After she became a mother just before her 15th birthday, Diana Ricardo was forced to drop out of school and give up her dreams of a brighter future.

Ricardo says she was impregnated by a teacher, who afterwards refused paternity testing claiming he could not afford a second wife.

ANCWL calls for the ANC to set up a a sub-committee on gender.

The ANC Women's League on Wednesday announced measures aimed at ensuring that women are properly represented in key public and political positions.

This included the draft Gender Equity Bill, intended to ensure a 50/50 representation in key positions, league president Angie Motshekga told reporters in Durban.

At the age of 13, Chantal Kifungo* is mother to a ten-month-old baby girl. It wasn't her choice. Almost two years ago, she was raped by her stepfather – and fell pregnant with his child.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) on Friday adopted the Dakar Declaration that gives women equal participation and full involvement in all peace and security issues in compliance with a landmark UN Security Council resolution.

A UN statement on Saturday said the representatives of the countries adopted the declaration after a three-day forum in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.

The Democratic Republic of Congo said on Friday it "had not expected the admonitions" of the UN Security Council and denied recent mass rapes in the country were linked to the government, a spokesperson told AFP.

The DR Congo officers deployed in the Kivu provinces "were put into offensive contact with these groups of rapists, we beseiged them", said government spokesperson Lambert Mende, when questioned by AFP.

First the rebel soldiers told residents of the villages in the mineral-rich eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) not to worry. They were just there for a rest and would do no harm. But as dusk fell, the fighters encircled five villages simultaneously, and the gang rapes began.

Six or seven men lined up to take their turn. The victims ranged from a month-old baby boy to a 110-year-old great-great-grandmother.

United Nations peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) are building detention facilities in the country's troubled east to ensure that female detainees are safely and securely housed while they await trial.

In the wake of mass rapes of civilians in the restive far east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Security Council called on the country to take “swift and fair” action to bring the perpetrators to justice.

Hundreds of people – including more than two dozen children – were raped by members of armed groups in July and August in the volatile North Kivu province.

In yet another grisly deja vu, the world has heard about hundreds of rapes in a small area of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC, or Congo) in late July and early August, many of them in North Kivu, within a few miles of a United Nations encampment of peacekeepers charged with protecting civilians. The UN is not just negligent but complicit in these crimes.

The UN Security Council on Friday renewed a strong condemnation of the mass rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo, stressing in particular Kinshasa's primary responsibility in the provision of security and protection of its citizens.