As Africa commemorates the International Day of Democracy on 15th September and the Peace Day on 21st September, the African Women's Development and Communication Network (FEMNET) urges African governments to take concrete steps to secure equal participation of women and men in democratic, peace and security processes.

A single mother of three, survivor of prison torture and exile. A pediatrician, linguist and practiced buster of gender barriers as the first female president of Chile. This is the resume that makes Michelle Bachelet an excellent choice to lead the newly created United Nations agency to promote gender equality around the globe, to be called U.N. Women.

For the first time in its history the Nepali Congress will see a long queue of women participants in the 12th general convention. As many as 500 women representatives selected from village and regional level conventions and under reserved quotas are participating in the conclave.

If Brazilian voters elect a woman president next month, what might have appeared to be isolated developments in Chile and Argentina would start to look more like a trend in the southern countries of South America.

A poll in Peru says two women are the front-runners in the Oct. 3 election for Lima's mayor, a post to which only men have been elected since the city was founded in 1535.

Susana Villaran, candidate of the leftist Social Force party, leads with 42 per cent support. Lourdes Flores of the National Unity movement is second at 28 per cent, the Ipsos-Apoyo poll says.

In a rural Kabul suburb, hundreds of men jostle for the chance to ink their finger and vote, while next door, shielded by a curtain, only a few women wait for their own line to form.

Although 10 of Kabul's 33 parliamentary seats have been reserved for women, few were visible in the capital's outlying hamlet of Chawni after voting began in Afghanistan's second parliamentary election since 2001.

West African countries today moved towards ensuring the equal participation and full involvement in all peace and security issues in compliance with a landmark Security Council resolution.

Representatives of 16 countries across the region adopted the Dakar Declaration after a three-day forum in the Senegalese capital that considered how West Africa can better implement resolution 1325.

The U.N.'s $169 billion catch-up plan for global maternal health--the runt of the development-goal litter--faces a final checkup meeting in New York this week. As a maternal death clock tick-tocks in Times Square, the big question is money.

In mid-August in the northern Afghanistan province of Kunduz, the Taliban carried out a horrific sentence against two young Afghan lovers who had eloped against their families' wishes. The punishment was death by stoning. Deemed by Islamic extremists to be justified under sharia law, the process involves partially burying the accused, after which a male crowd hurls stones at the victims' exposed heads until they die.

With five years left till the Millennium Development Goals' 2015 deadline, civil society groups say South Africa has made progress on some goals but regressed on others.

Pal Mfunzana's sole source of income is a couple of corrugated tin shacks, indistinguishable from many others in Diepsloot, a deeply impoverished slum on the northern edge of Johannesburg.