Kenya

When Mary Muli and her husband failed to conceive a child, they followed the long-held tradition among the Kemba in Kenya's Eastern Province and brought another woman into their home to bear children for them.

Efforts to improve agriculture in Kenya often miss the mark by targeting men instead of women. One woman spent 20 years organizing female farmers to share investments and training. Now men are joining too, and the women's work is paying off.

Women entrepreneurs are now a key focus in many developmental issues as a way to amply their numbers in the business world. The International Finance Corporation plans to help at least 400 women owned enterprises in Kenya to access credit by 2011.

In a partnership deal with the African Development Bank formalised in 2006, the private leading arm of the World Bank through the Growth Oriented Woman Enterprise programme, Gowe has so far approved 28 loan applications.

"Gowe helps women owned businesses grow by providing financing guarantees of up to $ 400,000 about Sh 32 million. Under the programme, 117 women entrepreneurs have been trained," said Ms Makena Mwiti, Senior Gender Co-ordinator-Africa Gender Enterprise Markets GEM.

A man in a bar gets progressively more drunk and disorderly, his speech growing more slurred and his sexual advances to a waitress becoming more aggressive as he tries to get her to go home with him.

The scene is from a sketch at the second national bar hostesses' conference in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, where bar staff told the gathering they often had to deal with sexual violence and harassment.

"People don't respect you as a bar worker; they treat you badly and expect that you are an easy target for sex because of your job," Catherine Wacira, a bar hostess in Nairobi, told the conference on 27 October.

"Our managers rarely take our side when we are being harassed because the customers are paying a lot of money; they prefer to keep them happy rather than defend us."

Participants at the conference on preventing HIV and sexual violence among bar hostesses said their working conditions sometimes made it difficult for them to refuse punters' sexual advances.

We've been down this road before but it's a road we shall travel constantly until we get to a more understanding and equal environment. A group of people branding others evil and their acts illegal because they are having sex differently is quickly becoming a broken record.

The Kenyan government has embarked on an ambitious national programme to fast track the national rollout of male circumcision as a means of preventing HIV. Results from three randomised controlled trials in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda, in 2006 showed that following circumcision, the incidence of HIV infection was reduced in men by more than half. According to the new policy document, circumcision will be rolled out for males of all ages in a culturally sensitive way and in a clinically safe setting. The programme will involve some strengthening of the health infrastructure, but according to Peter Mutie, head of communications at the National AIDS Control Council (NACC), the existing health centres are sufficiently equipped for the rollout.