News: Children of Empowered Women Grew Taller

Care and USAID highlights dramatic drop in child malnutrition and provides an inside look at a program called SHOUHARDO that combined nutritional support with women’s empowerment initiatives to reduce child stunting, a key measure of malnutrition, by 28 percent in less than four years. That’s twice the rate of the average U.S. government-funded food aid project of its kind. The program was designed to reduce malnutrition among 2 million of the poorest people in Bangladesh. Researchers found that women who participated in empowerment interventions to help them fight sexual harassment, move about their communities more freely and gain a greater say in household decisions were less likely to have stunted children than women who received only direct nutrition interventions such as regular food rations. In other words, the children of empowered women actually grew taller.

Access the article here

News: 2010 Society for the Anthropology of Work Book Prize awarded to The Gender of Globalization (SAR Press)

You can access the Table of Contents, read excerpts and the external reviews of the book at this link of the publisher:  http://sarweb.org/?sar_press_gender_of_globalization-p:sar_press_advanced_seminar_series

News: In Kenya, Survey of Female Farmers Uncovers Challenges

A World Bank survey in Kenya that seeks women’s input and data to inform agricultural policy shows that female farmers have limited access to water, energy and finance, and few women own property they can use as collateral for loans. As agriculture becomes ‘feminized’ and men abandon farms to work in cities, policies must change to meet women’s needs. Read more here: http://go.worldbank.org/ETKDJPYK70

News: Women compete better when they are in teams, research finds

[Source: Guardian] Nearly two-thirds of the “gender competition gap” – the gap between the likelihood of men or women to enter a competition – disappears when people are offered the chance to compete in two-person teams rather than as individuals. Academics Andrew Healy and Jennifer Pate claim that their findings, published in the Economic Journal, have important implications for the design of competitive environments, such as elections and corporate career ladders.

See full article by Guardian here. Read the abstract of the paper here.

News: Ghana: Group Puts Women’s Inheritance Rights Under Spotlight

Source: AllAfrica

03/08/2011

The right of women to inherit their deceased husbands is one that has faced great resistance from adherents of traditional customs and some religious sects in most African societies, and therefore requiring concerted efforts to bring about the needed change that will recognise women as equal partners in relationships, with inalienable right of succession in the event of their spouses predeceasing them.

The denial of women’s succession rights in recent times has been compounded in situations where a male spouse dies from HIV/AIDS. In Ghana, some communal societies pour scorn on the female spouse, often accusing her of being the one who had infected the deceased with the virus. The woman is usually, in circumstances as depicted, driven away with her children from their matrimonial home and dispossessed of all the properties that commonly belonged to the couple, rendering the woman and her children destitute.

News: Rape reporting during war

Reports of sexual violence during the ongoing unrest in Libya have captured headlines across the world. Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi’s forces, some have alleged, were given Viagra to facilitate their rape of hundreds, if not thousands, of victims. Recently, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both expressed outrage at what was apparently a purposeful campaign. Yet recent reports by the U.N. and by advocacy groups shed doubt on these claims. Amnesty International, for example, has been unable to locate a single rape victim, or even anyone who knows a victim.

As the veracity of stories about sexual violence in Libya came into question, the American Journal of Public Health published a study estimating that the prevalence of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was far worse than previously documented. The article estimated that between 2006 and 2007 more than 400,000 women between the ages of 15 and 49 were raped during the war there — 26 times the U.N.’s official count.

So what are we to make of these two cases — a possible exaggeration of rape in Libya and a gross underestimation of it in the DRC? Wartime sexual violence has rightly been called a hidden epidemic; in truth, we know very little about its actual magnitude and impact. Reports of rape are increasingly common in countries wracked by conflict, such as Colombia, the DRC, East Timor, Côte d’Ivoire, Libya, and Sudan, but no one knows what the relationship is between increased reports and increased rape. Even in peacetime, sexual violence is severely and unevenly underreported. Beyond prevalence, patterns of where, when, and by whom rape is committed — not to mention why it is committed — are even less clear. War exponentially worsens these problems. As a result, estimates of rape in prominent conflicts are often unreliable.

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News: One-third of foundations in Europe actively support women and girls

Large gap remains between European foundations’ interest and their investments

research report european giving

25 May 2011- An estimated 37 percent of surveyed European foundations made grants or operated programmes intended to benefit women and girls in 2009, according to a report released today by Mama Cash and the Foundation Center, at the European Foundation Centre’s Annual General Assembly in Portugal.

Untapped Potential: European Foundation Funding for Women and Girls indicates that the median percentage of total grant monies allocated by foundations in support of women and girls was 4.8 percent, based on 2009 grants data from sampled foundations. Yet, substantially higher numbers of European foundations (90 percent) expressed interest in at least one issue related to women and girls.

News: USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah announced the establishment of USAID’s new Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.

The Economic Growth, Agriculture, and Trade’s (EGAT) Women in Development Office is being transformed into a new Office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, focused on building partnerships that can deliver results. This office will also give greater support to female entrepreneurship, scale up initiatives designed to enhance women’s ownership of key assets like land and housing, and work to reduce gender gaps in access to new technology and infrastructure. Carla Koppell is the new Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Office. The complete speech is available at http://www.usaid.gov/press/releases/2011/ps110426.html.

Gates Blog: The Importance of Investing in Women Farmers

Last week was an exciting time to be working for women farmers as they contribute to poverty reduction and agriculture development. Two new reports articulated the business case why we should all be targeting our efforts and resources to getting women farmers the tools and resources they need to manage productive farms and control the benefits they receive from their labor.

see it here

News: ALINe working with the World Food Programme’s Purchase for Progress initiative to further women’s economic empowerment

ALINe is supporting the World Food Programme (WFP) in the development of the Purchase for Progress (P4P) global gender strategy. Through the P4P initiative, WFP is using its purchasing power to offer smallholder farmers opportunities to access agricultural markets, become competitive players in those markets and thus improve their livelihoods. P4P provides a particularly appropriate vehicle to economically empower female smallholder farmers, but the challenge however, remains how to most effectively achieve this goal.

WFP has identified 8 core activities that it believes to be particularly effective and beginning February 2011, ALINe will provide P4P with specific guidance on how these suggested activities can be adapted to account for local and cultural differences in the 21 pilot countries where P4P is currently being implemented and build towards a P4P global strategy. ALINe will also undertake fieldwork in Ethiopia, Mali and Guatemala, to ‘ground truth’ and contextualise key assumptions, focusing on the operational aspects of the strategy and on the impact of P4P on women’s empowerment and access to markets. This work will feed into a broader scope of work that the WFP Gender Service has commissioned the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) BRIDGE Programme to carry out on its behalf, to advise on how to mainstream gender across key dimensions of WFP’s work at field level and how to build capacity of WFP staff to ensure the gender mainstreaming is effective.