...Four months ago, Mama Monique* was dragged out of her home in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and raped by four armed men, who had just murdered her husband.
The crime was not carried out in some rural backwater, but in Goma, a city of several hundred thousand people and capital of North Kivu province. Yet nobody came to help her or offer condolences, instead neighbours shunned the 49-year-old Congolese businesswoman and acted as though she was to blame for the rape.....
...UNHCR and its partners help newly arrived refugees with food, water, shelter and medical assistance. Mama Monique has been receiving medical care and counselling for trauma. Her children are hopeful that even in exile they can resume their studies and prepare for the future. For their mother, it will be more difficult to adjust to a new life after losing so much.
Burundi currently hosts around 50,000 refugees, mostly from Democratic Republic of the Congo (47,800). Some 9,200 asylum-seekers from the DRC have been granted refugees status in Burundi since the start of 2013.
...All of them held a remarkably deep knowledge of environmental conditions in Somalia and could describe at length how drought, deforestation, desertification, and extreme heat created scarcity of essential household resources like food, water, and cooking fuel. A lack of sanitation, water-borne diseases, and sudden-onset disasters like floods further exacerbated the health and personal security impacts of scarcity.
Participants in general, but more particularly women, saw these environmental problems as inextricably linked to the ongoing conflict, political instability, and lack of competent governance and economic structures...
She is perhaps the most powerful African woman on earth, leading a major United Nations agency that focuses on women’s issues on the global scene. With her post as Executive Director of UN Women, while also holding the title of Under-Secretary General, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is in a unique position at the world body....
Author: Ranjani K. Murthy, cross-posted from the Gender and Evaluation website, August 22 2014
In evaluation conferences, at times I hear "I do feminist evaluations, and not gender evaluations. Feminist evaluation places issues of power at the center of defining scope of evaluation, evaluation process and, how findings are used. They look at intersections between gender and identities, and examine how the project/programme change social structures. Gender evaluations do not deal with issues of power and structures."...
...To conclude, gender-redistributive evaluations and feminist evaluations are similar, while gender-neutral and gender-specific evaluations are not.
...Notably, with the expense and difficulty of reaching large parts of the population in South Sudan, a significant portion of the funding that is available has been directed towards UN Protection of Civilian (PoC) sites, which host only 10 per cent of those displaced across South Sudan. To ensure aid reaches the majority of displaced South Sudanese, CARE is urging stronger support to humanitarian organizations that are also working outside the Protection of Civilian sites.
Furthermore, UN figures suggest that funding for responding to and preventing sexual and gender-based violence - the issue highlighted in the recent CARE report, The Girl Has No Rights: Gender-based violence in South Sudan - has only received 55 per cent of the funding required to meet demand....
..."With a potential famine on the horizon and conditions continuing to deteriorate rapidly, the international community must act now to address the massive shortfall in funding for the South Sudan relief effort. Failure to fully commit to addressing the crisis in South Sudan will put many thousands of lives at greater risk."...
September 1st, 2014 marks the first anniversary of the creation of the Special Envoy on Gender at the African Development Bank[i] (ADB). The Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) spoke to Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, the first Special Envoy on Gender Issues at ADB, to learn more about the Bank's main goals and challenges for gender equality...
This 2013 publication provides an overview of the key issues, challenges and opportunities for ensuring more systematic consideration of gender issues in statebuilding in fragile and conflict-affected countries.
...The AWEP-WECREATE Centers in Africa are the result of a joint initiative of the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs (AF) and Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs (EB), and partnership with the Secretary’s Office of Global Women’s Issues (S/GWI), to further leverage two successful programs that seek to foster local entrepreneurship, trade, and investment through training, mentoring, and networking.
One is the African Women's Entrepreneurship Program (AWEP), a trade and investment program that is part of the Department of State’s International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP). It provides professional networking, business development, export promotion, access to capital, and access to market opportunities to African women entrepreneurs, connecting them with U.S. policy makers, companies, industry associations, nonprofit groups, and multilateral development organizations.
The other is the Women’s Entrepreneurial Centers of Resources, Education, Access and Training for Economic Empowerment (WECREATE), a flagship program that will work with other public and private partners (including from the State Department to create women’s entrepreneurial centers around the world.
International climate conferences are usually a sea of dark suits – like a mass audition for Men in Black – only there’s not much action.
It’s a situation UN climate chief Christiana Figueres describes in an interview with RTCC, published on Monday: “I don’t think I am the only woman who is very acutely aware, every time I walk into a room, how many men and how many women are sitting round the table.”
But dig a little deeper, and the influence of women in the climate sector is more profound than it looks, evident across most countries and all sectors.
Below are 20 women who are set to play a vital role in shaping the conversation and structure around a proposed emissions reduction treaty.
Walmart and the Walmart Foundation have announced a $3 million investment in three farmer training programs in Rwanda, Zambia and Kenya....
...In Rwanda, Walmart Foundation funding is supporting the expansion of the Global Communities EJo Heza program, providing training to 50,000 farmers on agricultural techniques, emphasizing the production of corn, beans and dairy farming implemented by Global Communities...An additional 45,000 farmers will be trained in business skills and leadership in agriculture in Zambia, as part of Agribusiness Systems International’s Women's Improved Marketing and Asset Control (WIMAC) project...[and] in Kenya, Walmart Foundation funding will support the expansion of the One Acre Fund program to improve agricultural practices and market access for 40,000 farmers, which will see them receive high-quality inputs such as seed and fertilizer, as well as post-harvest support. This process is expected to result in a higher crop yield that could double incomes in one planting season.
At the Bush Institute’s African First Ladies Summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in July 2013, a number of key new initiatives were announced. The outcomes of the announcements are encouraging. Combined, these organizations and their programs have raised over $18 million and reached over 4.3 million women and children worldwide. They are operating in 13 African countries: Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
Development partners, including UNICEF, have been supporting the Ethiopian Government so that the country could achieve universal access to education by 2015. The current support is focused on mobilising leadership committed to girls' education (locally, nationally and regionally) by developing the necessary tools for gender sensitive budgeting and participatory plan of action in budgets at district, regional and national levels.
These guidelines have been developed to address the current gaps in gender-sensitive budgeting for girls' education. It is believed these guidelines would assist the different stakeholders involved in the process of planning and budgeting to recognise and address female and male needs and interests; and provide them with opportunities through planning and budgeting.
This publication presents a guiding framework for concerned higher, middle and local government stakeholders to undertake gender budgeting for education. The guide is also designed to mobilise leadership committed to girls' education by developing the necessary tools for gender-sensitive budgeting and participatory action plans.
This guide was prepared by the Ethiopian Ministry of Finance and Economic Development (MOFED) and Ministry of Education (MOE) in collaboration with United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and The British Council.
...If Agriculture is taking center stage, who’s at the center? Smallerholder farmers. Who’s at the center of the center? Women. Women are the backbone of African agriculture (and of the world, in general). Women are major stakeholders and their voices should be included in the discussion forming the policies that will directly affect them...
The U.N. refugee agency reports Ethiopia now hosts more refugees than any other country in Africa, supplanting its neighbor, Kenya. The UNHCR says the main factor is the huge influx of refugees from conflict-ridden South Sudan.
UNHCR reports by the end of July, Ethiopia was sheltering almost 630,000 registered refugees, including nearly one-quarter of a million refugees from South Sudan. The agency says most of them, nearly 190,000, have fled into Ethiopia since war erupted in their country in mid-December.
Besides the South Sudanese, the UNHCR reports Ethiopia also is hosting 245,000 Somalis and nearly 100,000 Eritreans....
This free web-based course provides participants with a general grounding in the current concepts of governance from a gender perspective and offers some examples and resources for applying these within key governance institutions, with a focus on governments.
Overview:
Why does gender matter for governance? How can we expose gender-blind institutions and processes? What strategies have enhanced the opportunities and outcomes for women and girls in government processes? What can we learn from this and how can we integrate this into our own work?
This pilot course aims to support development practitioners who are working to strengthen gender equality in relation to governance processes in their workplace. To support them this course seeks to equip participants with an introductory knowledge that can help them to take forward strategies for positive change....
...Across the continent, Africa’s women are primary producers in agricultural activities, managers and users of productive natural resources. They possess a strong body of knowledge and expertise that can be used in climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies. Furthermore, as stewards of natural and household resources, women are at critical positions to contribute to livelihood strategies adapted to changing environmental realities. However, they face marginalization in critical areas relating to access and ownership, policy and decision making...
In Uganda, the Refugee Law Project based at Makerere University helps men who have been raped during conflict. The Observer newspaper has published a first-hand report of meetings with some of these men.
Yet the issue of male rape is rarely discussed in comparison with sexual violence against women. One 2002 review showed that, of the 4,076 NGOs that addressed wartime and politically motivated sexual violence, only three per cent mentioned the experience of males in their information leaflets.
Human rights lawyer Lara Stemple has written that, when it comes to human rights law too, attempts to create laws that are sensitive to both male and female experiences of sexual violence have been "distressingly limited"...
...She says a decisive moment came in 2010, when researchers looked for the first time at how the same conflict can affect both women and men. One survey in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed that 40 per cent of women had experienced sexual violence in conflict - but 24 per cent of men had too...
...Stemple says there is hope of developing international law recognising the burden of wartime rape on men. But she points out that it would benefit from more research on what sexual violence is like for men. For example, she says, some studies have found that men sometimes experience sexual arousal during rape, which often leaves victims feeling guilty and confused.
"What I would really like to see is a law that is both gender inclusive and gender sensitive," says Stemple. And, she says, uncovering more of the distinct ways in which rape affects different genders remains a research need.
With a budget of hundreds of dollars when thousands are needed, Victor Mukasa, executive director of the Kuchu Diaspora Alliance (KDA), is operating a cross-border operation to house and protect Ugandan LGBT refugees in Kenya, where a current effort to promote a stone-the-gays bill is underway...
...Mukasa works from American shores to help lesbians, gays, bisexual and transgender people (sometimes self-identified with the Swahili-originated Ugandan term, "Kuchu") in east Africa in the face of terrifying situations for LGBTs in Kenyan refugee camps...
What are their conditions like in refugee camps? The Kuchu Diaspora Alliance-USA (KDA-USA) is aware of the presence of Ugandan LGBT refugees in camps in different parts of the world. However, we have focused on the situation of those in Kenya. There are two types of LGBT refugees in in Kenya: those in the Kakuma Camp, northwestern Kenya and the urban refugees living in Nairobi and neighboring cities.
The conditions for both types are horrible. In Kakuma Camp, they have lately been under attack because of their perceived sexual orientation by fellow refugees, mostly, Sudanese and Somalians. The refugees report that there is no protection from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR); and the police have been reported to threaten the victims with application of Kenyan law, which prohibits homosexuality. One such attack took place on June 27, 2014.
A Ugandan LGBT refugee was stoned by Sudanese refugees who claimed that homosexuals do not deserve to live among human beings. The attackers went ahead and raided the area where the LGBT refugees camped and attacked them too. Efforts to get protection from the UNHCR were in vain. The police in Kakuma are reported to have harassed the victims even further. The LGBT refugees, for fear of being killed by their attackers, left the camp and spent the night at the UNCHR offices only to be ordered to return to the camp the following day without any protection. These kinds of attacks happen every now and then....
...For the urban refugees, mainly in the capital, Nairobi, housing, medication and food are the major problems. A lot of gay men have resorted to commercial sex work in order to survive....
...Many have fled Kakuma Camp because of the unbearable conditions there and as a result, the numbers of homeless LGBT refugees are rising in Nairobi. We hear of different initiatives supporting them financially but the refugees themselves do not know where those funds go. They need help and that is why the KDA-USA has stood in the gap.
...Rwanda has the highest women representation of any parliament in the world, constituting an unprecedented 64 per cent of the Lower House.
Women are also strongly represented in other national and local institutions, well above the constitutional threshold of 30 per cent that either gender is guaranteed in decision-making organs.
...Kagame addressed Rwanda's transformation following the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi, saying "We came out determined and committed to reverse the situation. We looked each other in the eyes and asked one thing: who benefitted from Genocide?
"Not one single person or family benefitted from the Genocide. We could choose to work towards a common good or the common destruction that we had already experienced."...
...Addressing leaders and members of the Aspen Institute, the President spoke of Rwanda's progress and challenges, pointing out that the Genocide was a lesson for all Rwandans.
Beyond Disaggregated Indicators: Applying Gender-Sensitive Monitoring and Evaluation to Enhance Learning
The importance of Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) to enhance learning is by now well established. At the same time, practitioners are increasingly aware of the need to take into account gender issues to improve program effectiveness. But what does adopting a gender-lens mean for M&E and how is gender-sensitive M&E different? Clearly, disaggregating key indicators by male and female is not enough.
This webinar provided practical examples of how gender-sensitive M&E can be done and what difference it makes for youth development programs. Participants learned how to be more gender-sensitive during the development of their M&E plan, data collection, and analysis. Presenters at this ApplyIt! Webinar included Kevin Hempel (Independent Consultant, Youth Employment & Livelihood Development), Karen Austrian (Associate, Poverty, Gender & Youth Program, Population Council, Kenya) and Jeff Edmeades (Senior Social Demographer, Research and Programs, International Center for Women on Research (ICRW).
Civil society groups have criticised the US government’s enthusiasm for private sector investment in Africa, as the head of the country’s development agency announced a controversial agriculture scheme had now attracted more than $10bn (£5.9bn).
On Tuesday, at the US-Africa summit in Washington, the US aid agency, USAid, lauded the increased company investment in the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition initiative, launched by Barack Obama at the G8 summit in 2012 to accelerate agricultural production and improve the lives of 50 million people in Africa by 2022.
The initiative has been condemned as a new wave of colonialism for its requirement that governments change laws and policies in favour of businesses. Critics have also expressed alarm at the lack of effective monitoring and accountability mechanisms.
US officials claim the total investment will now create about 650,000 jobs and benefit more than 5 million smallholder farmers in the 10 African countries that have signed up to the New Alliance – Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Tanzania...
...[The] report said that almost 37,000 jobs have been created through the scheme so far, reaching 3 million smallholder farmers, although details of the kinds of jobs or how they were reached were not given. Around 95% of the policy changes have been advanced or completed, and funding of around $2.1bn has so far been disbursed from donors, which include the US, UK and EU, it said.
However, only 21% of the 3 million farmers reached through the scheme are women, who have filled 40% of the newly created jobs. A key tenant of the New Alliance is to provide greater support to women, who comprise more than half the continent’s farmers.
Across the continent, funding shortfalls and insecurity are forcing steep cuts in food rations for many of the most vulnerable. (800,000+ refugees have had food rations cut, causing hunger & struggle even within UN protection.
...a lack of funding has forced WFP to take difficult and drastic action and confronted refugee families with some very hard choices. Some 300,000 refugees in Chad, primarily from Sudan’s Darfur region in the east and from Central African Republic in the south, are among the worst affected. Their previous ration of 2,100 kilocalories has been slashed by 60 per cent, leaving refugees with a scant 850 kilocalories per day. The situation worsens by the day as hundreds of thousands of hungry refugees struggle to cope...
...Insecurity has limited access to some sites, making it harder and costlier to deliver food rations to hungry refugees. In South Sudan, for example, conflict has cut off road and river access to some camps, forcing WFP to orchestrate costly airlifts and further depleting available funds. Immediate action is needed to ensure both humanitarian access and sustained funding...
...The human and economic costs of undernutrition are enormous, affecting most the very poor and women and children,” according to a recent UNHCR/WFP technical paper. “In developing countries, nearly one third of children are underweight or stunted. Undernutrition contributes to over one third of all child deaths and increased frequency, severity and duration of infectious disease.”...
...Given the extreme vulnerability of refugees, UNHCR and WFP have made a concerted effort over the past five years to improve nutritional standards in refugee camps. This includes measures to prevent and treat micronutrient deficiencies that cause stunting, anaemia and other ailments. The micronutrient program has helped to slow and even reverse rising rates of these nutrition-related problems in some areas. But UNHCR says real success in combating widespread undernutrition among refugees will require sustained support and attention. And now the hard-won gains of the past five years could be lost due to the current shortfalls in funding and food.
Having fled their homelands with little more than the clothes on their backs, most refugees have few if any additional resources to make up for any reduction in food for their families. Their options are severely limited, particularly in camps where they have little or no access to work, agricultural or grazing land, or other means of self-sufficiency.
Some of them resort to so-called ‘negative coping strategies,’ triggering a range of additional problems. These include an increase in school dropouts as refugee children seek work to help buy food for their families; exploitation and abuse of women refugees who venture out of camps in search of work or land to grow crops; “survival sex” by women and girls trying to raise money to buy food; early marriage of young girls; increased stress and domestic violence within families; and more incidents of theft and other activities that raise tensions within camps and with surrounding communities.....
The Human Rights Centre of the United Nations mandated University for Peace is inviting applications for its upcoming specialized online course on Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons which will be delivered from 3 September to 14 October, 2014. To apply, please send an emailto admissions@hrc.upeace.org along with your CV and a short Statement of Purpose (not more than 500 words) indicating the motivation for taking the course. Deadline for application is 25 August, 2014 and qualified participants will be enrolled on a first-come-first-served basis.Course Description
This certificate course introduces learners to the international system for protection of refugees and stateless persons. Issues concerning international protection of refugees and stateless persons have undergone a sea change from the 1950s when the international instruments for protection of both these vulnerable groups of persons were first adopted. The contemporary world order poses serious challenges to their protection, beginning with identifying refugees and stateless persons within mixed migratory flows, inadequate national policies by states to protect them, their incompatibilities with international law, the role of international organisations like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), issues of xenophobia and security in host countries amongst various other issues.
This e-learning course is designed to provide a comprehensive picture to participants on what the system for the protection of refugees and stateless persons is from the international perspective, what are their needs and available legal protections, which are the relevant actors involved in their protection and what are the challenges facing today’s refugees, stateless persons and host countries. The course also analyses protection under the regional systems with the help of selected case studies. The course is based on a dynamic pedagogy including reading materials, video clips, case studies, and interactive webinars with the instructor as well as officials of UNHCR.
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