"Over the last ten years the situation for women in Tanzania has changed considerably. The Tanzanian government has adopted affirmative action in encouraging gender equality in parliament and local government authorities. The number of seats in parliament held by women has risen from 10 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2000." This is according to an interview with Gertrude Mongela, MP and Speaker for the Pan-African Parliament, Tanzania, by Action for Southern Africa (ACTSA).

Zanzibar's parliament has passed a bill that outlaws homosexuality and lesbianism. The bill imposes stiff penalties which include up to 25 years imprisonment for those in gay relationships. The overwhelmingly Muslim Indian Ocean island is a key tourist destination on the East African coast. The attorney-general said they were determined to prevent Zanzibari culture from being corrupted. The president is expected to approve the bill into law.

Trade policy continues to overlook the work of social reproduction, or 'the invisible, unpaid and undervalued work required to sustain the human family and the human community', which is done predominantly by women. There are four areas that fall under the jurisdiction of the WTO that are critical to social reproduction which, this report argues, should be removed from the WTOs jurisdiction: agriculture, services, intellectual property and investment.

Trade liberalisation processes impact differently on men and women due to the fact that men and women have different roles in production. Despite the fact that women are actively involved in international trade, WTO agreements are gender blind and as such have adverse impacts on women. The first part of this paper presents an analysis of the impacts of WTO agreements on women in developing countries. Provisions of specific agreements and the impacts on women are outlined. The second and main section of the paper is a compilation of case studies on the impacts of trade liberalisation on women in Africa.

Isis-WICCE is a global, action oriented resource centre based in Kampala, Uganda. It exists to promote justice and the empowerment of women globally through documenting violations of women's human rights, and facilitating the exchange of information and skills to strengthen women's capacities, visibility, and potential. This is done through the production and exchange of information, the promotion of ideas, solidarity actions, and networking. Isis-WICCE's has been running annual Exchange Programme Institutes since 1984. These institutes offer women activists working in the area of human rights, armed conflict and peace building issues, an opportunity to spend time working on specific themes, and developing skills in using the human rights framework for advocacy purposes.

The Network of African Women Ministerial and Parliamentarian Bureau met last week in the Namibian capital of Windhoek to plan its sixth conference scheduled for October in Gabon. The meeting aimed to evaluate, monitor, adopt resolutions and prepare for the next meeting, the theme of which is Gender and HIV/AIDS: Reinforcing the National Response. The meeting will also focus on domestic violence.

SNV's mission is to develop the capacities of capacity builders at provincial and local levels, with the twin objectives of reducing poverty and improving governance. Many of the advisory services rendered by SNV Rwanda are directly related to the empowerment of women and the mainstreaming of gender. This can mean the integration of gender in local government, civil society and private sector or lobbying and advocacy skills of women organisations.

Marie-Julie Nse Ndzime has made a success of her printing company located in Gabon's capital, Libreville - no thanks to anyone else. "I never received a request for bids nor was lent any money by the banks," she told IPS. "I only got a leg up by hard work and networking." Only 10 percent of Gabonese businesswomen manage companies in the country. Many face an uphill struggle in trying to get fair treatment from their male counterparts, who have tended to judge them on their physical appearance alone.

Strategic Initiatives for the Horn of Africa, a regional organisation that promotes women's participation in politics, has called for gender issues to be addressed in the Sudanese peace negotiations. "So far, there is no voice of women in the talks. Women are not visible in whatever has been accomplished at the negotiations and that is why we are advocating for them to have a say in the process, because they are the ones who have been affected most by the civil war in Sudan,” Hala Elkanib, Director of Strategic Initiatives for the Horn of Africa (SIHA), told IPS in Nairobi.

Though quite a number of nations have ratified international human rights instruments, women’s rights are still violated on a day to day basis given the patriarchal set up of society. Through the International Feminist Network, Isis-Women's International Cross Cultural Exchange (WICCE) receives a number of calls for action from women and human rights activists worldwide. So please support the women whose lives are in danger.

The international humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has expressed its serious concern about continued sexual violence against women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a phenomenon that is being perpetuated by ongoing insecurity. One year after a peace agreement was signed to put an end to the war in DRC, MSF continues to see victims of rape in its clinics. Releasing a report entitled "I have no joy, no peace of mind", MSF describes the terrible medical, psychosocial and socio-economic consequences of sexual violence in the DRC and the use of rape - against both women and men - as a weapon of war.

In impoverished Burkina Faso, girls as young as eight are married off to men often older than their own fathers. But the government is now trying to eradicate this practice, alarmed by the continuing emergence of pregnancy complications in very young mothers. Typical of this phenomenon is the case of 22-year-old Christine. When she was 16, Christine ran away from home after realising that her family was preparing to marry her off to a polygamous old man.

Providing gender inclusiveness in access to land can benefit families, communities, and nations through increased economic opportunities, increased investment in land and food production, improved family security during transitions and better housing and land stewardship. This is according to a paper by the Sustainable Development Department, FAO / SD Dimensions. The paper explores gender and issues of land access and administration in rural development. It argues that increasing social, economic and technological changes are requiring a re-examination of the institutional arrangements used to administer who has rights to what resources and under what conditions.

Zimbabwe used the occasion of International Women's Day to launch its National Gender Policy. Developed in collaboration with UNIFEM, the Zimbabwe Gender Forum and UNDP Zimbabwe, the policy will facilitate gender mainstreaming in all sectors of the economy and government to promote gender equality and redress historical gender imbalances. Contact Nomcebo Manzini on the email address below for more information.

The report highlights the difficulties that black and minority ethnic-led voluntary organisations in the UK – many of which support development activities in their countries of origin in the South – face in securing recognition and funding from institutional funders. However, the report also highlighted efforts by funders to reach out more effectively to such groups.

Women’s right to land ownership could change the face of Africa and speed up efforts to achieve food and nutrition security. This is the view of some 500 delegates who attended a three-day international meeting on food security in Uganda’s capital Kampala. The gathering which ended Saturday attracted delegates from 50 countries, 30 of them from Africa.

It is retold so often that the account of how an embarrassed government minister rescued a female relative, who had been caught in a police sex worker crackdown he sanctioned, has become something of an urban legend. Some say it is surprising that the woman’s embarrassment - not to mention that of the official - did not lead him to entertain the possibility that police may have acted too arbitrarily when they set out to banish the world’s oldest profession in the 1980s. Officers’ methods included accosting - and even arresting - any ‘suspicious’ woman walking around after dark, especially if she was daring to move about unaccompanied.

Over the last two years, the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) Global Studies Programme has organised a series of workshops in Africa on Refugees' Right to Communicate. The series culminated in the publication of a call to action summarising the key findings of the workshops. Here, Valérie Gatabazi highlights critical gender issues in relation to the situation of refugees, based on the presentation she gave at one of the workshops which took place in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The issues are universal and call for urgent redress, especially with regard to the situation of women and girls in refugee camps.

"Many corporations continue to move their production zones to developing countries in order to benefit from cheap labour and lax standards. They pay low wages, make their workers work long hours in unsanitary and dangerous working conditions, they sexually harass them, verbally and physically abuse them, and they prohibit them from unionising to defend their rights, and violate other human rights as well. It is clear that inequalities of power, access, position and condition between global labour market actors as well as gender inequities in public and private responsibilities, make it such that commercial and economic policies impact women and men in disproportionately different ways." In the month of February, Women's Human Rights Nets explored the diversity of legal and extralegal mechanisms of social corporate responsibility (SCR) as well as the opportunities and challenges that these mechanisms represent for the exercise and improvement of women's rights. Visit their web site for more information.

Amnesty International aims to force governments to recognize their complicity in gender-based violence when they fail to create or enforce laws against it. As the latest step in this, the London-based human rights organisation this month launched an international campaign to raise awareness of violence against women as a human rights violation. "Amnesty International has been working on holding governments accountable to prevent, punish and investigate violence against women by state and non-state actors," said Sheila Dauer, director of the Women's Human Rights Program at Amnesty International U.S.A., based in New York City. "This campaign will take on that issue."