Political Participation - News

Libyan exile Shahrazad Kablan was teaching school in Cincinnati when the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi began in her hometown, Benghazi. She put her house on the market and within weeks had moved to Qatar, where she hosted a taboo-busting show on the pro-rebel Libya TV. On Wednesday night she was in Manhattan, drumming up support among women's rights activists for the long slog ahead as Libya rebuilds.“We need help,” Ms. Kablan said. “I want people to remember that Libya is a story of hope, but we need the international community to play its part.”

Maya Jribi, the only woman in a leadership job at one of Tunisia's main political parties, says it's been an uphill battle to persuade other women to run as candidates in the Oct. 23 elections. “I recruited some excellent lawyers but they all had reasons not to run,” said Jribi, deputy head of the Democratic Progressive Party, or PDP, in an interview in the capital, Tunis. “They didn't have enough experience, they didn't like speaking in public.” Jribi's party has put women at the top of its candidate lists in only three of the 33 constituencies, and she's “not happy about it.”

“ALL of us were there, throwing stones, moving dead bodies. We did everything. There was no difference between men and women.” So says Asmaa Mahfouz, an Egyptian activist, remembering the protests that felled Hosni Mubarak at the beginning of the year. Though some men told her to get out of the way, others held up umbrellas to protect her.

On Sunday, Sept. 25, 2011 King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia announced that Saudi women now have the right to serve as members of the Shura Council, the appointed consultative council that advises the king, and are allowed to run as candidates and nominate candidates in the next set of municipal elections which will be in 2015. This new law will make a historic change in the role of women in Saudi Arabia.

Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Afghan women emerged as a high-profile focus of U.S. policy. Women's progress was promoted as a powerful, positive product of the international presence in the war-scarred country. But ten years later, with negotiation and reconciliation widely viewed as the only options for ending the war, Afghan women's rights seems largely forgotten. President Barack Obama notably said nothing of women in his 2009 speech on the war--his most significant public statement on the conflict--at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. And though Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has remained a powerful advocate for Afghan women, leaders in that country wonder how strong U.S. support will be when Clinton is no longer in office

Zambia has come a long way in trying to achieve social, economic and political development. Several initiatives have been put in place by many stakeholders, all aimed at addressing the development challenges that this country has faced. As a result, the country has since then recorded significant achievements in the education, health, agriculture, mining, as well as the many other areas of human endeavor.

The World Bank has commended the government for its efforts at creating an enabling environment for women to participate actively in socio-economic development.

A workshop on post referendum gender issues commences today. The workshop is organized by Gender and Development Unit at Development Studies and Research Institute of University of Khartoum in collaboration with German based Friedrich Ebert Organization, and will focus on constitution and laws.

Insherah Jernazi adheres to such a strict interpretation of Islamic modesty that she never leaves home without covering herself in a long black robe. Her veil leaves only a narrow opening for her eyes. She wears black gloves to avoid even accidental contact with a man who is not a relative. But as the six-month rebellion against Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi closed in on Tripoli, Mrs. Jernazi did something she had never done before. She said “no” to her husband.

Women in the country particularly those in Buipe in the Central Gonja District have been urged to use their natural endowments and resources to solve chieftaincy disputes to promote unity and development.