16 November 2010

From 25 Nov to 10 Dec, Take Back The Tech! calls on women and men to take control of technology to protect the right to freedom of expression and information. Since it began in 2006, campaigners in more than 30 countries have used the internet, mobile phones, radio and more to document and fight violence against women.

Just a few pills could save an African woman’s life. Certainly, with roughly 250,000 dead each year from pregnancy-related causes, the need is great. Two major causes of maternal death in the region, postpartum hemorrhage and incomplete abortion, can be prevented and treated with access to misoprostol, a known medication that has been available for decades. Misoprostol, with or without another medicine, mifepristone, is also used for safe abortion. Isn’t it time that African women benefit from the same simple technology that women around the world have?

Using SMSs to remind HIV patients to take their dose of life-saving medication could give a major boost to drug adherence, according to an innovative trial in Kenya unveiled on Tuesday. In the "WelTel Kenya1" study, three clinics recruited 538 patients with the virus. They either received the weekly SMS to their cellphone in addition to a standard course of antiretroviral drugs or were given standard care alone. The SMS recipients typically received the discreet message "Mambo?", which is Kiswahili for "How are you?" They were instructed to reply "Sawa" (fine) or "Shida" (problem) within 48 hours.

Attention Creative minds!

Women'sNet is calling for entries to design messages for the 16 Days of Activism to end Violence Against Women and Children.

The best message developed will be used to localise the 2010 Take Back The Take campaign whose theme is Get Creative! Explore technology! Defend Women's rights! The message should combine the 16 days of activism campaign and in particular how information and communication technologies can be used to end violence against women and children.

An aggressive national campaign to persuade people to abstain from sex or commit to 100 percent condom use for a month could make a significant contribution to HIV prevention efforts, says a leading HIV expert. Alan Whiteside of the Health Economics and HIV/AIDS Research Division (HEARD) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal is trying to get the AIDS community talking about this and other innovative strategies to curtail HIV. Addressing delegates at the Third HIV/AIDS in the Workplace Research Conference in Johannesburg on 9 November, Whiteside pointed out that in countries such as Swaziland, where nearly 50 percent of women aged 25-29 are HIV-positive, past prevention efforts have failed catastrophically.

Swaziland is a country of great inequality where a minority is rich whilst two-thirds of the population survives on less than a dollar a day, half of them going hungry. As in most countries in the world, women bear the heaviest burdens of such inequality because, amongst other things, of their lower social and legal status and subsequent lack of access to education and finances. Women are generally heavily discriminated against in Swaziland, both legally and culturally, even though the country’s new constitution promises equal treatment for women and though Swaziland is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). One group of women that is particularly vulnerable, stigmatised and prone to despair and despondency is that of single mothers, including teenage mothers – although the two are often interconnected as one of the main causes of single motherhood is early pregnancies.

Iran and Saudi Arabia may get seats on the board of a new UN super-agency to promote women's rights, prompting outrage from human rights and women's activists. "We think it sends a horrible signal to women around the world who are looking with hope to the agency," said Philippe Bolopian of Human Rights Watch. "Given the abysmal record the two countries have on women's rights, their candidacy will be seen as a provocation by women around the world."

The United Nations estimates that 95% of aggressive behaviour, harassment, abusive language and denigrating images in online spaces are aimed at women and come from partners or former male partners. Other surveys show that the victims of cyber-stalking are predominantly female. Many popular social networking websites include personal information such as email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, names of family members, and even minute-to-minute updates on a person’s location, which is useful to friends but could also act as a source of information for perpetrators of violence.

The allegations of the gang rape of a 15-year-old girl on the Jules High School campus in Jeppestown rocked the nation. It wasn't just that she was drugged; that the heinous, brutal attack was recorded on a cellphone; that the recording of the vicious act was circulated and -- if we believe some early reports -- that some educators laughed when they saw the video that was so devastating. It wasn't the chilling comments from the school pupils, some of whom told our reporters that watching the incident was "like watching soccer" and that the victim looked like she "was enjoying herself" that makes it so shocking.

Deadline: 08 December 2011

Join us on Twitter

Follow us @WomensnetSA on Twitter and retweet our tweets from November 09th to December 09th under the hashtag #Fone4women. Alternately, you can tweet your own message under the same hashtag #Fone4women. Tweet a message calling for cell-phone donations and create awareness around the importance of Information and Communication Technology (ICTs)rights and freedom.

Women'sNet – a Feminist organisation based in Johannesburg, is excited to announce a Call for Participation in its upcoming Freedom Fone training workshop, aimed at community radio stations in South Africa. Women'sNet's mission is to advance gender equality and justice in South Africa through the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). We provide training and facilitate content dissemination and creation that supports women, girls, and women’s and gender organisations and networks to take control of their own content and ICT use.

The training workshop will be held on the 22 November 2010 – 24 November 2010 and focuses on equipping radio stations with skills to use Freedom Fone to create interactive audio content over The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence. Women'sNet is looking for 17 participants from Community Radio Stations in South Africa.

About 29 percent of South African pregnant women were living with HIV in 2009 - a figure that has barely shifted over the past four years, despite increased levels of commitment from the country’s health department and numerous prevention campaigns. Based on blood samples from nearly 33,000 pregnant women in all 52 health districts, HIV prevalence was estimated at 29.4 percent, against 29.3 percent in 2008 and 29.4 percent in 2007

Member States today took the next step in enabling the newly-created United Nations agency on gender equality and women¹s empowerment to begin its work by electing countries to serve on its Executive Board. The elections, held in the 54-member Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), will enable the new Board to come together prior to the official establishment on 1 January 2011 of the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women (UN Women). The 41 board members were selected on the following basis: 10 from Africa, 10 from Asia, 4 from Eastern Europe, 6 from Latin America and the Caribbean,
5 from Western Europe and 6 from contributing countries.

The full extent damage done by the midterm elections to women’s ability to access abortion and other reproductive health care services may not be known for months or years, but one measure we can count: fifty-three new anti-choice Republicans were elected to the House, and five to the Senate. In response to the election results, and in anticipation of the amped-up assault on women’s rights, Steph Herold, a young reproductive justice activist, put a call out to women on her Twitter feed: “Time for us to come out. Who's had an abortion? Show antis we're not intimidated by scare tactics. Use: #ihadanabortion.” The #ihadanabortion hashtag soon swarmed with the first-person accounts of women’s abortion experiences, with thoughtful responses, and with support. But after mainstream media attention, antichoicers joined the fray, with cynacism, suspicion and no small amount of cruelty for women who have had abortions.

South Africans are rightly proud of having what is probably the most progressive Constitution in the world. But rights can never be taken for granted -- as the saying goes, "eternal vigilance is the price of freedom". Furthermore, all these rights are part of an interrelated whole. Today we must acknowledge that constitutional rights in general, and some more so than others, are endangered. Public consciousness is bombarded with manifestations of militarism in public discourse; it is becoming an accepted form of existence. And violent attacks on women, including being stripped for not conforming to norms expected by "repositories of custom", such as taxi drivers, are simply seen as a part of life.

The United Nations has recently elected a governing board for its newest entity, UN Women, which unites the four previous agencies working for women and including UNIFEM. UNIFEM NZ was concerned when the assignment of seats was announced and the Pacific was not included among the groups. We were told on follow-up that the Pacific Island states were included within ‘Asia’, which was allocated ten seats. New Zealand and Australia are part of ‘Western Europe and other’ with allocated five seats.”

Are you in high school and would like to be part of an information communication technology camp at Girls’Net. 

In a world where social and moral decay are devouring every facet of our society, and at an alarming rate too, you have to wonder whether we have descended to a level where the sexual violation of schoolgirls on school grounds, after they have allegedly been drugged, has become a way of life. Could it be the reason why we haven't had much public outrage about the alleged rape of the schoolgirl at Jules High School in Jeppestown last Thursday, or the hundreds who are raped by their fellow pupils - and even their teachers? Could it be why we have not heard from the motor-mouths at the Congress of South African Students and all the other student organisations? Could it be why, with the exception of the condemnation by the ANC Youth League which, at the time of penning this column was the only political youth formation which had condemned the incident, we have not heard from their counterparts in other political parties - not even the attention-seekers at the Democratic Alliance, whose leader is a woman?

"Community radio stations in Haiti play an indispensable role during catastrophes, and so do women, who can identify the most urgent needs of families during the reconstruction of the country," said a representative of one of these stations in the Caribbean island nation. Marie Justine Gurlein of Radio Refraka of Haiti was discussing her experiences at a round table that brought together women radio reporters working in situations of conflict and emergency, during the Nov. 8-13 Tenth World Assembly of Community Radio Broadcasters in the Argentine city of La Plata, 56 km southeast of Buenos Aires. This is the first time the assembly of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) is being held in South America.

The resurgence in religious fundamentalism and the inordinate influence of certain church leaders over public health policy present major obstacles to the prevention of needless deaths and injuries of women from unsafe abortion on the African continent. This was one of the issues discussed at a conference with the theme "Keeping our Promise. Addressing Unsafe Abortion in Africa", hosted Nov. 8-11 by Ipas with the support of Ghana’s health ministry in Accra. Ipas is a global, non-profit organisation promoting women’s exercise of sexual and reproductive rights.

It takes little to bring out the scars that many women who were raped in Bosnia still carry. Rumours, later shown to be unfounded, that Angelina Jolie would star in a film to be shot in Sarajevo on the war-time love between a Serb man and a Bosniak Muslim girl he raped, had women's groups lodging strong protests. The false reports spotlighted the fate of thousands of Bosniak Muslim women believed to have been raped by Serbs mostly in eastern Bosnia in the 1992- 95 war. Many were repeatedly violated for months. Several were killed. Many children they gave birth to were adopted or sent to orphanages. Hundreds of women terminated pregnancies, even late ones, in hospitals or health care centres after fleeing eastern Bosnia, according to aid organisations such as Women Victims of War and the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF). Serbs deny that rapes occurred by their forces in eastern Bosnia.

Chilean journalist María Pía Matta, a feminist and staunch believer that communication is a universal right based on freedom of expression, is the new president of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC).

Matta was elected at the end of the Nov. 8-13 Tenth World Assembly of Community Radio Broadcasters in the Argentine city of La Plata, 56 km southeast of Buenos Aires, whose theme was bolstering the effectiveness of community radio stations to help achieve greater social justice.

The more than 5,000 community radio stations that belong to AMARC on every continent should have increasing legal recognition, "because they are a key tool for expanding democracy at the local and global levels," she says in this interview with IPS.