"Two excellent stories, one by Buzzfeed's Jina Moore and another by Lauren Wolfe at Foreign Policy, recently brought to light the fact that women make up 75 percent of the current Ebola epidemic's victims in Liberia. Earlier in the week, the Washington Post reported that in other affected states women have comprised 55 to 60 percent of the dead.

"The United Nations Development Programme in Ethiopia announced the appointment of its Goodwill Ambassador for Entrepreneurship at a high profile event held in Addis Ababa drawing members of the government, private sector and development partners.

Every day, women around the world are cracking glass ceilings. This week, one of those ceilings will shatter all the way from Cyprus -- and reverberations should be felt the world over.

Women groups and Civil Society Organisations have made their inputs into the Sierra Leone in-country monitoring of the United Nation Security Council Resolutions 1325 and 1820 Report for 2014.

It has been four months since the 14th of April -- the beginning of a life-changing horror story for almost 300 school girls in Nigeria. The recent kidnapping of these girls reminded me, the G(irls) 20 Summit delegate representing South Africa, of my position in the world as a woman, and made me grateful for the opportunities that I receive.

When Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee led women in song at the fish markets on the Liberian coast in the late 1990s, she began one of the most striking peace movements of our time. Amidst brutal civil war, Gbowee mobilized women across diverse religious and political affiliations to demand inclusion in their country's peace process.

In the last few days, while the world has been overwhelmed by the flow of information about atrocities committed by Islamic State (IS) jihadists, public officials and local media channels have confirmed that hundreds of Yezidi and Christian women have been abducted, some of them buried alive and others subjected to rape and sexual slavery.

Do women hold the key to a peaceful society? Much is known about the victimisation of women through rape, trafficking, and early marriages, but much is yet to be discovered about how women can be empowered in conflict settings to bridge the gap towards peace.

Operation Protective Edge and the costs of war in the latest round of the Israel-Palestine conflict have dominated all our newspaper headlines in the past month. Images of harm and horror have come to be the stock and trade of the media reporting on the ongoing hostilities. International law has been repeatedly invoked in this war, although often in ways that suggest its breach and even impotence.

Women leaders in the Ugandan police force and the military have called for deliberate measures and policies to increase the number of women and to promote gender equality in the country's security forces.

Without adequate numbers, they say, women are poorly represented in key departments of the different security organs which also affects the quality of security work.