Participation

Socioeconomic experts on Saturday called for including Middle East and North African (MENA) women and the young generation in the economy so as to achieve cross-sector development.

During a session titled: “Linking trade to development”, held under the World Economic Forum, the experts discussed means to better leverage regional and global trade to restart growth and drive economic and social development.

A report published in conjunction with a human rights conference to be held in Gambia from 24 October to 7 November paints a bleak picture of the plight of women in North Sudan, reserving caveated optimism for South Sudan.

Women of Jammu and Kashmir from both the sides of the Line of Control (LoC) expressed their desire for peace, security and economic stability in the region and demanded an immediate end to the protracted conflict.

The women during a two-day intra-Kashmir conference held at Gulmarg demanded their participation in all the peace-building initiatives and peace negotiations on Kashmir.

With President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner's win in Sunday's Argentine's election all but assured and a woman leading the largest country in Latin America, it might appear that the political glass ceiling in the hemisphere has finally been cracked. But from Buenos Aires to Washington, D.C., women still have a long way to go to achieve parity in politics, according to recently completed gender studies and political analysts.

Maya Jribi, the only woman in a leadership job at one of Tunisia's main political parties, says it's been an uphill battle to persuade other women to run as candidates in the Oct. 23 elections.

Libyan exile Shahrazad Kablan was teaching school in Cincinnati when the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi began in her hometown, Benghazi. She put her house on the market and within weeks had moved to Qatar, where she hosted a taboo-busting show on the pro-rebel Libya TV.

On Wednesday night she was in Manhattan, drumming up support among women's rights activists for the long slog ahead as Libya rebuilds.

Since 2008, the government has not met a legal obligation to issue an annual report on gender equality, MP Damira Niyazaliyeva, chairwoman of the parliamentary committee on social policy, health care, labour and migration, said at a hearing on “The woman in contemporary Kyrgyz society: problems and achievements.”

I went for a walk in Liberia two years ago. It started "upcountry" where the forest is thick and the air still, on the border with Sierra Leone, the West African country twinned with Liberia through common turbulent recent history. And it finished a month or so later on a giddying day when the jungle lifted and I stepped on to buttermilk sands rinsed by the horizon-less Atlantic.

The Administrator of Gash-Barka region, Mr. Musa Rab'a, said that the role of women is of vital significance in the government's endeavors to ensure social justice.

When three women were named recently to share this year's Nobel Peace Prize, well-wishers said: Isn't it wonderful that women are being honored? And the news stories all led with their gender. I heard an NPR reporter say giddily that it marked a "celebration of women!"