Images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of African-American George Floyd, who then died, have sparked protests from Amsterdam to Nairobi, but they also expose deeper grievances among demonstrators over strained race relations in their own countries.
Source: ICIR Nigeria
OBY Ezekwesili, a former Minister of Education, says the culture of impunity embedded in the affairs of Nigeria has aided and normalized sexual violence against women where perpetrators go unpunished.
Source: The Guardian
Covid-19 school closures have exposed children around the world to human rights abuses such as forced genital mutilation, early marriage and sexual violence, child protection experts say.
Globally, the World Bank estimates that 1.6 billion children were locked out of education by Covid-19. As schools in England and around the world prepare to reopen this week, NGOs warn that millions of the world’s most vulnerable children may never return to the classroom, and say that after decades fighting for girls’ education the pandemic could cause gender equality in education to be set back decades.
In Tanzania, girls sent home from boarding schools where they were being protected from FGM have already been cut. In the Sahel region, where early marriage is widespread, Unicef worries that many girls will never return to school.
The Dutch charity Terre des Hommes runs a safe house for girls in Tanzania, protecting them from FGM.
“The community has taken advantage of this situation of Covid-19 and where children are now back at home they are cutting their girls. They know it is against the law but they are not afraid. We had one mother who was jailed for a year after carrying out FGM but for her she is happy. She is locked up but her girl is cut.
“Many girls have been cut, including girls we had managed to keep safe through the cutting season, which began in October last year. Some girls escaped and they ran to our FGM centre; we had several girls just turn up. For these children, school is a safe place.”
The Tanzanian government is now sending back small numbers of pupils, starting with those who have exams in early June.
In west and central Africa alone, 120 million children were sent home after schools shut, and some had to make dangerous journeys over hundreds of miles on their own.
Andy Brooks is Unicef’s child protection adviser in west and central Africa and has worked on issues of child exploitation for 30 years.
He says one major concern for girls is that being out of school for a prolonged period of time puts them at risk of early marriage. “Secondary education is a major delayer of early marriage. In this region of west and central Africa, four out of 10 girls are married before 18. If you look at the countries of the Sahel – Mali and Niger, Burkina Faso – it’s six out of 10.”
Brooks says there are fears for those who never return. “It’s a real worry that girls won’t come back … [because of the Covid-19 outbreak] the financial stresses might be even harder and families will be looking for girls to get married earlier.”
However, the pandemic may offer an opportunity to help some children, he says. “There is a phenomenon in the Sahel area, where many children are sent across borders to be with Qur’anic teachers and learn Arabic. There are hundreds of thousands of [these] children across the region, known as almajirai. They live away from home and the outcomes for these children are very poor; they often end up begging on the street.”
The sudden closure of schools put many children in danger by sending them on long unaccompanied journeys home, says Brooks.
“When [the schools] were closed suddenly children were roaming around trying to get home … Over 7,000 moved just from Nigeria to Niger; [we think] about 30,000 of them are on the move. It is an awful moment for vulnerable children but Covid has kicked open the door to this situation that wasn’t sufficiently known about. It could be an opportunity for change.”
Since the Covid-19 lockdown, some state leaders in Nigeria have called for an end to the poorly regulated Qur’anic schooling system.
In their recent framework for safely reopening schools, Unicef, the World Bank and the World Food Programme stated: “The adverse effects of school closures on children’s safety … are well documented. Being out of school … increases the risk of teenage pregnancy, sexual exploitation, child marriage, violence and other threats.”
The UN refugee agency has warned that school closures risk “reversing small gains recently made in expanding access to education for refugee children”.
Even before coronavirus shuttered schools, fewer than half of school-age refugee children were enrolled, while only one in four were attending secondary school.
In Bangladesh, aid groups had been preparing to launch a pilot programme that would allow Rohingya refugee children in the settlements to start learning from the Myanmar curriculum for the first time in hundreds of informal learning centres.
Babu Nisa, a refugee teaching assistant at one of the centres, told UNHCR that her students were “very upset” when they heard it would be closed as part of the lockdown.
Likewise, in Latin America, groups working with refugees fear Covid-19 will make finding school places even harder for displaced children.
Underlying fear of the resurgence of the Covid-19 virus also hangs over students who are returning to education, and, as in Europe, keeps some at home even when schools reopen.
Eric Hazard is campaign and policy director for Save the Children in Africa. He points to the known risk of sexual violence that girls face when not in school. “We know what happened during the Ebola crisis. There was an increase in children who dropped out of school, in particular girls. Over 11,000 girls in Sierra Leone became pregnant. We need to pay serious attention to the secondary risk [of lockdown] in terms of violence and sexual abuse against children.”
In the rural Zimbabwe district of Wedza, a new electric-powered motorcycle is helping bring income to poor women and easing the burden of looking after families.
On May 13, Zimbabwe’s main opposition party, The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC Alliance), carried out a flash protest against the government’s failure to provide relief food or funds to the people in the Warren Park suburb during the COVID-19 national lockdown.
Source: Standard
Covid-19 is an unprecedented pandemic in scope and impact. Every facet of human life bears the strain, loss and change occasioned by the pervasive nature of the global emergency. Covid-19 has unfortunately further worsened pre-existing inequalities, discrimination and marginalisation of women and girls in more ways than one.
Source: Maverick Citizen
Monday, 25 May marks Africa Day. What does that mean in practice? Our experiences as social accountability practitioners in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi and South Africa oblige us to do more than merely celebrate the shiny ideals of Pan-Africanism on this day.
Source: The Conversation
Amid global commitments to defeat, or at least minimise, the pervasive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, the impact on the African continent remains unclear. African governments have moved quickly to mobilise resources and strengthen their emergency preparedness and response capacities.
But particular attention needs to be paid to the most vulnerable members of the population. There are ongoing discussions on pressing health issues including women’s health.
Source: DailyMonitor
Pregnant mothers in Nebbi District are giving birth from homes due to lack of transport to health centres during the lockdown, putting their lives and those of unborn babies at risk.
Source: The Guardian
Rwanda is to release 50 women who were jailed for having abortions after a personal pardon was issued by the country’s president, Paul Kagame.
Human rights activists welcomed the pending release of the women, six of whom had been given life sentences – the highest penalty available to the courts – two serving 25 years and the others terms ranging from 12 months to 20 years.
It is 7am and hundreds of children have come out on this chilly morning to queue for a plate of porridge.
With makeshift masks covering their faces, the children wait for Samantha Murozoki to start dishing up the warm food into whatever plastic tub, plate, tin cup – or even ripped-off corner of a cardboard box – is presented to her.
Source: Global Voices
#BringBackOurGirls and #ArewaMeToo reshaped political activism in Nigeria
Source: Thomson Reuters Fondation
Somalia's coronavirus lockdown has led to a huge increase in female genital mutilation (FGM), with circumcisers going door to door offering to cut girls stuck at home during the pandemic, a charity said on Monday.
Plan International said the crisis was undermining efforts to eradicate the practice in Somalia, which has the world's highest FGM rate, with about 98% of women having been cut.
Source: Africa.com
The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and Standard Bank Group are calling on women fund managers across Africa to apply to join the African Women Leadership Fund initiative (AWLF), an innovative impact fund that will provide capital and expertise to successful candidates.
Source: Thomson Reuters Fondation
No more child brides? Ethiopia's efforts to end child marriages could be undermined by the new coronavirus.
Source: UNDPArabic
COVID-19 has placed unprecedented global pressure on essential health supplies, putting the most vulnerable at risk of ‘missing out’. In Sudan, this means hundreds of thousands in Khartoum’s poorest urban area, Mayo, and similar locations.
In Rwanda, Benimana Uwera Gilberthe, a scholar and pepper producer, experienced first-hand the challenges of breaking into agribusiness.
Malawi is not doing enough to enforce its laws on human trafficking, resulting in a number of cases against perpetrators being dismissed by the courts, according to a local rights group. But local officials say that this Southern African nation — one of the poorest countries in the world — just doesn’t have the financial resources to do so.
Source: BBC
Sex workers in Zambia are helping to trace people who have contracted coronavirus after a surge in new infections at the border town of Nakonde, the health minister has said.
Source: Ghana Business News
The World Health Organisation argues that maternal mortality is unacceptably high. It notes that about 295,000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth in 2017. The vast majority of these deaths (94 per cent) occurred in low-resource settings, and most could have been prevented.