The UN is set to empower Tanzanian women ahead of the General Election in October 31, the world body said in a statement released Wednesday.

It said the empowerment includes improving their skills in public speaking, media engagement, campaign planning, presentations, community mobilisation, advocacy and lobbying.

A United Nations-backed project in Venezuela has trained dozens of government officials and security force members on how to prevent sexual and gender-based violence and provide better care and protection for victims.

Women Democracy Group, an NGO, has launched a campaign to train 3,000 women who are to contest for various seats in the forthcoming general elections.

The coordinator of the organisation, Ms Rita Aciro, said the programme is aimed at equipping woman candidates in the 2011 general elections with fundraising, management and publicity and public speaking skills among others.

UN investigators have accused a group of rebels of gang rape. Members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR) committed the crime in late July in a small village in North Kivu province (eastern Congo). At least 200 FDLR rebels participated in a series of night-long assaults on women in the village.

Congolese community leaders say they begged local U.N. officials and army commanders to protect villagers days before rebels gang-raped scores of people, from a month-old baby boy to a 110-year-old great-great-grandmother.

Some 240 women, girls and babies may have been raped after rebels recently seized a town in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the UN says.

Officials had previously said they had received reports of 150 rapes in and around the town of Luvungi.

The UN mission has been heavily criticised for not doing more to protect the local population as it had peacekeepers based nearby.

A senior United Nations peacekeeping official, who is visiting the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) following the recent mass rape of civilians by members of illegal armed groups, has travelled to the eastern region of the country where the crimes were committed, a UN spokesperson said today.

Kigali City has topped the Gender Based Violence (GBV) crime list with 510 cases registered in the first six months of the year. The report indicates that 1,572 cases were registered country wide by the end of June.

The Southern and Eastern Provinces are the second and third with 318 and 313 cases respectively, while the Western and Northern provinces registered the lowest cases, according to the report.

Members of Rwanda Women Parliamentarians Forum (RWPF), who are currently meeting in the Western Province, have acknowledged that poverty among women remains a major challenge.

The lawmakers are meeting evaluate their 2009 activities and part of 2010 and set projections for the coming year.

The wires have been hot this week with reports of a slow-moving mass rape crusade in Walikale, Congo. According to The New York Times, rebel soldiers raped at least 154 Congolese women and four baby boys in broad daylight, 18 miles from a United Nations base of 80 peacekeepers, over a four-day span in late July & early August.

"Why is this happening?"

"Why didn't the peacekeepers intervene?"