Despite the provisions of the Family Code, child marriages are on the rise in Morocco. The Moudawana raised the minimum marriage age from 14 to 18 and required a judge's approval for nuptials with a minor. Still, five years after the Family Code became law, 33,253 females below the age of 18 tied the knot.

Cameroon continues to arrest and prosecute individuals under a law that criminalizes same-sex sexual activity. This law has consequences for LGBT people beyond their unacceptable arrests and imprisonment. It drives inequality within the justice system and promotes violence within families and communities. To combat these violations, in November IGLHRC launched the report, 'Criminalizing Identities: Rights Abuses in Cameroon based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.' The report was a collaborative effort with Human Rights Watch and the Cameroonian LGBT organisations Alternatives-Cameroun and l’Association pour la Défense des Droits des Homosexuels.

INTERIGHTS is pleased to invite applications from lawyers for an internship as part of the development and implementation of its work. This is a part-time or full-time placement (three to five days per week) to begin ideally in the first week of February 2011 for six weeks. It will provide an opportunity for a researcher with knowledge of women’s human rights and relevant law to assist our programme in developing a publication with:
- Legal research on international and comparative human rights law and practice with respect to the protection of women’s human rights;
- Researching case law and comparative and human rights standards on women’s human rights
- Compiling indexes for the publication
- Case summaries.

Young African women activists and feminists gathered in Ghana towards the end of last year and issued a statement on the African Women's Decade, climate change, food sovereignty and economic partnership agreements.

Preparations for the popular Cape Town Pride, taking place from 24 February to 6 March 2011 are underway in the Mother City and organisers have promised a remarkable event that will highlight the beauty of diversity and indicate the event is not only about beautiful bodies and drag queens but about gay families, normal gay businessmen, the transgender community and the unheard voices of 'our sisters' in the townships who often face intimidation and corrective rape.

How can non-governmental organisations (NGOs) tackle social issues such as HIV, gender equality and violence in rural African communities? A number of them, including South African Sonke Gender Justice network, Ubuntu Institute, CARE International and Zambian Women for Change (WFC) are working with traditional leaders as a gateway to reach the people in communities they are targeting.

FEMNET will be unveiling the first issue of The African Women’s Journal on 20 January 2011 in Nairobi, Kenya. The first of its kind in the region, The African Women’s Journal will provide well researched and analytical articles on women, gender and development issues in Africa. The theme for this first issue of the Journal is 'The African Women’s Decade (2010-2020): A Call for Action, Action and More Action'.

Politically motivated sexual violence against women in Zimbabwe takes many forms. These include extreme violence, gang rape and insertion of objects (bottles and sticks) into the women's genitalia. This report from the Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU) and Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights (ZADHR) is the first coming out of Zimbabwe focusing particularly on politically motivated rape; the aim of the study was to provide a valid and reliable description of cases of politically motivated rape. Since this was a clinical rather than an epidemiological study, there was no attempt to determine either the prevalence of political rape or to establish how representative the sample was.

'We are Young African women activists and feminists from various countries who gathered in Accra, Ghana on 20-23 November 2010 for the Regional Consultation and Training on Gender, Economic and Environmental Justice convened by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) and Third World Network-Africa. Recognising the challenges and uncertainties that the Africa region is facing in the context of systemic global crises, we affirm the central role of women in the resolution of these crises and the crucial need to address the gaps and fragmentation in the institutional and policy responses from governments and global governance institutions.'

Some Muslim women in western Uganda are demanding that a new HIV prevention programme for Muslims include condom promotion, going against calls by local religious leaders for the programme to be limited to messages on faithfulness and abstinence. 'The holy Koran allows Muslim men to marry four wives, but men still go out of wedlock and have extra-marital relationships,' Jazira Mugisa told IRIN/PlusNews.

Soldiers patrolling on the periphery of the BeitBridge border fence have been accused of sexually harassing desperate border jumpers intending to cross to South Africa. Zimbabweans living in South Africa who had come to the country hoping to acquire travel documents have been forced to leave the country without passports due to chaos at the Home Affairs Department. Sources who spoke to Radio VOP said women who use undesignated entry points into South Africa are subjected to sexual harassment including rape.

How is it possible that a woman living in a water-rich region only needs to open the tap to get enough water for herself and her family, while a woman in a water-scarce region has to walk for miles and miles to get far less water of much worse quality? This article has two parts. The first deals with dominant positions concerning water: the neoliberal agenda, consequences of water privatisation, and the UN stance. The second part looks at what is missing in this picture and ignored by the dominant perspectives - namely, global inequalities and gender discrimination.

The lives of Botswana’s transgender people are seemingly about to change for the better, following the registration of Rainbow Identity Association (RIA), a trans and intersex oriented organisation, formed in 2007 after founder, Skipper Mogapi, realised marginalisation of these gender identities among the general lesbian, gay and bisexual movement in that country.

Christiana Garpeh listened attentively with her headphones as she put together her first radio piece of the day. She ignored the Beyonce song playing in the newsroom to focus on transcribing an interview. The interview was with a woman from Pagos Island, a part of Monrovia cut off from the rest of the city by swamps. She was seeking donors for women's literacy classes and classes in soap making and tailoring. Each working day Garpeh produces about two such stories on the needs of women for broadcast by Liberia Women Democracy Radio, housed in a two-story building in Congo Town on the outskirts of Monrovia, the nation's capital.

Sex work has increasingly become a popular means of making money for young girls in the urban areas in Malawi. This article makes reference to an intervention project in Malawi that was implemented in 2004 and sought to empower sex workers and to encourage them to insist on consistent use of condoms. The messages were also designed to encourage the young sex workers to modify their behaviour and withdraw from the practice.

The Municipal Service Project (MSP) has undertaken in-depth examinations of the gendered effects of privatization of public services, with a particular emphasis on the ways in which privatization creates additional burdens for women and exacerbates the power imbalance caused by the gendered divisions of labour. A new briefing note available on their website covers this issue and also includes an extended bibliography broken down by sector (water, health and electricity/energy) and thematic areas of interest.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT ) organisations of Malawi have expressed concern over the delay by the Canadian authorities to issue visa to a Malawian gay Tiwonge Chimbalanga. Chimbalanga and his colleague Steve Monjeza hit the headlines following their arrest and conviction on homosexuality charges after going public about their engagement in December 2009.They were later released following a presidential pardon last year.

Slapped into submission by a child soldier, a man thanks the gunmen who have just raped his wife and daughter, now bedraggled and whimpering. Dozens of women in a large circle observe the harrowing scene. But this is theatre - as therapy. The 'stage' is the grounds of the General Referral Hospital of Panzi, in Bukavu, capital of eastern Democratic Republic of Congo’s South Kivu province, a facility that specializes in treating survivors of sexual violence, of whom there are a very large number in eastern DRC, where rape is widely used as a weapon by warring groups. The performance brings together both survivors and perpetrators of extreme violence.

This week, South Sudan is again going to the polls, this time to vote in a referendum on secession from the North. The preliminary result should be known by 15th January, and will mark one of the final stages of the historic 2005 agreement to end the long-standing conflict between North and South Sudan. All eyes will be on this vote, which is widely seen as likely to result in the South’s separation from the North. How will this shape women’s lives in North and South Sudan? asks this article from

'People living with disability face all sorts of discrimination. We are discriminated against at job interviews in schools. Every day is a battle to remain positive in the face of a world that is too bent on dismissing those among us that do not meet the standard of what is normal,' explains Mishi Juma, a disabled community leader from the Coast region. In the past, Juma never had a safe space to raise these issues. But all this has now changed. Juma and many other disabled women can now raise their concerns with the newly established Ministry of gender and social development.