection in the school yet.” Half of about 300 students at the school are girls.

Another institution in the same district, Gayeshpur High School, has the same complaint. “With around 300 girl students in our co-ed school, we need at least two toilets. We were happy that the toilet has been built, but it still lacks flowing water,” headmaster Prasanta Chatterjee told IPS.

The government scheme under which NGOs take up the work of building toilets does not include providing water pipes – a task that depends on local agencies.

Girl students during the menstrual cycle are advised not to carry heavy objects like buckets filled with water; so they avoid school altogether during those days if there is no easy access to water in the toilets.

Under India’s Right to Education Act of 2009, which recognises the right of children to free and compulsory education till the completion of elementary school, provision of proper toilets as part of school infrastructure is mandatory, says S.N. Dave, WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) specialist at Unicef Kolkata.

Dave told IPS: “West Bengal being in a riverine area, water is not much of a problem. But there is scope for improvement in terms of better coordination between agencies.”

Some states like Kerala in the south and Sikkim in the northeast fare better.

According to a Planning Commission study in 2013, Sikkim had the best performing gram panchayats (village councils) and maintenance of sanitation facilities, having achieved 100 percent sanitation.

Girls in Pakistan face neglect and violence. Credit: Zofeen Ebrahim/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Oct 7 2013 (IPS)

Twenty-eight-year-old Omar Zaib, a taxi driver in Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s Punjab province, confessed in court last month to drowning his one-and-a-half-year-old daughter because he wanted a son. A few days later, the media reported that two newborn girls had been found abandoned at a railway station.

Before that, in August, the police arrested a man accused of burying his newborn daughter alive because she was physically deformed.

But things came to a head when news of the rape of a five-year-old in Lahore broke out last month. Pakistan’s civil society erupted in protest.

According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP), the police have already registered 113 cases of rape and 32 of gang-rape in Lahore alone in the first eight months of this year.

But the malaise can be found across Pakistan, in small towns and big cities including Faisalabad, Tandlianwala, Kasur, Toba Tek Singh in the Punjab province; Karachi, Chachro in Sindh; and Peshawar, Dera Ismail Khan in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa region.

The spate of such incidents in recent months has left civil society alarmed. An incensed Pakistani public is demanding the enactment of long-pending child protection laws, such as the Child Protection (Criminal Law Amendment) Bill 2009, the National Commission on the Rights of the Child Bill 2009, the Charter of Child Rights Bill 2009, the Prohibition of Corporal Punishment, the Child Marriages Restraint (Amendment) Bill 2009 and National Immunisation Bill 2009.

In addition, they are urging the government to implement the maximum punishment of life-long imprisonment until death, without possibility of parole, remission or pardon for paedophilia, rape and gang-rape convicts.

Arshad Mahmood, director of advocacy and child rights governance with Save the Children, says what is needed is a complete child protection system which would include not just the political will for law-making, but also a proper budget for implementation of the laws as well as for running the whole paraphernalia of monitoring.

“I think the Indian rape case triggered these protests,” Ayesha Khan, a development researcher working on women’s issues at the Collective for Social Science Research in Karachi, tells IPS. She was referring to the brutal gang-rape of a paramedic in Indian capital New Delhi in December last year, which resulted in her death.

However, unlike the outrage the rape in Delhi triggered in neighbouring India, the anger in Pakistan remains restricted to hundreds of tweets and outpourings on social media sites.

“When will the social media activism transform into action?” asks Samar Minallah, a rights activist who was part of a recent protest in Islamabad and was dismayed by the lukewarm response.

According to Asha Bedar, a Karachi-based psychologist, “Violence against children, especially young girls, is nothing new, nor unique to Pakistan.”

There is no official database, but the non-governmental organisation Sahil puts the number of child sexual abuse cases at 3,861 in 2012, while Madadgaar Helpline’s national database recorded 5,659 cases of violence against children from January to October last year.

These numbers, however, remain only indicative, as most cases go unreported. More than the numbers, what Bedar finds alarming is the “noticeable increase” in severe forms of violence, with very young girls being abducted, raped and murdered routinely. But only the very severe cases manage to rouse society from its collective stupor, she laments.

“No wonder violence continues. We simply do not value our women enough,” she adds.

Aurat Foundation, an Islamabad-based women’s rights organisation, had in a report titled Beyond Denial reported 7,516 crimes against women in 2012. Released earlier this year, the report noted how crimes like murder, domestic violence and acid-throwing increased between 2010 and 2012. The total number of women who died through murder, honour killing and suicide, among other crimes, was 13,583 between 2008 and 2012.

“Give these tragedies any name, but the figures imply that 34 percent of the total number of women subjected to violence did not survive the assault,” Dr Rakhshinda Perveen, author of the report, tells IPS.

As with all cases of abuse, perpetrators target the most vulnerable members of society because it is with them that they can exert the most power and impose their will, whether physically or sexually, says Bedar. This tendency increases in times of stress, and young girls are frequently victims, Bedar adds.

Bedar’s views find endorsement in the findings of a recent United Nations multi-country study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific, titled ‘Why Do Some Men Use Violence Against Women and How Can We Prevent It?’.

Published in the British Medical Journal and The Lancet early this month, it is based on interviews with 10,178 men aged between 18 and 49 years in Bangladesh, China, Cambodia, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea. One in four men admitted to raping a woman believing in “sexual entitlement” or as a form of punishment because they were angry.

“They believed they had the right to have sex with the woman regardless of consent. The second most common motivation reported was to rape as a form of entertainment, either for fun or because they were bored,” notes Emma Fulu, one of the authors of the report.

Minallah, however, blames parents as well for these incidents. “Nothing, not even poverty, can justify the murder of a newborn girl.” She thinks parents who neglect their children need to be penalised too.

She notes how in the recent case of the rape of the five-year-old, her absence went unnoticed for hours whereas the search for the missing boy accompanying her had begun much earlier.

Simultaneously, there are efforts to persuade the government to change school syllabi to ensure a positive portrayal of women. The Pakistani parliament passed seven pro-women laws between 2004 and 2011. But the government has failed to provide a safer environment for Pakistani women.

“It really all depends on convictions,” says Minallah. “Unless the main culprit in a rape case is tried and punished, there is not much hope.” The lack of convictions and unaccountability convey the impression that such issues are ‘private matters’.

School children in Gaza face early gender segregation. Credit: Mohammed Omer/IPS.

By Mel Frykberg
RAMALLAH, Occupied West Bank, May 3 2013 (IPS)

The Islamist resistance group Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip, is being accused by its Palestinian Authority (PA) rivals in the West Bank of Talibanising Gaza and turning the coastal territory into a new Muslim Brotherhood neighbourhood.

Earlier in the year Hamas launched a “virtue campaign” aimed at spreading Islamic Sharia and fighting against “Western dress and behavior.”

Following a recent law passed by Hamas, when the new school year begins from September this year, it will now be illegal for male school teachers to teach Palestinian girls in Gaza’s schools. Furthermore, girls and boys from the age of nine upwards will be forcibly segregated throughout the Gaza Strip, including those in private and Christian schools where co-education exists to a certain degree.

The law will affect the seven percent of schools in Gaza that are private, including Christian schools. They will need to finance the expansion of their buildings to be able to hold special classes for each gender. Gaza has 690 schools with 466,000 students for a population of 1.7 million.“This is ridiculous. What is wrong with boys and girls learning together?"

Another article of the law regulates relations between Palestinian educational institutions and Israel, by banning schools from receiving aid meant to encourage or promote the normalisation of relations with Israel.

This latest crackdown on civil liberties follows earlier campaigns which have seen women banned from riding on the back of motorcycles, a common form of transport in the territory where fuel is scarce. Women have also been banned from smoking water pipes in public, and couples on the streets have been subjected to interrogations by Hamas security members.

Male hair stylists are forbidden from styling women’s hair while female runners were banned from taking part in a marathon organised by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza, leading  UNRWA to cancel the event.  The marathon went ahead in the West Bank, attracting international competitors and Palestinian women.

In the West Bank there is no law segregating boys and girls in early school. However, apart from some schools including private and Christian schools, there is a general segregation of the sexes in high school.

But choice is an issue for many Palestinians, and Hamas legislation on “how to be a good Muslim” is seen as enforcement of the Hamas political agenda.

“This is ridiculous. What is wrong with boys and girls learning together? As a Muslim and a parent I want the choice as to whether I send my children to a mixed school or a gender segregated one,” says Rana Atta from the Women’s Affairs Technical Committee (WATC) in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Atta, who wears a head scarf, says that the new legislation introduced by the Hamas authorities not only violates human rights but is contrary to the spirit of education which should be promoting gender equality and an inclusive society representative of all.

“It’s illogical that male teachers will now be forbidden from teaching girls. Just as boys should be exposed to female teachers as an integral part of our society, so should girls be exposed to male teachers. I seriously wonder about the educational background of the people who are introducing these new laws in Gaza,” Atta tells IPS.

In a press statement, the Gaza Centre for Womens’ Legal Research and Consulting condemned the decision as “gender-based discrimination.”

When Hamas took over full control of the Gaza Strip it promised to respect the civil liberties of Palestinians, a promise that the Islamic movement has increasingly broken with growing militancy.

“Hamas is slowly engaging in a process of the Islamisation of Gaza. A process which is not constitutional on the one hand and neither is it popular with Gazans on the other,” says Dr Samir Awad, a political analyst from Birzeit University, near Ramallah.

“They have gone so far as to threaten the Palestinian contestant of Arab Idol with legal action and accusing him of engaging in illegal and immoral behaviour,” Awad tells IPS.

“Hamas’s draconian legislation is unwarranted, neither by the constitution nor the Palestinian population. These latest developments are further entrenching the political divide between the West Bank and Gaza.

“Those schools in Gaza were there long before Hamas and will be there long after Hamas is no longer around. Palestinians have stated repeatedly that they want self-determination and that applies to Gazans too.”

It is as if they have given up hope of ever seeing their girls again. They are an Adivasi family from a remote village in Assam state in India, nestled in the Himalayan foothills. The picturesque surroundings belie the hollowness they feel within.

Three of their four daughters have been missing for the last five years.

“Poor and ignorant, the parents simply don’t know where their girls have gone,” says Sunita Changkakati, executive director of the Assam Centre for Rural Development, an NGO in Guwahati.

The Adivasis, an aboriginal tribal people whose ancestors the British had recruited from central India to work in the tea plantations of Assam, are particularly vulnerable to the menace of human trafficking, though women from tribal areas in lower Assam and others from neighbouring states in the northeast have been falling victim too.

Wily agents stalk the countryside, hunting for gullible prey. The bait most often is the promise of big money, the lure of city life or the prospect of escaping a humdrum existence. Some even dangle the prospect of marriage, hooking impressionable girls under the pretence of having fallen in love with them, ‘marry’ them in secret, and instead of a promised honeymoon, deliver them to prostitution.

Accordingly, in the last couple of years, there have been media reports of girls from the north-east of India and other parts of Assam being rescued from brothels in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and elsewhere in the country."The mother was obviously lying, but what could we do?”

According to the records of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the state government of Assam, the recorded number of girls trafficked for sale outside the state started with a minuscule four in 2005, went up to 37 in 2009, 54 in 2011, and 79 in 2012.

These numbers could be far from the real story, since parents seldom register cases of their missing daughters.

Not all the missing girls end up in the sex trade. Bizarre as it may seem, many of them, some under the age of 18 – the stipulated year of adulthood under the Indian Constitution – find themselves getting married to much older farmers in the faraway Indian states Punjab and Haryana.

Female foeticide and infanticide have skewed the male-female sex ratio in these two north Indian states, leaving men in these villages with no women to marry. Hence, the practice of ‘buying’ consorts from middlemen. Getting a bride from the north-east may have been unheard of earlier. No longer so, never mind if there is little in common between their cultures.

Some of the other abducted girls find themselves in the domestic help circuit in India’s metropolitan cities. Recruited by affluent families, “they are often underpaid, working almost as bonded labour,” says Stephen Ekka of Pajhra (meaning ‘spring of life’), an NGO in Tezpur in the north-eastern state Assam.

“Trafficking doesn’t mean only those sold into the sex trade,” says Ekka, who himself belongs to the Adivasi community. “Anyone who is unwillingly confined to a work-field can be considered as being trafficked.”

Rajeeb Kumar Sharma, general secretary of the Global Organisation for Life Development (GOLD), an NGO in Guwahati, tells IPS about the case of a domestic worker recruited by a Delhi-based agent who complained of stomach pain, and when taken to a hospital was found to have had an organ removed without his knowledge. The hapless man was told that since so much expense had been incurred on his behalf, he had to make good the loss by bringing another able-bodied person from his village.

Poverty and unemployment are the primary factors driving the villagers to desperation; the lack of social mobility and of education and opportunities for young people compounds the problem.

Assam’s famous tea plantations, a major source of employment for the state’s populace and crucial contributor to its revenue, have been facing hard times in recent years. To cut costs, many have started employing only casual labour, especially during the tea plucking season. It wasn’t unusual in this scenario for girls to go out looking for work, even if their parents remained unaware of where the money was actually coming from.

Even in the remotest village, the name ‘Delhi’ now evokes instant recognition and is perceived as the magic word to open a world of untold riches. Often, a girl ‘from Delhi’ comes visiting, attired in ‘fancy’ clothes and heavy make-up, and bragging about how much she earns. It’s often a ruse, the surface glamour a lure to recruit other girls.

Trapped thus, many girls set out to follow a dream, and return after visiting a nightmare, if they return at all. Changkakati of the Assam Centre for Rural Development recently came across a girl in a village who was barely 14 years old and nursing a six-month-old baby. “When we asked her mother about it, she said her daughter was married. The husband (she said) was apparently from Bihar, but since he had a shop in Delhi, he could not be with them. The mother was obviously lying, but what could we do?”

NGOs like the one Changkakati works for or Ekka’s Pajhra, among many others, have been working in the past few years to raise awareness about human trafficking, helping rescue victims and rehabilitating them. Helping them in their efforts are local student bodies as well as organisations such as the All-Adivasi Women’s Association of Assam, headquartered in Majbaat near Udalguri town. Their members have easy access to the local community, making it easier to keep tabs on girls missing in the area.

NGOs in the state have taken to implementing Ujjwala, a scheme to combat human trafficking, particularly of girls sold into prostitution. Vigilance committees look out for possible cases of trafficking, and work in close collaboration with the police to rescue girls. In 2012, 78 girls were admitted to shelter homes.

Rehabilitating the rescued girls, however, is difficult, especially if they have returned after a few years, due to social stigma. “Some girls have come back with really bad health conditions,” says Pajhra’s Ekka. “They look depressed too but do not want to talk much about what may have happened to them.”

The state CID department has set up 14 anti-trafficking units. Special vigil is kept at railway stations.

Hundreds of young Egyptian Christian girls have mysteriously disappeared. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS.

By Cam McGrath
CAIRO, Apr 16 2013 (IPS)

When a young Christian girl goes missing in the Egyptian port city of Alexandria, her family will call on a certain Muslim sheikh in the nearby town of El-Ameriya.

The local Salafi leader, whose ultra-conservative views condone the marriage of girls as young as nine, has a history of abducting Coptic Christian girls and forcing them to convert to Islam and marry Muslim men, claim rights activists.

And so the sheikh and his associates are the natural starting point for any investigation into missing underage Christian girls. And, according to activists, that is usually where they find them.

“Whenever a young girl disappears in the area the trail leads to this sheikh,” says Mamdouh Nakhla, chairman of the Al Kalema Organisation for Human Rights.

In a recent case, a 13-year-old Coptic Christian girl from a village near Alexandria was allegedly kidnapped and held for over a week as her abductors tried to force her to renounce her religion.

According to her testimony, she was drugged unconscious while in a taxi on her way home from school. She woke up in a secluded house with two Salafi sheikhs and an elderly woman. Her abductors forced her to wear niqab, a full veil covering the body and face, and beat her when she refused to convert to Islam.

Girgis claims she was released nine days later when the sheikhs became nervous after her family organised large demonstrations for her return. The Salafis turned her over to police, who feared the girl’s testimony would spark sectarian clashes, and so tried to convince her to claim she had wilfully gone to a sheikh seeking to convert to Islam.

“The only thing unusual (about this case) was that the girl was returned,” says Nakhla. “In one case I investigated a kidnapped girl was allowed to call her parents, but in all others the girl was never heard from again.”

Christian rights watchdogs say abductions and forced conversions of young Egyptian Coptic girls have been going on for decades right under the noses of local authorities. But the frequency of the kidnappings has increased alarmingly since the uprising in 2011 that toppled dictator Hosni Mubarak and brought an Islamist-led government to power.

More than 500 Christian girls have been abducted in the last two years, according to the Association of Victims of Abduction and Forced Disappearance (AVAFD), which documents the disappearances. A growing number of cases involve girls between the ages of 13 and 17.

AVAFD head Abram Louis claims the abducted girls are taken to ‘safe’ houses, where they are manipulated or blackmailed into converting to Islam and forced to marry Muslim men, often to serve as second wives.

“If we inform the police where the kidnapped girl is being kept, they inform the Salafis, who then move her away to another home and then we lose all trace of her,” Louis said in a recent interview.

“Egypt has laws in place to protect girls under 18, but Salafis do not accept them,” says Amal Abdel Hadi, head of the New Woman Foundation. “To them, a girl is only a minor until she has her first period.”

However, Salafi leaders have categorically denied any role in abducting Christian girls or forceful proselytising. They claim that so far as they know, the girls converted to Islam of their own free will, in some cases after falling in love with a Muslim man.

Ishaak Ibrahim, a religious rights researcher at the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), says inter-faith love affairs and conversions are dangerously provocative issues in Egypt. Rumours of such have led to outbreaks of sectarian violence.

He says many of the alleged abductions involve young Christian girls who appear to have converted to Islam to escape bad relations with their families, or after having engaged in pre-marital relations (taboo in conservative Egyptian culture) with Muslim men.

“The girls appear to have chosen to change their religion,” Ibrahim told IPS. “But because the family is ashamed, and because the police don’t investigate to find their daughter, the family chooses the easiest solution, which is to say the girl was kidnapped by Muslim extremists.”

Such cases only present a problem when the girl is a minor, he says, as Egypt’s Child Law criminalises the marriage of any girl under 18, even if by her own free will.

But Nakhla, who is representing the families of 20 missing Coptic girls, says there are clear signs that young girls have been coerced into converting and marrying.

Referring to one recent case, he asks if it makes sense that a 15-year-old Christian girl would suddenly choose to convert to Islam and serve as a second wife, without any legal rights, to a firebrand Salafi sheikh over 40 years her senior. The girl has never spoken or written to her parents since her disappearance – unusual behaviour in a country where family ties run deep.

“In Egypt it is a crime to marry a minor, and you can’t legally change your religion until you’re 18… yet the government refuses to investigate these cases and arrest those responsible,” complains Nakhla.

While Ibrahim argues that all Egyptians should have the right to change their religion at any time, he says authorities also have a responsibility to ensure that women – particularly minors – are protected from coercion and exploitation.

“The family should be allowed to meet their daughter and get her to explain what she wants in the presence of the public prosecutor,” he says.

Salafi leaders have rejected any state intervention, and have warned against attempts by parents and human rights organisations to return the girls to their families.

Roughly 82 percent of Afghan girls drop out of school before the sixth grade, partly due to early child marriages. Credit: Najibullah Musafer/Killid

By Abida M. Telaee
KABUL, Feb 26 2013 (IPS)

In Afghanistan, the maternal mortality rate is on the rise; hospitals are filling up with anaemic women and girls; and in over 200 districts, high schools are devoid of even a single female pupil. These issues are not unrelated – they are all products of a grave social problem in this country of 35 million people: early child marriages.

According to Sadia Fayeq Ayubi, head of the reproductive health department at the ministry of public health, early marriage (of girls younger than 16 years) is illegal in Afghanistan yet girls as young as 13 are frequently married, often to much older men.

In 2013 alone, 53 child marriages have been reported, said Nazia Faizi, a representative of the rights department at the ministry of women’s affairs.

And although that number is less than in previous years, it does not provide an accurate picture of the situation since “there are more unreported cases in the rural areas where women are more deprived and have no rights or access to legal help”, Faizi added.

Child marriages are most common in four northern provinces: Kunduz, Sarpol, Faryab and Herat, where women’s “access to justice is poor”, she said.

Girls are coerced into marrying young. Many families consider it a matter of shame if their daughter is not married by the time she is 16 years old.

Sometimes, young girls are also “traded” in marriage to save family honour or in compensation for a crime committed against a member of the family the girl is being married into.

According to Sayed Salahudin Hashimi, a preacher in Abu Bakr Siddiq Mosque in Khair Khana, Kabul, although Sharia law allows the marriage of post-pubescent girls, the decision to take a husband lies entirely with the girl herself: she cannot be forced, and she has the right to reject the offer.

But while this may be the case on paper, the reality for millions of girls is very different.

Medical concerns

Nayela, a teenager hailing from the Sarpol province in northern Afghanistan, is currently in the Malalai Maternity Hospital in the capital city of Kabul for treatment of fistula.

A serious reproductive health condition arising during childbirth, fistula is common among women and girls who receive little or no professional medical care during pregnancy and labour. One of the most common forms of the condition, obstetric fistula, is characterised by an abnormal passage between the birth canal and an internal organ like the rectum.

Both painful and humiliating, fistula leads to a host of related medical problems including incontinence, bladder infections, infertility and kidney failure.

As happens with many victims of fistula, Nayela delivered a stillborn child and sustained severe internal injuries during the process. When it became clear that her condition would linger on, her husband and mother-in-law drove her out of the house.

Her mother subsequently brought her to the hospital for treatment, which involves surgery.

Dr. Hafiza Omarkhail, head physician of the Malalai Maternity Hospital where Nayela is now awaiting treatment, identifies fistula as a “rampant female problem” here, exacerbated by childhood marriages.

Nayela’s father died when she was very young and by the time she was a teenager her grandfather had forced her to marry a 40-year-old man, for what he claimed were “financial reasons”.

Now she is suffering the consequences, along with scores of other girls battling both the pressures of early marriage as well as a weak maternal health sector.

According to Sadia Fayeq Ayubi, head of the reproductive health department at the Public Health Ministry, girls are married off between 13 and 17 years, and are often pregnant between 17 and 19 years of age.

This statistic is put in sharper perspective when viewed alongside national maternal mortality statistics: one in 50 Afghan women is likely to die of pregnancy-related causes, according to the 2010 Afghanistan Mortality Survey. The lifetime risk of pregnancy-related death is five times as high in rural areas as it is in towns and cities.

But the survey’s maternal mortality rate of 327 per 100,000 live births in the survey area — which excluded parts of the country disrupted by conflict — is significantly lower than the 1,400 per 100,000 live births assigned by United Nations agencies and the World Bank for the same year.

Meanwhile, divorce rates, suicide and self-immolation are on the rise, said Parwin Rahimi, in charge of the women’s support department at the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC).

In 2010, former Deputy Health Minister Faizullah Kakar completed a study based on hospital reports and Health Ministry records, which showed that over 2,300 women and girls in the 15 to 40 age group attempt suicide annually.

That same year, 100 cases of self-immolation were registered at the Herat City Hospital – 76 of those women succumbed to their burns.

Experts and advocates suspect that early marriages are playing a role in pushing an increasing number of women to these desperate, often fatal, acts.

Rahimi believes it is a “legal flaw” that girls can be married as young as 16 and allowed to start a family.

Most of these teenage brides face exploitation and unimaginable violence at the hands of their husbands and in-laws. They have little access to justice, and more often than not their stories go untold.

Child marriages could also explain the high drop-out rate for girls in Afghanistan – according to the international development organisation BRAC, 82 percent of Afghan girls drop out of school before the sixth grade.

The Education Ministry says the situation is worse in rural areas, where girls rarely manage to finish school. It is estimated that 70 percent of Afghan women are illiterate.

Although most girls are resigned to their fate, some fight back.

Nineteen-year-old named Mahjooba was engaged to her cousin when she was just a child. When she refused to marry him, the family became violent.

“I had continued my studies up to Class Nine. I passed an exam for admission to nursing school. When my aunt’s family got to know, they did not want me to continue with my studies. But I did not agree with their decision. I was divorced,” she said.

The AIHRC has been pushing for the registration of marriages in court as a solution to child marriages.

*Abida M. Telaee writes for Killid, an independent Afghan media group in partnership with IPS.

By Zofeen Ebrahim and Farooq Ahmed
KARACHI, Dec 20 2012 (IPS)

Balancing her school bag on one shoulder and holding her three-year-old son by the hand, Farida Haque (19) ignores her in-laws’ complaints and her husband’s frown as she heads each morning for the tiny school in her remote village of Allah Bachayo, located in the Thatta district of Pakistan’s Sindh Province.

She is determined to complete her education but, like most other girls in rural Pakistan, she faces a long struggle.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), one in every 12 of the world’s ‘out of school’ children are Pakistani, mostly young girls. Nearly half of the women living in rural areas in Pakistan have never been to school.

The international community has almost universally acknowledged that educating young girls will transform society, end child marriages, improve women’s health and stem violence and militancy.

In a bid to assist the Pakistan government achieve the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of ensuring universal access to education by 2015, the European Union committed 30 million euros to the Sindh Education Sector Support Programme earlier this year, which is particularly focused on improving girls’ access to education.

Schoolgirls in Peshawar pray for Malala. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov 5 2012 (IPS)

Young schoolgirls seemed undeterred by the attempt to kill Malala Yousafzai, but parents in northern Pakistan are becoming increasingly concerned over their children going to school.

The outlawed Tehreek Taliban Pakistan shot and injured Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year-old girl student outside her school in her native Swat district last month. She is making rapid recovery from a brain injury in a UK hospital, but the incident has left a deep impact.

“My wife and I are very concerned about the security of our children because Taliban militants are now looking for soft targets like schoolgirls,” Zawar Hussain, a government official whose three daughters study at University Model School, the biggest girls school in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province of Pakistan told IPS.

The Taliban have attacked schoolgirls in various parts of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and the Federally Administered Areas before. But the Malala incident has set alarm bells going and people now want better security at schools.

“We have asked the school principal to call an emergency parents-teachers meeting to take measures to enhance security for students in view of Malala’s episode,” Hussain told IPS.

Before Malala, a major attack on the Government Girls Degree College in Lund Khwar in Mardan district in March last year had left 35 students injured in a grim reminder that the Taliban are still active in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) and in the adjacent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).

In October last year militants attacked a school van in Peshawar, the capital of KP province, killing four children and a driver.

Girls education became a prime target of the Taliban who sneaked into FATA after dismissal of their government in Kabul by U.S.-led forces towards the end of 2001. They extended their campaign against education to the adjacent KP in 2005.

The militants argue that educating women is in breach of Islam. About 800 school buildings have been blown up in KP and FATA. That campaign continues.

“We are ready to pay extra but we want a safe environment in schools,” said 35-year-old shopkeeper Muhammad Rehan. Gripped with fear for his two daughters, he said the Taliban were now spreading out from Swat.

“Taliban know that girls are an easy target to spread terror,” he said. Elsewhere the Taliban may have to confront security forces, he said.

Sarhad Public School on University Road in Peshawar has put in place a system where students are asked to leave in queues and to not touch any suspicious object.

“We have drafted guidelines for our students after Malala’s attack. The students have been instructed to inform the class teacher if they spot any suspicious persons near the school,” principal Nadeem Ahmed said.

“We have restricted the students’ movements and have warned against leaving school in droves because the attackers want to kill or injure as many as they can.”

Other schools will follow the suit, he said, because parents are pressuring principals to improve security.

“My mother insists that I stay home but I am not afraid,” Palwasha Bibi, a third grader at the Ashraf Memorial School in Canal Town, Peshawar, told IPS. “She (my mother) loves me and wants to see me happy and alive. Her concerns are genuine but we have to take safeguard measures instead of staying away from school.”

Some classmates had been advised by parents to wear veils as part of precautionary measures to avoid being attacked, she said. “The Taliban won’t harm veiled students.”

Education Minister Sardar Hussain Babak told IPS that posting of police at all of the 30,000 schools in the province was not possible but that coordination among parents and teachers was being strengthened to thwart Taliban attempts to scare away students.

“We have started a strategy to arm the schools’ watchmen and increase coordination among schools’ administration and police,” he said. “In some districts we have imparted training to guards.”

Parking of vehicles near schools has been restricted, he said. Police have been directed to keep an eye on the suspicious people near big girls’ schools.

Deputy director for education Ghulam Farooq said they had issued immediate instructions to all schools to make elaborate arrangements for security especially at the time when the students leave school at the end of the day.

“We are carrying out inspections to see the security measures. In case of any laxity, the principals or head teachers of the concerned school will be held responsible and they will face action,” he told IPS.

Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund. Credit: Malgorzata Stawecka/IPS

By Malgorzata Stawecka
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 28 2012 (IPS)

With the global population on track to reach a staggering nine billion people by 2050, according to U.N. figures, a stronger action plan is needed to address the challenges of ending poverty, ensuring a well-functioning health system and access to education, as well as guaranteeing social inclusion for all.

“The demographics of the world is a tapestry, it is not just about growth, but there are other issues that we need to address,” said Babatunde Osotimehin, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), a U.N. flagship agency involved in advocating for human rights and gender equity, with a particular focus on youth and women.

“And I would capture it by looking at what I call the continuum of life,” he added in an interview with IPS.

Osotimehin pointed out that, against the backdrop of the current global economic and environmental crisis, more emphasis must be placed on issues such as ageing, access to reproductive rights and education as well as empowerment of women and youth.

Speaking with IPS correspondent Malgorzata Stawecka on the launch of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s global initiative ‘Education First‘ Wednesday, Osotimehin explained how United Nations member states along with UNFPA are preparing to meet the challenges of a world of nine billion.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What would be the major focus of UNFPA next year? Ageing? Family planning? Rising population in the developing world?

A: There are two extremes which we address. First of all the young people who are at reproductive age or going to become active in their reproductive life. Given the fact that most of these young people live in the developing world, where population growth is still rapid, we as the Population Fund are working with governments to address the issues of comprehensive sexuality education, generally for girls, to make sure that we give them the enablement to attain their full potential, because we know that when girls are educated they make different choices in their lives.

Reproductive health services are included in the plan and we’re working with governments to put in place policies that ensure the rights of people to make those choices without coercion. If you achieve that spectrum, you’ll actually slow population growth. And we’ll continue to do that. We’ve done that in many countries and it’s been successful.

Going forward with a rights-based approach, providing education services, will be the right thing to do. Now that’s one bit of it.

There’s the other bit of it where you look at it and see that the population is ageing and that countries actually are shrinking in terms of their population.

Productivity might be affected because we’ll have fewer younger people than older people. Today one in nine in the world is aged above 60. But by 2050, one in five will be above 60. So, we are seeing the progression towards ageing. We must be aware of it.

In trying to put in place systems and social policies we’re considering what does (ageing) mean for production, running services, employment, social policies, social services, health, housing and education. These are things that we’re involved in and these are the ways we’re engaged with the government.

Q: Do you think the current global economic crisis, especially in Europe, would have a negative impact on funding population programmes worldwide?

A: The current global economic crisis may affect funding for population programmes because we don’t know how long this will go forward. Some of the donors are affected at this point, but hopefully solutions will be found to the eurozone crisis and we begin to see the difference in terms of overseas development assistance.

But maybe it is also the time to begin to look at development systems in a totally different lens. For example, what we’re doing with the ‘Busan agreement’ that actually involves South-South cooperation, cooperation rather than assistance in that sense, technical assistance, modalities of affecting the development process, which might not be entirely dependent on money.

Finally, to also challenge new and emerging economies to begin to participate in the development agenda through south to south and just making sure that this share of experiences are across the regions and across the world. That’s probably what is going to happen.

Q: The programme of action adopted at the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo will commemorate its 20th anniversary in 2014. Do you expect a follow-up international conference?

A: There is not going to be an international conference, but a high-level meeting at the United Nations. I think at that point we’re currently engaging, reviewing how far we’ve come in the Cairo process and by 2014 we’ll have the secretary’s general report on what we’ve already accomplished with the rights-based approach to reproductive health, but basically also to identify gaps, what are the things we need to take forward, programming wise.

We’ll be able to use that to inform our agenda, but more importantly also inform the development agenda of 2015 because reproductive health and the rights of women and girls has to be front and centre for us to actually make progress.

Q: What in fact are the successes and failures of ICPD? Have the funding targets for ICPD been achieved? if not, how big is the shortfall?

A: Funding targets have not been achieved so far. I couldn’t tell you exactly how much it is, but we’ve made progress. As you can see, there is a great increase in female education around the world. We’ve also been able to provide comprehensive sexuality education in many countries and to improve environmental policies about reproductive health.

We’ve also seen greater spending domestically by governments themselves in this area. Of course there are many challenges, like resistance to women’s issues to ensure reproductive health and rights, but I think, all in all, we’ve made great progress.

Q: With the launch of ‘Education First’, Secretary-General’s Ban Ki-moon’s global Initiative on education, what role will UNFPA play?

A: The role of UNFPA in this initiative is to highlight the unique perspective we’ll bring to education. A) On the current issue of girls’ education which is crucial for national development; B) to insist that education is comprehensive and to include comprehensive sexuality education; C) to also go forth to talk about empowerment of young people and provide them with the skill set to be able to participate effectively in national development. That’s what we bring.

Three days ago, I said the young people are the future and I was told by young people, “No, we’re here. We’re not the future, we’re today.” And it’s true. Because the changes that happened in North Africa were by young people and that’s what happens all over the world.

There are challenges for all of us, but it’s important to see how can we make sure that young people are part of the conversation and that they see themselves as a part of solution and not the problem.

Excerpt:

Women in Africa spend 200 million hours collecting water. Credit: Charles Mpaka/IPS

By Thalif Deen
STOCKHOLM, Aug 31 2012 (IPS)

As the weeklong international conference on water concluded Friday, it was left to one of the keynote speakers from the United Nations to focus on a much neglected perspective on water and food security: the role of women.

Lakshmi Puri, deputy executive director of U.N. Women, told delegates that development can be neither sustainable nor inclusive if it does not free women and girls from “carrying heavy buckets of water every day”.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, 71 percent of the burden of collecting water for households falls on women and girls, says the U.N.’s 2012 report on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Currently, women in sub-Saharan Africa spend an average of about 200 million hours per day collecting water, and a whopping 40 billion hours per year, according to the U.N. Development Programme.

“And that’s a billion with a B,” Puri emphasised to IPS hours after she made an impassioned plea for gender equality and women’s empowerment in relation to food and water security.

Speaking at the closing session of the conference, she pointed out that although women carry, literally and metaphorically, most water-related tasks – playing a key role in food production, especially in subsistence farming, and performing most of the unpaid care work -their participation in decision-making processes on water and food management remains very low.

“This does not only result in biased and misinformed decision-making, it jeopardises the achievement of women’s human rights,” she added.

The annual conference, one of the world’s largest gathering of water experts, drew over 2,000 delegates to the Swedish capital this year.

Rita Colwell, the 2010 Stockholm Water Prize Laureate, said women in Bangladesh were using their saris to filter contaminated water, resourcefulness that has helped reduce cholera by nearly 50 percent.

“The key area of empowerment is in empowering women,” she added. “In educating women on the value of safe water, we are then educating the household, and through that the entire country, to change their behaviour.”

At a side event, “Why African Women Matter in Sustainable Food Production”, it was pointed out that women do much of the farm work, and also grow most of the food crops, yet men control most of the land, farming inputs and equipment and agricultural markets.

The bottom line: women are key actors in agricultural activities but they are not key decision makers.

There are few or no women in national water boards governing the management and distribution of water, and fewer still holding decision-making jobs at ministries for gender affairs.

In 2012, women held less than six percent of all ministerial positions in the field of environment, natural resources and energy, according to the United Nations.

Agriculture has not fared any better. “Only five percent of women in Kenya own land registered in their own names,” said Dr. Akinyi Nzioki of the Centre for Land, Economy and Rights of Women (CLEAR) based in Kenya.

Violet Shivutse of Grassroots Organisations Operating Together in Sisterhood (GROOTS) of Kenya said today’s land tenure system continues to undermine rural women’s efforts to access land when they rely so much on agriculture for their livelihoods.

She said most inherited land is transferred primarily to sons, not daughters. And there were instances of widows with HIV/AIDS who were evicted from homes and denied access to land.

Bethlehem Mengistu, regional advocacy manager for WaterAid in East Africa, told IPS that most African countries do have national legislation and are state parties to international conventions protecting the rights of women.

“We have made lots of progress,” she said, “but there is a gap between policy and implementation.”

Puri, who attended the Rio+20 summit meeting in Brazil in June, said the outcome document adopted by world leaders there set in motion a number of processes, including the development of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which will follow the completion of the U.N.’s  Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015.

It is important not only that these SDGs include a specific goal on gender equality and women’s empowerment, but also that gender perspectives are mainstreamed in all other goals, including a SDG on water, she noted.

“This will give the goals a better chance to be achieved and, at the same time, contribute to the achievement of gender equality.”

She said the combined impacts of the recent economic and financial crises, volatile energy and food prices, and climate change have exacerbated water and food scarcity, along with their detrimental impact on women and girls. Creating a water and food secure world requires putting women and girls at the centre of water and food related policies, actions and financing.

On the positive side, the global movement towards gender equality and women’s empowerment has also shown results, albeit limited.

In Morocco, for instance, the Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Project of the World Bank was aimed at reducing the burden of girls, traditionally involved in fetching water, in order to improve their school attendance, said Puri.

In the six provinces where the project is based, it was found that girls’ school attendance increased by 20 percent in four years, attributed in part to the fact that girls spent less time fetching water.

At the same time, convenient access to safe water reduced time spent collecting water by women and young girls by 50 to 90 percent.

She said it has also been proven that improvements in infrastructure services – especially water and electricity – can help reduce time women time spend on domestic and care work.

In Pakistan, putting water sources closer to the home was associated with increased time allocated to market work. In Tanzania, a survey found that girls’ school attendance was 15 percent higher for girls from homes located 15 minutes or less from a water source than for those in homes one hour or more away.

“We need to address the multifaceted gender discriminations in accessing and controlling productive resources such as water and land, assets and services,” Puri noted.

She said evidence suggests that investing in women-owned food and agricultural enterprises could narrow the resource gap and increase agricultural yields to potentially reduce the number of hungry people by 100 to 150 million.

A rash of recent rape cases has sparked local criticism of the weakness of the justice system in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where inadequate resources and simple incompetence mean survivors of sexual violence hold little hope of obtaining justice.

“In the final week of July, we recorded more than 12 cases of rape committed against very young girls – some of the victims were just six years old,” said Father Jean Okutu, the parish priest at Sacré Cœur Church in Mushie Territory.  “The perpetrators were adults, all civilians.”

A total of 16 rapes of young girls have been reported in recent weeks in this remote administrative district of western DRC, and the mothers of the survivors have joined forces to complain about the failure of the local and provincial judicial system to prosecute their assailants.

Maria T.*, whose eight-year-old daughter was one of the victims, told IPS that despite being treated at the Sacré Cœur parish dispensary, her little girl still complains of pain in her genitals and abdomen. “We have to go to a bigger medical centre to be sure that we won’t face more consequences later on. But we don’t have money,” she said.

Elodie K.’s ten-year-old daughter was also raped. “We need strong measures to protect young girls in Mushie. We also need the identities of all the victims to be carefully protected to ensure that they can grow up normally and have a chance to get married one day,” she said.

“The government should even consider relocating these children, or letting them study overseas at the state’s cost, to ensure they are protected from taunts and isolation by other children their age.”

According to Bandundu’s attorney general, André Mvunzu, the province has already put in place a programme to fight impunity for sexual violence.

“Twelve perpetrators of the rapes recently recorded in Mushie have been arrested and are currently in detention there. They will face trial and the court’s rulings will send a clear message to all,” he told IPS.

Mushie resident Jean Pierre N.* is sceptical. “When we hear the attorney general on the radio, we get the impression that he doesn’t have a clue about how his own judicial administration is working. Of the 12 accused that he stated are in detention, eight have escaped – including the two men who raped my daughter.”

Nzundu told IPS that security at Mushie’s prison needed to be improved, as it was not the first time detainees had escaped.

Jacques Katchelewa is head of a non-governmental organisation working to promote gender equality and food security in Mushie. He fears that if the judicial system fails them, the families will turn to informal arrangements for compensation for the crimes committed against their daughters.

“This runs counter to the law in terms of ending sexual violence,” he said. “The only way victims and families can get justice is if the local court is strengthened. In Mushie, the court has just one magistrate who cannot, all by himself, sit and rule on cases of sexual violence. We need to reinforce the team of judges.”

Congolese law requires a panel of three judges to hear such cases.

Father Okutu shares Katchelewa’s concerns about the effectiveness of the justice system in Bandundu. “I’ve appealed for justice to be served in these rape cases. The provincial attorney general has responded by sending a second magistrate to support the one who is here.”

Mushie’s local prosecutor’s office is subordinate to the provincial attorney general’s office in the provincial capital, the city of Bandundu, 500 kilometres away. It is intended to bring justice a bit closer to the people, but it lacks resources – as do local residents.

“The victims’ families are too poor to pay court costs. I’ve already had to take on the cost of medical care for most of the girls,” Okutu told IPS.

“Litigants who experience problems should write to the Minister for Justice and Human Rights and to the High Council of the Judiciary to explain their difficulties in order to obtain justice and so that magistrates will be deployed to Mushie,” said Jean Paul Nyumba, an advisor to the justice minister’s office.

But Nyumba, himself a lawyer, lamented the fact that there is a shortage of magistrates in many parts of the country while there are many idle magistrates in the capital, Kinshasa.

Joseph Ntayondezandi Mushagalusa, a lawyer and former national attorney general, said a dose of realism is required.  “The problems with the justice system are the same across the country,” he told IPS.

For example, Mushagalusa told IPS, “Even with the recruitment of 2,000 new magistrates in March 2012, the DRC’s judiciary has only 4,000 members. With the population standing at nearly 80 million, we have just one judge for every 20,000 residents of DRC.

“And that’s without accounting for the many magistrates who are not working, such as those who are assigned new posts, but for unresolved logistical and practical reasons, never report to their new assignments or abandon them.”

The provincial governor, Jean Kamisendu Kutaka, has appealed for help from the broader population. “Everyone needs to help the government fight against the different forms of criminality that are raging in the province. It calls for more vigilance. Every citizen has the obligation to expose crimes. It’s the only way to make criminals afraid,” he said.

Nine women in the northern Côte d’Ivoire town of Katiola have been convicted for carrying out female genital mutilation – the first time that a 1998 law banning FGM has been applied.

The women were found guilty of excising thirty girls aged between 10 and 15 in February. They were each sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay a fine equivalent to roughly 100 dollars.

“We have been waiting a long time for a boost in the fight against this scourge,” said Rachel Gogoua in the Ivorian economic capital, Abidjan, where she heads the National Organisation for Children, Women and the Family (ONEF), a non-governmental organisation that campaigns against FGM.

“The time for awareness-raising is over: now we need to sanction perpetrators.”

The Katiola court handed down the sentences on Jul 18, but in view of the women’s ages – ranging between 46 and 91 years old – decided none will actually have to spend time in prison. Gogoua told IPS she feels the convicted women should serve at least a token amount of jail time to drive home the message to others still practicing excision in many parts of the country.

“The law forbidding these practices was passed in 1998 and we have carried out extensive public education about it. In the end, we have to realise that these women are making fools of us. They are well aware of the law, but they defied it under the pretext of customary practice and tradition,” said Gogoua.

Despite the 1998 law, genital mutilation is still widespread in Côte d’Ivoire, according to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Based on surveys carried out in 2006, UNICEF estimates that 36 percent of Ivorian women have undergone excision, making it one of the worst affected countries in Africa.

Female genital mutilation is the complete or partial removal of the external genitals of a woman, according to the World Health Organization. This can involve the vulva, the major and minor labia, the clitoris, as well as the urinary and vaginal tracts.

The practice is most common in the northern and northwestern parts of the country, where nearly 88 percent of women are affected, and in the west, where the prevalence rate is 73 percent, according to UNICEF.

Massandjé Timité, 33, is originally from Marandallah, in the north.

“I still feel the pain from my excision today, 15 years later,” she told IPS. “It was a terrible trauma. The wounds healed very slowly, and with each day that passed, I feared the worst.”

Timité said that to evoke tradition to justify the continuation of FGM is to make a superficial argument. “When an excision is clumsily executed, as it was in my case, no one comes to help you. Does tradition accept that a woman should lose the very thing that allows her to give life?”

Despite numerous awareness campaigns and repeated promises by excisors, FGM continues to be practiced.

“Amongst us, the Wobé (an ethnic group in the west), it’s a shameful thing to be called ‘zoégbé’ (an un-excised woman),” explained Cécile Gnowahou, 26, who went through the procedure when she was 11.

“You don’t have the right to marry and you are often ridiculed in the village. In this context, our parents hear the message, but the cultural reality overrides it. This is a custom that has existed since before our parents’ grandparents’ time,” she said.

“Excision causes much more harm than one thinks,” said Gnowahou. “Sometimes it even leads to the victim dying, yet even when these things happen, it is amicably resolved between families.”

Gnowahou’s own experience illustrates the social dilemma that FGM presents many Ivorian women with. “Not only was I unable to get married following the prolonged bleeding that I suffered, but now times have changed and any man who knows about my status as an excised woman automatically rejects me,” she said.

But she believes that if the law against female genital mutilation is applied, it would begin to reduce the prevalence of FGM.

Her sentiments were echoed by Raymonde Goudou Coffie, Côte d’Ivoire’s Minister for the Family, Women and Children, who said that the successful prosecution in Katiola is only a beginning. The minister said the law would be applied in full against practices which affront human dignity, particularly that of women.

Salou Bandé is proud to stand at the front of the only classroom in the village of Bénnogo, 90 kilometres north of the Burkina Faso capital, Ouagadougou, sharing his knowledge with his students. He is part of an initiative to improve education for nomadic children in the West African country.

Bandé’s slender build marks him out as a member of the nomadic Peul people, and he was one of the first teachers at the “School of the Shepherds”. This innovative educational institution takes in between 20 and 25 students each year, specifically targeting 12-year-olds who have never attended formal school.

“We start with a unit in Fulfulde (the local language) on malaria, then we continue with classes in history, geography, French language, and earth and life sciences – which covers livestock rearing, health, the environment and hygiene,” Bandé told IPS.

Bandé said he has 18 students in his class, including 11 girls. “They study as far as the Cours élémentaire 2ième année (the third year of primary school), then an exam administered by the Provincial Department of Basic Education allows the students to join formal school system. Our first cohort is now in its fifth year of high school.”

There are 300 students attending the unusual school in this region of the country.

According to Boubacar Barry, head of the education programme at the Association for the Promotion of Livestock Herding in the Sahel and the Savannah (APESS), putting children in formal school has a severe impact on a pastoral family’s livelihood.

Working alongside the Ministry of Education and Literacy in the north of the country where pastoralists make up 17 percent of the population, Andal et Pindal – a local association that has been instrumental in setting up the school for shepherds – conducted a study in 2003 which found that less than one percent of livestock herders’ children were enrolled in school.

The special school conducted its first classes that same year, welcoming students between nine and 15 years old in six counties of the northern province Sanmantenga. Of the 197 students in that first intake, 144 completed the four-year cycle and sat for a final exam.

This year, according to Mamadou Boly, a retired primary school inspector and president of “Andal et Pindal” (whose name means “knowledge and enlightenment” in Fulfulde), the shepherds’ school achieved an 85 percent success rate, and nearly two-thirds of students went directly into CM2, the final year of primary school. Several have gone on to secondary school and vocational training centres.

“We thought we were just training children from the cattle pens, but these children have left their settlements and are conquering the world,” said Boly.

Burkina Faso is attempting improve education for the nomadic Peul children by forming a “School of the Shepherds”. Credit: Julius Cruickshank/CC BY 2.0

He told IPS the school was born out of concern by individuals in pastoralist communities: “People who had been to school, and who realised that their community was not progressing.”

Moussa Diallo, president of the parent’s group at the school, registered both his son and daughter at Bénnogo. “We’ve realised that there is no longer enough space for livestock and agriculture. So to succeed in these sectors, knowledge is needed,” he said. “We can see the difference with those who have not gone to school.”

Boly agreed. “The kids say they don’t want to go to formal school, but it’s essential. So we have framed the standard curriculum with an accent on pastoralism, on earth and life sciences, health and hygiene,” he told IPS.

“It’s the management of time and space that’s different. It’s always the community itself that decides at what time each school opens and closes. When the students get out early, they can go water the animals and help their parents.”

In addition, the school is not in session at all from May to December, leaving students free to take part in the annual migration with the herds in search of pasture.

With the school in Bénnogo well established, further classrooms have been opened in six other villages in the region. With support from the Education Ministry and foreign partners, 15 more schools are expected to open in the 2012-2013 school year in the eastern and south-central regions (where rates of literacy and school attendance are lowest).

“The relevance of Andal et Pindal’s work lies in its focus on a very specific group which must be educated in its real context if we want to provide an adequate education which responds to the specific needs of its intended beneficiaries,” explained Rémy Abou, director general for basic education and non-formal education at the ministry for education. His department has helped the association design programmes and provided it with learning materials.

“We appreciate what this association is doing, because the government can’t do everything – especially when it comes to non-formal education where there is such a wide range of different needs,” said Abou.

“What the shepherd school has achieved is a precious safeguarding of the pursuit of education amongst people for whom education was not a priority,” said Barry from APESS.

Each year, 16 million girls aged 15-19 give birth. 50,000 of them die from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. And 95 percent of those births occur in developing countries.

Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa lead the world in this department, with 80 and 120 births, respectively, per 1,000 adolescent females in 2009. But young girls’ bodies are not ready for childbirth, and getting pregnant before the age of 18 is a risk to both mother and child, as a UNICEF report, “Progress for children”, has shown. In fact, childbirth is the leading killer of adolescent girls in Africa.

Better access to and more effective use of contraceptives would help prevent 272,000 maternal deaths worldwide each year, according to a recent Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health study. But in ensuring that girls can access and know how to use contraception, education is key, despite various cultural challenges that educating girls often faces.

Studies have shown that keeping girls in school improves their sexual and reproductive health. A recent released report by Save the Children shows that the higher a mother’s level of education, the lower children’s under-five mortality rate.

Laura Laski, chief of the sexual and reproductive health technical division at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), told IPS that some families “believe that more education will not contribute to what (young girls) would…become later in life”.

Cultural barriers

Winifride Mwebesa, senior director of family planning and reproductive health at Save the Children, told IPS about cultural barriers in Sub-Saharan Africa. “Very often, poor families find themselves obliged to marry their children. The tradition has been that as soon as the girl menstruates she needs to get married because you don’t want the shame of having a pregnancy in the house before she is married.”

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), in the developing world 90 percent of adolescent pregnancies are those of married girls.

Early marriage is a problem in Sub-Saharan Africa because it’s rooted deeply in the traditional values of the community. “Over 30 percent of girls in developing countries marry before 18 years of age; around 14 percent do so before the age of 15,” said Laski. Then, community expectations that girls soon have children prevents them from going to school.

In Latin America, early marriage is not as big a problem as in Sub-Saharan Africa. The report “Jóvenes y derechos” by Family Care International shows that in Latin America, factors related to a higher rate of teenage births have more to do with poverty, sexual abuse, absence of parents, culture and education levels.

María Faget, regional consultant in Latin America and the Caribbean for Family Care International, told IPS that “sexual context is still something not in the open”. Talking about the topic with parents or friends is difficult, and there is a reigning culture mandating that “young people do not need or should not be looking for contraception”, Faget explained.

Efforts in this region focus on providing “friendly services” and a welcoming environment for young people because sometimes, confidentiality is a problem. “These services are open and many times they are opened within hospitals and so young people do not go because they are afraid they are going to meet people, people they know,” said Faget.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, “friendly services” are also trying to be implemented. They include the training of  health personnel to provide accurate information to young people without interfering with their own values.

Education as the foundation

In both Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, the solution is strongly linked to the improvement of girls’ education.

Mali is a clear example. The percentage of female attendance in primary school between 2005-2010 (latest data) was 55 percent. But this number falls to 24 percent in secondary school, according to UNICEF data.

The number of girls in school is very low and the teenage pregnancy rate is extremely high – 190 births per 1,000 women – as the “Countdown to 2015 report” shows. The number is even higher than  the Sub-Saharan Africa average of 120 births per 1,000 women.

Often, families won’t take their girls to school because they are so far away . But Save the Children is working to build community schools there, as well as to create a girls-friendly environment –  also important in a family’s decision to let girls go to schools. “We build community schools that are friendly to girls, that have separate latrines,” Mwebesa told IPS.

Family Care International was part of a plan called Plan Andino para la Prevención del Embarazo en Adolescents (Plan Andino to Prevent Pregnancies Among Adolescents) that worked in six countries: Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Perú, Venezuela and Colombia.

Of those countries, Colombia has seen major improvement. “Colombia has made enormous effort in  friendly health programs,” explained Faget. In 2010, it launched an important communication campaign, “Por el derecho a una sexualidad con sentido,” that had a strong rights component.

Organisations agree that in these reproductive health and sexual education programmes, including young people’s voices is critical. After all, youth are the bridge between health and education systems and what is really needed.

Save the Children relies on youth participation to help develop materials related to sexual education. “We may have an idea of the content that needs to be in, but the format has to be decided by young people,” said Mwebesa.

Family Care International also believes in the importance of youth involvement, because youth can shift attitudes and they can have a big impact in changing culture, explained Faget.

In addition to keeping girls in school, young people need to have access to family planning and receive age-appropriate sex education, which Laski descrbied as “comprehensive sexuality education (where) girls and boys are educated about not only about their sexuality but (also) about…relationships and how to protect and promote human rights”.

“When I was still at school I was abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army, along with 139 other girls,” says Grace Akallo. “I spent seven months in captivity, but I survived, I escaped and I went back home.”

Twelve years ago, when Akallo was still a child, her life took an unexpected turn when she fell into the hands of Joseph Kony’s notoriously brutal rebel force known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Grace Akallo. Credit: UN Photo/Eskinder Debebe

Today, she is married with a child, a masters degree and a mission in life: to give a voice to the female child soldier.

Formed in Uganda in the 1980s, and now operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the LRA remains among the most persistent perpetrators of grave violations against children, according to a recent U.N report.

“When girls are first abducted, it is the same as for boy soldiers,” Akallo told IPS. “They are beaten and mistreated, they are trained to become child soldiers, given AK-47s, and forced to kill.

“Most of the children are sent to the forefront, with the leaders behind them. Your bullets are finished? You shoot your friend in order to get more bullets. At the same time the leaders used children as shields, so that the children get shot and they survive.”

What makes a girl child soldier different is the sexual abuse that they are forced to endure, says Akallo. “Most girls were sexually abused, including me. I was lucky I did not return home with a child, or get infected with HIV or any other disease.

“Many of these girls had to give birth while in captivity, some of them had to go fighting with children on their backs, and some gave birth on the battlefield,” she said.

But the plight of the female child soldier is largely hidden from view, masked by the leaders of armed groups who refer to girl combatants as “wives” or “sisters”.

Girls are summarily awarded to male combatants, and Kony is reported to have had up to 50 girls in his immediate household at one time.

“Some are given to just one commander, and some are given to multiple men,” Akallo told IPS.

Disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration

Due to the roles that girls play, including cooking, domestic tasks, transporting provisions and sexual services, they are rendered almost invisible, under the radar of international law and disarmament initiatives.

Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes have been in operation since the 1980s and the U.N launched its formal set of guidelines in 2006. But progress has been patchy, especially regarding girl soldiers.

“When you disarm somebody, you ask them to return their arms. Many of the female child soldiers do not carry arms. They are used as sex slaves and bush wives. From that point of view, I do not think that DDR has been successful,” Ugoji Adanma, founder of the Eng Aja Eze Foundation, which helps women and girls emerging from conflict, told IPS.

International law has also “dramatically excluded” female soldiers, according to Matthew Brotmann, director of international programmes and adjunct professor of law at Pace Law School, speaking at a Jun. 4 conference titled “The Incidence of the Female Child Soldier and the International Criminal Court”.

By failing to include specific gender-related definitions in legal instruments and policy guidelines, “We are forcing a square peg into a round hole,” Brottman told IPS.

“We cannot treat all victims the same regardless of gender,” he said.

In the recent trial of Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, the enlistment of children as soldiers was enshrined as a war crime for the first time.

But commanders of Lubanga’s militia group, the Union of Congolese Patriots (UPC), were not held to account for allegations of rape, which raises fundamental questions about the bias of international law.

“The incidence of the female child soldier was not really taken into consideration. It was noted, but why did the prosecutors not tender the evidence of core witnesses as to the sexual violence against females? That is my concern,” Adanma told IPS.

Reconciling communities

The reintegration of female child soldiers poses one of the greatest challenges for ex-combatants and those endeavouring to protect them, from grassroots NGOs to governments and the international community.

Funding is lacking, and though donors are quick to respond in emergencies, reintegration often falls into the murky area between emergency assistance and development assistance.

“In Sierra Leone, where we worked on rehabilitation hospitals and education, to open up schools where girls could go, my message was carry the pen and not the gun,” Rima Salah, former deputy executive director of the U.N. children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS.

But the complexity of reintegrating ex-combatants defies simple solutions.

“Neither boy nor girl child soldiers are really accepted back into society, but for the girl child soldier it is (harder) when they have unwanted children,” Akallo told IPS.

“The boy child soldier can go back to school, train and develop life skills but for a girl, for her to go back to school and try and acquire life skills they have to think of their children, arrange babysitting or stay at home.

“With boys, people can forget that they used to be soldiers, but the girl soldier walks with a child, which makes her past unforgettable. The stigma stays with her,” Akallo explained.

“Personally, I struggled a lot. I was called names – ‘Kony’s wife’, ‘Kony’s prostitute’ – even the girls that I worked with would call me names.

“Social workers, and people working with girl child soldiers have to be really very strong to be able to walk with these girls in the community.”

Akallo recently founded an NGO based in northern Uganda called United Africans For Women and Children Rights that emphasises the importance of ensuring former child soldiers are accepted back into their communities.

“What we do is mostly focused on the reintegration and rehabilitation of children,” Akallo told IPS.

The NGO is currently in the process of building a community health centre and a counselling centre, which will focus on reconciling the community.

“It is very important that girl child soldiers are reintegrated into the community otherwise they are left to fend for themselves,” she said.

Looked upon as soiled, stigmatised as HIV carriers, and ostracised as mothers to children born of war, without support female ex-combatants have few doors open to them in society.

“Many female ex-combatants turn to prostitution,” she said. “They may no longer be child soldiers but they are forced to trade in their freedom once more.”