South Africa's highest court has ruled that gay couples should receive the same financial benefits as heterosexuals. The case was brought by lesbian judge Kathy Satchwell, who wanted her partner to get the same benefits as the married partners of other judges.

The verdict in the retrial of 50 men, tried for their alleged sexual orientation, is expected on 15 March before a criminal court in the Qasr al-Nil district of Cairo. The trial takes place amid a continued clampdown by the Egyptian authorities on men on the basis of their actual or perceived sexual orientation.

Liberian women have called on the Government and the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) to cease the hostilities in order for them to have a peace that would enable their children to go to school without any fear or intimidation to prepare themselves for the development of their country.

Kountaya camp exploded in song and dance last Saturday as Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugee women gathered at the camp in Guinea's Albadaria district to mark International Women's Day, which was observed all over the world on March 8.

A coalition of human rights groups has accused the United Nations of making little effort to prosecute rapes alongside other crimes committed during Rwanda's 1994 genocide. "Thousands of Rwandan rape victims, many of whom are now dying of AIDS, continue to wait expectantly for justice from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda," said coalition organizer Jean-Louis Roy, head of the Canadian humanitarian organisation Rights and Democracy.

A decade ago women seemed to be on the periphery of the epidemic, today they are at the epicentre. This page guides you to some resources on women and HIV/Aids and to detailed information on especially vulnerable groups of women. Some sample statistics show that today 47 percent of the 36.1 million people living with HIV are women and this proportion is growing. Of the 16,000 new infections that occur everyday, up to sixty percent are now amongst women.

The government has launched the South Africa Reference Group for Women in Science and Technology to enhance women's involvement in these sectors. The establishment of the group is an active implementation of the National Research and Development Strategy, which was approved by the Cabinet last year.

Saving the lives of millions of African women who die from complications related to unsafe abortions will come center stage Wednesday at the first ever consultation held in Africa on providing access to safe abortion for women. The landmark consultation - 'Action to Reduce Maternal Mortality in Africa: A Regional Consultation on Unsafe Abortion' - brings together, medical professionals, legal experts, researchers, ministers of health, youth leaders, parliamentarians, women's health activists and journalists from 15 African countries.

Women in Kenya are vulnerable to poverty, HIV infection and violence because of discriminatory property inheritance practices, says a report from the New York-based Human Rights Watch. The United States based NGO says that after the death of their husbands, women are often evicted or made penniless, or forced to engage in traditional sexual cleansing rituals risking HIV infection, in order to stay in the property.

The training workshop aims to build the capacities of women and their organisations to utilise new Information and Communication Technologies in social development work and policy advocacy. The workshop offers two parallel instructional tracks from which participants can choose the most appropriate for their training needs and two sessions in which all workshop participants will be involved.

Micro-credit programs have long been praised as stepping stones out of poverty. But new international studies shed doubt on whether small loans can really make a difference against the enormous problem of poverty.

As a young Nigerian girl, Pearl Nwashili saw women come crying to her grandmother, bleeding and bruised from beatings at their husbands' hands. "I wanted to clean them, sew up their clothes, I wanted to heal the kids with sores, I just wanted to see people happy again as fast as possible," she says. As an adult in Lagos, she studied microbiology and earned degrees in public health as a way to help her people. With a grant from the Ford Foundation and facilities donated by Nigeria's government, Nwashili set up walk-in health centers at eight major Nigerian "motor parks," where hundreds of truck drivers, taxis and buses wait for loads and seek entertainment, food and rest in the meantime.

The Anti-War Coalition has announced that it will be joining women around the world in commemorating International Women's Day on Saturday, 8 March 2003. The group has organised a Women Against the War demonstration at the US Consulate in Killarney and a symposium on the effects of war on women and children.

The 1325 PeaceWomen E-News was initiated in May 2002, as a direct means of maintaining the momentum and visibility of Resolution 1325, advocating for the further implementation of the Resolution, and keeping people informed of the scale and range of activity around 1325. By prioritizing the efforts of women peace activists, by providing them with timely information to help build their capacities as peace women, by providing informed and current analyses of 1325, 1325 PeaceWomen E-News can help fuel the support and advocacy efforts for further implementation of Resolution 1325.

"I came here to the quartering area to try and find my husband, the father of my children," Celita Vasco says. "But when I arrived here I heard that my husband had died in the war. My children have no father." Her story is typical of women who found themselves caught up amid the ever-changing front lines of the Angolan civil war.

Mercy escaped her slavers last year. Like many Nigerian women smuggled or lured into Italy with the promise of jobs, Mercy was forced into prostitution to earn her freedom. But escape did not end her nightmare. Three weeks after speaking publicly to human rights groups about her experience, her sister was reported dead in Florence, true to the threats made by her former captors.

UNICEF said last month at a meeting of donors in Nairobi that the key to Somalia's future lay in the survival and protection of women and children and noted with optimism that peace talks aimed at ending more than a decade of anarchy were moving forward.

A silver lining has emerged in Swaziland's current food crisis through the efforts of thousands of Swazi women who have been put in charge of food aid distribution. "We use the phrase, 'Teach one man, and you teach one man, teach one woman and you teach 50 women," Erika MacLean, emergency coordinator for the World Food Programme (WFP) in Swaziland, told IRIN.

Water is essential to human beings and all forms of life. But pollution and lack of access to clean water is proliferating the cycle of poverty, water-borne diseases, and gender inequities. At the United Nations conferences of the 1990s-beginning with the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil all the way through to the 2000 Millennium Development Summit in New York, U.S.A. and the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg, South Africa-it became widely accepted that gender equality and women's empowerment are essential to poverty eradication. But despite the recognition that advancing women's human rights is key to breaking the cycle of poverty, implementation of this overarching policy agenda has been elusive. This paper presents an overview of the relationship between gender, poverty and water.

Gender at Work is a new knowledge and capacity building network focused on gender and institutional change, working with development and human rights practitioners, researchers and policy makers. Gender at Work aims to develop new theory and practice on how organisations can change gender-biased institutional rules and change the political, accountability, cultural and knowledge systems of organisations to challenge social norms and gender inequity.