Women's eNews (https://womensenews.org/tag/africa/)
While climate change is a global problem, African countries are likely to feel the effects most acutely and women are the most vulnerable of all, as a result of their dependence on the natural resources that are threatened by climate change.
Recently Google and Forbes both recognized African female entrepreneurs, highlighting the continent’s entrepreneurial energy. This publicity is a welcome alternative to Westerners’ dominant image of Africans as dependent people in misery.
This clinical team is known for its surgeries to repair the clitoris. But its services for survivors of FGM are much more. “We treat the whole mutilation with its emotional, social and psychologic impact,” says a pioneering surgeon.
No matter how much money or awareness Awa Soumahoro raises, she can’t prevent her 19-year-old cousin from being forced into marriage.
The country is a magnet for female immigrants from Eritrea, Nigeria, Somalia, Guinea and Ethiopia. Thousands of women from these countries have fled FGM and help define what it means to be a refugee in Europe.
For writer Barbra Emily, not seeing her family is a small price to pay for escaping female genital mutilation, a practice undergone by 27 percent of women in Kenya, the World Health Organization reports.
Studies report that girls in Kenya miss 3.5 million learning days per month because of a lack of available menstruation products. Here, Daraja Academy student Joyce Wanjiru writes about a friend who inspired her to help all girls in Kenya, one sanitary towel at time.
Nigeria’s gender-based abductions began in early 2013, a report finds, after the government imprisoned wives of Boko Haram members. Since then, the rate and scale of abductions has increased, with Christian women and girls the main target.
After decades of Ethiopian immigration to Israel, several black women now hold significant government posts and Israel recently crowned an Ethiopian as its national beauty queen. But hardship persists for women in these communities.
The new U.N. point person on sexual violence in armed conflict doesn’t plan to do it on her own. Zainab Bangura, a former health minister from Sierra Leone, is tapping governments to work alongside her nine-person staff.