BY DANIEL BEREZOWSKY — “When people talk about things like forced marriage or genital cutting, they like to believe that it is many miles away. They don’t realize that these things happen every day, in their own backyard.”
BY TANYA NYATHI — In Zimbabwe, 72 percent of the population live on less than $1 a day. Biting hunger, cash shortages, tight liquidity, and collective layoffs are common. According to International Labour Organization, over 80 percent of the population is unemployed. In many families, arranging a marriage for a daughter reduces the number of mouths to feed.
BY SUMMER LIN — In Msinga, like many other places in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, fewer than six in 10 women give birth with any trained professional, such as a midwife or doctor in attendance. When complications arise, no one is there to help treat the woman, leading to injuries like fistula or even death.
BY TANYA NYATHI — Evan Mawarire remembers receiving a harrowing call in May of last year. The person on the other end of the phone spoke in Shona, a dominant dialect among Zimbabweans. “Do you know that that very flag that you have around your neck could strangle you to death?”
BY CAROLINE SPIVACK & ASWINI PERIYASAMY At the UN’s 2016 Commission on the Status of Women, Joyce Kilipo, Mary Jack and Yolette Etienne discuss the difficult reality of being women first responders during times of crisis. For more on women first responders go to Women As First Responders and Women As First Responders in Humanitarian Action. Music C/O Podington Bear
BY ASWINI PERIYASAMY When asked why she became a first responder during Liberia’s Ebola Crisis, Brenda Brewer Moore said she drew her resolve from one of her country’s darkest times, “I lived the majority of my childhood years in Liberia during the civil war and saw the amount of death and destruction that the war caused. And as a child, one thing I promised myself was that one thing that I…
BY BRIAN FRESKOS Shadreck Banda wanted to punish his wife. The couple had gotten into an argument about dinner. Banda wanted nshima, a traditional Zambian porridge, with roasted pork; but his wife, Beatrice Zulu, had foregone the pork and cooked beans instead. After his wife had lain down, Banda erupted into a fit of vengeance, picked the piping pot of beans off the fire and poured it onto her. Zulu…
BY SAHER KHAN In the Niger Delta, women, who have the primary responsibility for management of household water supply, are providing dirty water to their families, not because they want to, but because they have no choice. According to UNEP and an Amnesty International analysis, the history of oil exploration in the Niger Delta has contaminated fisheries and polluted groundwater pipes and boreholes that are sources of water in communities…
BY KATHRYN DAVIS Women and girls in Ghana have been victims of sexual assaults and other gender-based violence at some of the highest rates in the world, and Ghanaian officials say they have made little progress in stopping the violence. “We still experience high rates of gender-based violence in many societies globally, Ghana included, violence within families, culture and it defies all of our efforts,” Martha Ama Akaya, Ghana’s UN…
BY SHANDUKANI OMPHULUSA MULAUDZI Ruth Mumbi was arrested by the police five years ago for what they said was a demonstration to incite violence in her community of Mathare, a slum in the Kenyan capital Nairobi. Mumbi organized a group of women to protest the country’s high maternal mortality rate. More recently however, Mumbi has advocated for the rights of young women who have been arrested after they underwent unsafe abortions….
BY CAROLINE SPIVACK Before Cyclone Pam struck Vanuatu in March 2015, Mary Jack helped neighbors on her home island of Tanna reinforce roofs with panaudu leaves and sandbags. But the cyclone turned out to be one of the strongest storms ever to make landfall with winds upwards of 150 miles an hour and left 70 percent of Vanuatu’s 277,000 population displaced. “For women, we were in confusion and overwhelmed by…