Princess Sikhanyiso, the eldest daughter of King Mswati III of Swaziland, has returned home from her studies in England wearing a set of umcwasho tassels, worn by young girls as a mark of chastity. In September King Mswati, Africa's last absolute monarch, announced the tradition was being reintroduced in an effort to combat Aids, which has killed more than 50,000 people in the tiny mountain kingdom. But the move has met with huge opposition - not least of all because the king's own daughter has not been forced to comply with the rule.

In Guinea, as in most West African nations, female genital cutting was, until recently, common practice. Prior to 1998, roughly 90 percent of Guinean women were circumcised. While the government enacted legislation banning the practice in 1984, the law was only recently enforced as a result of several deaths, vigorous campaigning by CPTAFE, a national women's rights NGO, and the public outspokenness of the First Lady and Minister of Social Affairs.

The Editorial Team of the Gender, Society & Development series is planning a book on 'gender/women and sustainable resources management' to be published in 2002. The book will be the 6th in the series produced by KIT (Royal Tropical Institute) and co-distributed by Oxfam GB. The Team is looking for authors, especially from the South, with practical experience in the field of integrating and mainstreaming gender/women' issues into the management and use of natural resources for sustainable development.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the rate of HIV infection in women is rising faster than any other group. UNAIDS estimates that women in sub-Saharan African made up about 55 percent of people living with HIV/Aids at the end of 1999.

Women's Voices is a video initiative which gives women living in poverty a voice in public policy making in Nairobi, Kenya.

WHRnet NEWS goes live to coincide with International Human Rights Day (10 December 2001). WHRnet uses the Internet to bring together women activists from all continents, and now it takes this opportunity to invite everyone with access to the web to join in. The newly redesigned site aims to promote advocacy through knowledge sharing of women's human rights issues and events.

All aspects of economic development, from healthcare to fighting corruption,
work better when women are actively participating, according to recent World
Bank research. Societies that discriminate by gender pay a significant price--more poverty, slower growth, weaker governance, and a lower quality of life.

The World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD 2002) will be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 02 to 11 September 2002. In preparation for this important event, the Women's Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) is calling on concerned women's organisations to participate in the global consultation that aims to come up with a Women's Action Agenda for a Healthy Planet 2002(WAA2002). This will be launched in the World Summit.

In this handbook, the Global Alliance Against Trafficking in Women (GAATW) presents the problem of trafficking and some strategies for responding to it. The handbook approaches the subject from a human rights perspective and quite effectively pinpoints the ways trafficking violates victim's human rights, particularly those of women. It brings to light, therefore, the seriousness of a problem which is not well understood.

This paper focuses on the relationship of trade, on the one hand, with gender and poverty, on the other, within the context of the human development paradigm. Specifically, it examines the impact of trade liberalization on gender inequalities (primarily via employment, wages and the care economy) and the impact of gender inequality on trade performance. These interactions are discussed in light of main-stream literature on trade, growth and poverty reduction, which defines poverty in terms of income or consumption and largely ignores gender. The paper also considers the policy implications of a gender-aware approach to international trade analysis and the current world trade regime.

UNIFEM set up a network of African Women Economists at a seminar on 'Fostering African Women’s Participation in Economic Policy Formulation and Monitoring,' held in Saly Portudal, Senegal from 29 October-3 November. Over 50 people from Central and West Africa attended the seminar, including governments representatives, technical advisors on economic and trade issues parliamentarians, journalists, UN officials, women activists and members of NGOs.

Poor women living in slums of Nairobi have been able to tell the world about their appalling living conditions by filming their lives on borrowed video cameras.

As the 16 days of activism against the abuse of women and children come to an end on 10 December, the Congress of South African Trade Unions thanks all those who joined the campaign and took a stand against the rising tide of violence against the most vulnerable sections of our society.

Kenyan women's groups accuse the security forces, sent to quell the ongoing unrest in the Kibera slum, of rape, arson and robbery. More than one hundred women marched to the Presidential Office, Thursday, to demand government intervention to end the violence.

We call on women's media, Internet managers, information and advocacy organizations -as well as researchers- to submit proposals for the second Know How Conference, to be held at the Makerere university campus, Kampala, Uganda, 21-26 July 2002.

Kenyan MP Jimmy Angwenyi is reported as saying that FGM rites are important to the community as they mark a "new" stage in life.

The women's wing of the Pentecostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) under the aegis of Social Securities Outreach (SSO) on Monday staged a peaceful demonstration to the Lagos State Governor's office protesting the death sentence passed on Safiya Hussain by a Sokoto State Sharia Court.

Tackling the roots of poverty will remain a pipe-dream unless women are involved in national planning strategies, said experts Thursday at a United Nations (news - web sites) meeting in New Delhi, India.