It began as a rumour and, having gathered legs, is now about to become viral. Earlier this month, Sani Yerima, the fifty-something year-old, former two-term Governor of Zamfara State and serving Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria reportedly took a fourth wife. Ordinarily, it should be no news that another African man from Nigeria has married a fourth wife. The circumstances of this reported marriage are extraordinary. According to the story, Senator Sani Yerima first divorced his fourth wife, who, after nearly two years of marriage and a baby, is still a teenager and well below voting age in Nigeria.

South Africa has one of the highest rates in the world of unemployment for comparable middle-income countries, writes Kimani Ndungu, with the latest official statistics showing that by December 2009, around 4.2 million people out of a total labour force of 17 million were officially unemployed. But this figure does not include almost 2 million individuals who have simply lost hope of ever finding a job. For women, says Ndungu, the situation is nothing but drastic.

With Madagascar's political crisis still far from resolved, economic and social rights have remained outside of the concerns of the country's leadership and mainstream media alike, writes Zo Randriamaro. Incidents of human rights abuses have been much less publicised than developments around political competition, Randriamaro notes, a reality reflective of elite concerns for self-protection and personal enrichment at the expense of ordinary livelihoods.

Kenyan church leaders' opposition to the country's new constitution on the grounds of objecting to abortion is dishonest, argue Beth Maina and Cenya Ciyendi. In the current constitution abortion remains legal purely under circumstances of medical emergency – something that is not set to change in the new draft constitution – Maina and Ciyendi note, but this has not allayed a wave of church-based mobilisation designed to deny women the right to determine what happens to their own bodies.

In March GenARDIS grant winners met for the last time after more than a year of innovative research and work to improve rural women’s lives in countries like Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic and Zambia. With projects as diverse as community radio drama groups, pest control through information access and using technology to promote women’s inheritance and land rights, projects were as diverse as the countries they came from.

A Cabinet committee has recommended changes to Ndorwa West MP David Bahati’s anti-gay legislation that preclude the possibility of discarding it, Daily Monitor has learnt. But the report, which is yet to be discussed by Cabinet, indicts Mr Bahati for not applying the kind of sophistication that would have anticipated the international condemnation that came after the draft legislation was tabled in Parliament last year.

A protest march will take place in Pretoria on Freedom Day, April 27, to demand equality for lesbians and gays in both the U.S. and Uganda. Organised by Up & Out, the University of Pretoria's gay organisation, the protestors will march from the Ugandan Embassy to the U.S. Embassy. The U.S. has been slammed by the organisation for its continued refusal to grant same-sex couples federal marriage rights and benefits. "How can a supposed first world nation decide to do such things?" asked Up & Out in a statement.

Since the first days of the earthquake, many humanitarian and human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, have issued warnings about the increased risk of gender based and sexual violence. The risks are well founded. Thousands of displaced people are sleeping in public spaces in just one square meter or even less; women are obliged to bath almost naked under the eyes of the other residents and passers-by; children sleep alone at night because they are unaccompanied or their mothers are working outside the camps in order to feed them.

Women and children will benefit equitably from family and national resources should the proposed constitution sail through, law experts have said. Speaking at a land reform forum Friday, law experts said the draft law guarantee equitable access to matrimonial property and public land, and provides for the enactment of laws to govern the same.

The mission of this conference is to identify and celebrate indigenous and evolving male, female and/or gender variant same-sex sexual practices, identities and communities, including expressions of gender diversity, and to promote their social acceptance and their physical and social well-being.

As the case of Millicent Gaika (30), a Cape Town lesbian who was beaten up and raped by a man known to her, is presently being heard at Wynberg Court, government has condemned the ongoing acts of “corrective rape” in the country and has vowed to put an end to them. After the man was arrested, the case was first heard at the Wynberg Court on Tuesday, 6 April but was postponed to today, Tuesday 13 April. Speaking outside the court where people are marching in support of Gaika, Ndumi Funda of Lulek’isisizwe LBT Women’s Project said, “We are strongly opposing bail for the perpetrator and we want to see justice being done for Gaika."

A gay rights activist in Kenya is receiving death threats and has been attacked on several occasions by random people who have seen and read about him in an anti-gay website that publishes and puts up posters of suspected homosexuals in different cities of Kenya, as ‘NOT WANTEDs’. The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) revealed this week, as it denounced the website , stating that it is a violation of rights and that it victimises people, in the name of religion.

Activists have cautioned that the Gates Foundation funded study, released today in The Lancet and showing welcome progress on reducing maternal mortality globally, also reveals one catastrophic exception. They said that current global AIDS programmes were reminiscent of the Victorian era, casting pregnant women as potential vectors of disease, and ignoring their health in the single-minded rush to achieve a 2010 goal of preventing the transmission of HIV to their babies.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said that its new toolkit will highlight anti-hunger and development efforts by helping countries gather more accurate information on differences between men and women in agriculture.

In the wake of a continent-wide upsurge in homophobia with Zimbabwe’s leaders Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai being the most recent to put there voices to it, Rev. Pieter Oberholzer and gay Christian activist, Victor Mukasa, were chased away “like lepers” from a consultative meeting on homosexuality held on 16^th March in Malawi. They’ve been attending on invitation of secretary-general Canaan Phiri of the Malawi Council of Churches (MCC), who organised the event.

First Lady Thandiwe Banda has said Zambia has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and that safe motherhood is still far from being assured. Ms Banda was speaking in Lusaka when she officiated at the opening of a media capacity building workshop on the campaign for accelerated reduction of maternal mortality in Africa (CARMMA).

Women's civil society groups were noticeable by their absence from the landmark Haiti donor conference on 31 March, which secured pledges of US$5.3 billion over the next two years to support the country’s post-quake recovery. Their lack of a presence at the meeting was indicative of a broader missing voice in Haiti’s long-term reconstruction prospects, gender activists argued.

Gender Links, a dynamic Southern African NGO based in Johannesburg invites applications for the post of Editor of its Opinion and Commentary Service and related publications. All applications must be received by close of business on 23 April 2010. Late applications will not be considered.

It is possible to address the negative effects of female circumcision without denigrating African women. African women who have undergone circumcision also deserve integrity and respect! Please this petition urging Good Vibrations to drop their support of Clitoraid. Clitoraid's humiliating campaign urges supporters adopt African women's clitorises.

The 2010 Gender Institute selected the theme of Gender and Sports in Africa’s Development: Towards Gender Equality in Sports in Africa. This builds on the debates on the same theme held during the 2009 edition of the Annual Gender Symposium held in Cairo in November 2009. The papers presented at this symposium revealed a marked gender disparity within the African sports space.