Majdah al-Fallah flashes a broad smile and pumps the hands of shoppers in downtown Tripoli as she works potential voters on the campaign trail ahead of Libya's landmark national assembly elections on Saturday.

The Bangladeshi government is attempting to register birth data online to combat high levels of child marriage. On 8 June in Bangladesh's western Khustia District, local media reported that 15-year-old Iva Parvin was to be married off by parents hiding her age, but local officials challenged the marriage and demanded proof that she had reached the legal marrying age of 18.

Despite the placing on Pakistan's statute books of tougher laws against the practice of `swara' or the “giving away” of a woman to a rival party to settle a dispute, the tradition continues.

It was the onset of winter, still in the early stages of a bloody civil war, and Aziza Saidova couldn't imagine things getting any worse.

Women constitute about 55 percent of Colombia's 3 to 5 million internally displaced population, and a new land restitution law here specifies that special attention and security be given to them as they try to regain their land.

The personal stories of three displaced women living in the Bogota area, however, demonstrate how difficult it could be for the law to serve this purpose.

How much has really changed since NGO Save the Children, and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) published a report that shocked humanitarian agencies a decade ago, when it exposed sexual exploitation and abuse (SEA) perpetrated on disaster-affected communities in West Africa by aid workers, peacekeepers and other community members?

The situation in northern Lebanon has made a turn for the worse during the last couple of weeks, after several outbreaks of violence in connection with the civil war in Syria. In the Lebanese city of Tripoli, the military presence has increased and there are significantly more weapons in circulation. But there are also people trying to stop the violence.

When rich countries like the U.S., Japan, and NATO nations get together periodically to discuss the future of development funding for Afghanistan, who represents the interests of women and children who actually live there? Mostly men.

SECURICO, the company that Zimbabwe's Divine Ndhlukula started in her cottage in the late 1990s with four employees and very little capital, has become one of her country's largest security firms. According to her, perhaps the biggest barrier she had to face when she set it up was her gender.

The Regional Women's Lobby (RLW), a network of women from seven countries in the Western Balkans, organized a roundtable entitled “Dialogue between women in Kosova”. The event provided a forum for women to discuss and share on how to integrate Serb women of northern Kosovo into Kosovo institutions and social life.