In a speech at Ahfad University for Women in Omdurman, Sudan, on April 9, USAID Deputy Administrator Donald Steinberg announced a new USAID global grant program to increase the substantive involvement of women in peace processes.

The Federation of African Media Women in Zimbabwe (FAMWZ) says there is lack of gender sensitivity in Zimbabwean media.

FAMWZ said female media practitioners continued to be trampled upon, with very few women to date having managed to get into the higher echelons in the media fraternity.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has launched a film documenting how the hopes and dreams of women, indigenous and disadvantaged groups in Nepal were fused into the country's new constitution.

As many as 4,000 cases of violence against women have been registered by Jammu and Kashmir State Commission for Women (JKSCW), a senior official today said.

"After inception of the Commission in the state, around 4,000 cases of violence against women were registered by it in Jammu and Kashmir", Secretary JKSCW Hafeeza Muzaffar said, adding, out of those 1,500 cases were settled amicably.

Legally, each of Peru's 25 administrative regions must have a plan for promoting equal opportunities for women. But over the last year, only 10 regions have actually allocated resources to the task of overcoming gender inequity, while another 10 have not even drawn up the compulsory equal opportunities plan.

A drastic rise in reported "honor" killings and fatal domestic violence in Turkey has sparked a vigorous debate about the government's recent attempts to address the problem. It also highlights the clash of conservative values with the country's rapid modernization.

The United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) in Uganda expresses its concern about the human rights violations resulting from the State's response to the walk-to-work protests, organised in various locations across Uganda. The intervention of the security forces resulted in infringements of the rights to life, liberty and security of the person, and the freedoms of association, assembly and expression.

When Bangladeshi film Meherjaan was released in January this year, it was a great moment for the director Rubaiyat Hossain.

It was her debut and in making it she had joined a handful of female film directors in Bangladesh.

The feature film is about a Bangladeshi woman's love affair with a Pakistani Baloch soldier during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence.

With the exception of the three nations of Nepal, Bhutan and Iran, Cornell University's Kathryn March, Feminist and Professor of Anthropology, Gender, Sexuality Studies and Public Affairs says, "Every single country there has had its highest political position occupied by a woman, at least once."

More than 800 people have been killed this year in a rise in violence in south Sudan before its independence in July, the United Nations said on Wednesday.

Southern Sudanese voted to separate from the north in a January referendum, promised to them as part of a 2005 peace accord which ended decades of civil war in Sudan. The war claimed some two million lives and destabilised much of the region.