"We are deeply concerned about the rapid spread of HIV infection in our countries and the millions of deaths caused by AIDS, which is testimony to the continued unequal power relations between women and men in our societies. The June 2001 United Nations General Assembly Special Session on HIV and AIDS established a clear link between women's inability to exercise their human rights and their vulnerability to HIV infection. As the majority of the continent's care givers women and girls experience first hand the devastating and severe impact of the diseases. We recognize that given women's subordinate position and lack of power special measures will be required to protect Africa's women and girls from all forms of public and private sexual and gender based violations." This is according to a communique that was presented by a SADC Gender NGO Focal Points Working Session that met in Lusaka 25 April to the Sub-regional Decade Review Meeting on the Implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA - Beijing + 10), on April 26 - 29. The meetings discussed and reviewed the main constraints and challenges encountered in implementing the 12 critical areas outlined in BPFA as obstacles to the advancement and well being of women.

UNIFEM – the UN Development Fund for Women – says, “Persistent internal conflicts in the East and Horn sub-region continue to result in gross violations of women’s human rights.” It says these violations include “rape, abductions and other forms of gender violence.” Nyaradzai Gumbonzvanda is the regional program director for UNIFEM in Nairobi. "Well, in this part of Africa we cannot talk of one problem because there is an interface of mainly four broad problems. We have issues of high levels of poverty and which are manifested in the context of food insecurity. At the same time, this is a region which is infested with conflict."

Violence against women is the greatest human rights scandal of our times. From birth to death, in times of peace as well as war, women face discrimination and violence at the hands of the state, the community and the family. Visit Amnesty International's website to find out what action you can take.

Chairperson of Women Trafficking and Child Labour Eradication Foundation (WOTCLEF) and convener of the African Women Conference, Mrs. Amina Titi Atiku Abubakar, has said the conference is meant to reposition Africa and write a new chapter in the history of African women. The event is a six-day conference intended to highlight and deliberate on issues related to the development of African women.

Thabo Mbeki has placed his political legacy in the hands of 12 formidable women, a leader of an apartheid party and a few good men. Women now make up 43% of the national cabinet, designed to implement policies that were developed over the past 10 years and, more importantly, deliver services to the people. The representation of women in the cabinet is the highest it has ever been in this country - and in Africa.

Women are most often responsible for domestic and community water management in developing societies, being in charge of determining sources, quantity and hygienic quality, begins a Unifem publication. On average women and children travel 10-15 kilometres, spending 8 or more hours per day collecting water and carrying up to 20 kilos or 15 litres per trip. It has been calculated that in South Africa alone, women collectively walk the equivalent distance of 16 times to the moon and back per day gathering water for families. The economic value of this unpaid contribution is enormous, notes the publication.

As thousands of Zimbabwean women have discovered, the law is a blunt instrument when it comes to domestic disputes that threaten health and well-being. A distress call from a squabbling family has no guarantee of eliciting a reaction from the police, who can do nothing unless there are indications of physical violence. Bookings normally result when assault has been committed.

HIV and AIDS have significantly increased the care burden for many women. Poverty and poor public services have also combined with AIDS to turn the care burden for women into a crisis with far-reaching social, health and economic consequences. This is according to a fact sheet from the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/ AIDS that explores the impact that HIV and AIDS have had on the role that all over the world women are expected to take in domestic work and in providing care to family members.

South Africa is the major destination for human traffickers, with women and children from more than 10 African countries being smuggled into the country, according to a UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) report released on Friday. The report, "Trafficking in human beings, especially women and children, in Africa", said South Africa was also a favoured destination for global traffickers, who smuggled in women and girls from Thailand for prostitution.

Children are increasingly recognised by geographers and other social scientists as independent actors who make valuable (albeit often overlooked) economic contributions to households and society. Hausa children in rural Northern Nigeria are highly mobile and play important economic roles supporting married women who spend much time in their walled residences (gida) because of the local socio-religious practice of Muslim seclusion. Secluded Hausa women have low mobility and do not attend local periodic markets, but make essential day-to-day purchases from child house-to-house hawkers while sending children on errands to make purchases on their behalf. This study shows how children work both independently and alongside adults in the spheres of agricultural production (on farms), domestic reproduction (in homesteads) and trade (within markets).

Despite the fact that Angola has one of the world's highest infant and maternal mortality rates, few pregnant women are accessing the available medical services. The maternal mortality rate in Angola is 1,000 deaths per 100,000 births, while the mortality rate for infants reaches 250 per 1,000 births. Only Sierra Leone and Nigeria have infant mortality rates worse than Angola's.

The Special Rapporteur on violence against women addressed the Commission on Human Rights earlier this month, warning against alarming trends toward political conservatism and a backlash which threatened the gains made thus far in the global women’s human rights agenda. Yakin Erturk, Special Rapporteur on violence against women, said she had emphasized the universality of violence against women, the multiplicity of its forms and the intersectionality of diverse kinds of discrimination against women rooted in other systems of subordination and inequality in her report to the Commission.

While corruption is evidently the talk of the day and infuriating everyone given its socio-economic implications, what is not easily appreciated is the fact that women and children are more affected by the scourge. Women are short changed in aspects of service delivery as they do not have the same economic clout to negotiate for qualitative services as their male counterparts. But countries that promote women's rights and improve their institutional frameworks have seen a marked decrease in corruption and their economies have actually boomed, says this commentary from the Zimbabwe Standard.

Cobbled together from the West African British colony of the Gold Coast and the Togoland trust territory, Ghana became in 1957 the first country in colonial Africa to gain its independence. Lesbians and gays, though, are still waiting to be liberated from a repressive British legacy: sodomy laws. A gay social life exists, mostly in the form of house parties, and a few queer-friendly clubs in the capital, Accra, but there are risks. Because homosexuality is illegal, club-goers, especially tourists, risk blackmail. If they don't pay, social and legal consequences can be serious.

Besides being a major human rights and public health problem worldwide, violence against women increases female vulnerability to HIV. This is according to a UNAIDS factsheet that analyses the issue of violence against women and its relationship with AIDS. The factsheet finds that fear of violence prevents women from accessing HIV/AIDS information, being tested, disclosing their HIV status, accessing services for the prevention of HIV transmission to infants, and receiving treatment and counselling, even when they know they have been infected.

Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika vowed Monday to free women from the yoke of the repressive Islamic "family code" that considers them perpetually dependent on men. Bouteflika, taking the oath of office for his second and final term after winning re-election in a landslide on April 8, said he rejected that women "should be subjected to a status that assails their rights and condemns them to a condition inferior to men".

Africa’s Anglican archbishops have vowed never to receive donations from western churches which support the ordination of gay priests. "We do not want any money from the Episcopal Church of the United States of America. This is not rhetoric. It is not a matter of a joke. We mean what we say," the chairman of the Council of Anglican Provinces in Africa, Nigeria’s Archbishop Peter Akinola said, as the other clergymen nodded in affirmation.

A publication from the Women's International Coalition for Economic Justice (WICEJ) brings together a wide range of issues and debates in relation to gender and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The debates include looking at the impact of gender activism; how different players are interpreting the MDGs; and what some of the broader challenges are which need to be addressed. Many of the articles explore how to use the MDGs as tools to challenge the existing status quo, to demand action on women's key concerns, to mobilize civil society in both North and South, to highlight labour rights and employment needs, and to push for a global reordering of the world's resources.

The constitutional review process in Kenya has reached its final stages after the presentation of a draft Constitution to the Attorney General on 23rd March. However a constitutional court has ruled that Kenya’s parliament be given powers to alter the draft Constitution document, a move which minority and indigenous rights groups claim could seriously weaken important provisions for minority and indigenous rights, which they have lobbied hard to achieve.

Although little research has been done in the area of child abuse, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) has said that existing data showed "a grim picture of the reality many children are facing" in Mozambique. The "Government Report on the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child" cites a survey among minor sex workers in the capital, Maputo, in which 25 percent of the children interviewed were between 10 and 14 years old, and 22 percent said their first sexual encounter had been violent and against their will. They had been violated by a close relative, including their own father, or a neighbour. According to UNICEF, some of the underlying causes of abuse and sexual exploitation were poverty, gender discrimination and harmful traditional practices.