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Going to school and receiving an education are opportunities most people usually take for granted. But for 67 million children around the world, such possibilities do not exist. Girls comprise over half of this overwhelming figure. They are forced to work in the fields and care for family members, deprived of the chance to attend school. The character-driven documentary "To Educate a Girl", directed by Frederick Rendina and Oren Rudavsky, tries to make this reality more visible to the rest of the world by showing the lives and struggles of six girls in Nepal and Uganda. The main goal of this documentary is to "educate those in the Western world who have no idea," Rudavsky said. "Those who see the movie see how hard it is to get a step up in the developing world and what the threats are." "I have found that most people in dire circumstances around the world, when given the opportunity to tell their stories, they really want to, and a documentary gives them a chance to have their voices heard where they otherwise would not be," filmmaker Rendina told IPS. The movie, supported by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the United Nations Girls' Education Initiative (UNGEI), aired for the first time on Link TV's broadcast network on Jun. 24.
Every time Bijaya Dhakal goes out to meet people and tell them what she does for a living, the simple task becomes an act of courage requiring nerves of steel. Dhakal is the founder of Nepal’s first and only organisation of women sex workers now trying to make the state and society listen to a community long hushed by poverty and discrimination. A widow who had not completed school, the 35-year-old mother of two became a sex worker after struggling to raise her family on the meagre wages she earned in a factory. For almost eight years, she led a double life, working in the capital Kathmandu and returning to her village sporadically, with her family believing she worked for a non-government organisation. "Sex workers suffer at the hands of the police and, at times, their customers who beat them up or rob them. Yet they can’t complain because the moment people learn what they do, a change comes over them," Dhakal says.
When Sujatha’s husband learned that she had conceived just five months after they got married, he became agitated over what he called her "ill-timed pregnancy". To worsen her husband’s anxiety, a test to determine the sex of the foetus showed she was carrying a girl. Sujatha, a public school teacher, and her husband, a civil engineer – who asked that their full names be withheld – are from well-off and educated families in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of the southern state of Kerala. Yet they dared violate the law, approaching doctors at the Sree Avittam Thirunal Hospital for an abortion; they were granted one within a month. The law prohibits Indian couples from selecting the sex of their unborn children, and from discriminating against female foetuses. Abortions are legal only for certain reasons, like when the mother is ill and pregnancy would endanger her life, or when a foetus is found to be severely handicapped.
While in New York to celebrate the launch of UN Women's flagship biennium publication, "Progress of the World's Women: In Pursuit of Justice", Botswana's Unity Dow sat down with IPS to discuss the United Nations' newest entity, its landmark report, and the road ahead for women. Dow is a lawyer, human rights activist, and formerly Botswana's first female judge. She has studied both within Africa and abroad, and has authored five books. She is serving her second term as commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists, and is chairperson of their Executive Committee.
Violence against women is rampant, devastating and tolerated in South Sudan and the new country needs to address these gross human rights violations and train people, especially soldiers, to respect women’s rights. This is according to rights activists in the country. "I have worked with many women and girls who have been abused. They are beaten by their husbands, raped by the rebel soldiers and they suffer in silence," says Loise Joel, a human rights activist who runs the non-governmental organisation Human Rights for the Vulnerable, in Central Equatorial State in South Sudan.
The 2011 Millennium Development Goals Report was released on 7 July with a generally upbeat assessment accompanied by some caveats. Here are some statistics:
Following five months of bitter political wrangling, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati finally announced a new government in mid-June. But while many Lebanese feel relieved over the long overdue appointments, gender equality campaigners despair that there is not a single female among 30 ministers appointed to the new Cabinet. It has further ruffled activist feathers that this glaring omission has failed to elicit the condemnation they are demanding. "I have to confess I was not expecting the number of women to increase but I was certainly not expecting women to disappear completely," says Lina Abou-Habib, executive director of the Lebanese gender equality organization, the Collective for Research and Training on Development - Action (CRTD- A). She tells IPS the announcement of the new Cabinet line-up was met with "shock and horror" from fellow activists. Yet even after more than two weeks, the absence of women has been almost universally ignored by the local and international media.
As it does each year in advance of the G8 meeting, the United Nations released an update on Tuesday on its progress toward the Millennium Development Goals (MDG), a series of initiatives set forth in 2000 to improve conditions for the world's poorest and most disadvantaged inhabitants, while fostering environmental sustainability, development and global partnerships. The new report [PDF], released by the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, notes that more and more girls are entering secondary school around the world than ever before. But at the same time, improvements in maternal health care, family planning services and equal access to the judicial system have stalled, creating profound roadblocks to female empowerment and gender parity in most of the U.N.'s 192 participating countries. With only four years to go before 2015 benchmark deadlines, there is a substantial amount left to do — especially regarding issues related to women and girls.
After protracted battles, women in Central America and southern Mexico have made headway in winning respect for their rights over the past decade, but the progress has been more formal than real, say women academics and activists. "A number of achievements have been made, mainly in formal and legal terms, with regard to women's rights," Adelay Carías, a researcher with the Honduran NGO Feministas en Resistencia (Feminists in Resistance), told IPS. "Now all of the countries have laws against domestic violence and national women's institutes. Furthermore, there are women's prosecutor's offices and the women's movement has become an important interlocutor with the state, with growing influence," she added, referring to the countries of Mesoamerica.
Women in minority and indigenous communities are especially vulnerable to wide-ranging forms of violence, abuse and discrimination, according to a new report released Wednesday by Minority Rights Group International (MRG), a human rights group that works on behalf of minorities and indigenous peoples. With limited access to political mechanisms of justice and protection, they are disproportionately the targets of attacks and discrimination, during times of conflict or peace, the report said. Dalits in India, Muslims in Britain, Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan, Batwas in Uganda, Aborigines in Australia - these are just a few of the communities spanning the globe who are sometimes welcomed, but more often not, by the dominant national cultures.
After being raped by government troops, women in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo face the further pain and humiliation of being repudiated by their husbands. "My husband refuses to share the bed with me. I sleep on the floor," one woman who asked not to be named said in the eastern village of Nakiele, where soldiers raped more than 100 women in early June. "My husband also rejects the meals I cook for him. He eats the ones my sisters make for him. I don't understand why I should be abandoned," said the woman, who is 19 years old with a six-month-old baby. In Nakiele, a village of 12 300 inhabitants perched on a hill overlooking the Fizi plateau in Sud-Kivu province, 121 women told a hospital doctor that they were raped on the night of June 11 by renegade troops.
Since that night, more than a dozen of them have been disowned by their husbands.
Women are under-represented in leadership positions and form a large group of unemployed people in the country, says Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies. "The South African private sector is very clear in that women are significantly under-represented in leadership positions and over-represented among the unemployed in our country," said Davies on Monday. Davies, who was speaking at the launch of the United Nations Women Empowerment Principles, said the private sector should spearhead as well as support women empowerment. The event was attended by chief executive officers of companies at the launch of the seven principles.
Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) has welcomed ANC MP Maggie Maunye’s apology for remarks she made about foreigners in Parliament last week. The organisation had called on Maunye to retract her statements publicly and assist in finding solutions “so that everyone within South Africa’s borders can enjoy their rights under the law”. Maunye, who chairs the parliamentary oversight committee on home affairs, implied at a meeting of the committee on Wednesday that foreigners who settled here were soaking up resources. She questioned the use of human rights laws and the constitution to accommodate foreigners and suggested that they should be turned away, as migrants were by Spain. “Really, this intake, for how long are we going to continue with this as South Africans? Is it not going to affect our resources, the economy of the country?” she said. “We’ve never enjoyed our freedom as South Africans. We got it in 1994 and we had floods and floods of refugees or undocumented people in the country and we always want to pretend it’s nothing like that.”
The education of women and girls is essential not only to promoting gender equality, but also to addressing the full spectrum of 21st century challenges. Research shows that investing in education is one of the most effective, high-yielding development investments a country can make. Much progress has certainly been made since 2000, when nations around the world committed to Millennium Development Goal (MDG) 2 for the achievement of universal primary education; yet considerable gaps remain, particularly for girls. According to some estimates, 72 million children worldwide do not attend school, and 54 percent of the unschooled are girls. In addition, although gender parity in primary education has increased over the past decade, a parity gap of 6 million still remains -- and it is even starker in the developing world. In Yemen, nearly 80 percent of girls out of school are unlikely to enroll, as compared with 36 percent of boys. In sub-Saharan Africa, almost 12 million girls are expected to not enroll.