Category Archives: Women’s rights and gender equality

India’s Covid gender gap: women left behind in vaccination drive

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Misinformation and access issues combined with patriarchal social norms fuelling disparity in distribution across most states

Deep-rooted structural inequalities and patriarchal values are to blame for India’s worrying Covid vaccine gender gap, campaigners and academics have warned.

As of 25 June, of the 309m Covid vaccine doses delivered since January 2021, 143m were administered to women compared with nearly 167m to men, according to CoWin, India’s national statistics site – a ratio of 856 doses given to women for every 1,000 given to men. The difference is not accounted for by India’s gender imbalance of 924 women to 1,000 men.

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Sadia Hussein: the FGM survivor who is saving girls from the knife

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Being cut, aged 10, led to extraordinary pain and complications in childbirth. Now Hussein’s campaign to end mutilation has led to a staggering change in attitudes

Sadia Hussein had been in labour for three days when she felt she could take no more. She could hear her mother crying in the distance, pleading with God to save her daughter’s life.

But even though things were clearly not progressing as they should have been, the women in her small Kenyan village were resistant to the idea of sending her to hospital. Her mother told her that doctors would “tear her apart” with a pair of scissors; that, at home, they could at least use a razor. “So now, on top of the overwhelming pain of labour, there was this continuous cutting,” Hussein recalls.

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Les Hijabeuses: the female footballers tackling France’s on-pitch hijab ban

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Young players excluded from matches because of their religious dress find a way to play on and encourage other hijab-wearing women into the sport

Founé Diawara was 15 years old when she was first told she could not wear her hijab in a football match.

It was an important game. She had recently got into the team of a club in Meaux, the town north-east of Paris where she grew up, and they were playing a local rival. Diawara had been wearing her hijab during training, but as she was about to walk on to the pitch, the referee said she must remove it if she wanted to play.

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Hungary’s LGBT protests and Juneteenth Day: human rights this fortnight – in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms from China to Colombia

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‘We have more in common than what separates us’: refugee stories, told by refugees

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In One Thousand Dreams, award-winning photographer Robin Hammond hands the camera to refugees. Often reduced by the media’s toxic or well-meaning narratives, the portraits and interviews capture a different and more complex tale

Robin Hammond has spent two decades crisscrossing the developing world and telling other people’s stories. From photographing the Rohingya forced out of Myanmar and rape survivors in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to documenting the lives of people in countries where their sexuality is illegal, his work has earned him award after award.

But for his latest project the photographer has embarked on a paradigm shift: to remove himself – and others like him – from the process entirely. Instead, as part of an in-depth exploration of the refugee experience in Europe, the stories of those featured are told by those who, arguably, know them best: other refugees.

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UK aid cuts to Bangladesh NGO a ‘gut punch’, says charity head

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Withdrawal from long-term partnership catastrophic, says Brac, affecting women and girls’ education and those in extreme poverty

The UK government’s funding cuts to the world’s largest international non-governmental organisation are a “gut punch” after a successful 10-year £450m partnership, according to a director.

Asif Saleh, executive director of Brac Bangladesh, said the cuts will leave hundreds of thousands of girls without an education, millions of women and girls without access to family planning and hundreds of thousands of people in extreme poverty without support.

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Student’s rape and murder puts India’s sexual violence under spotlight again

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Despite new laws to combat the problem, a rape is reported every 15 minutes, leaving victims and families crying out for justice

It was a historic day for women in India. Mamata Banerjee and her party won a spectacular election victory in West Bengal, defeating the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP) of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, defying many predictions. Securing a third term as chief minister, she was the only woman in such an important position in India.

The following day, 3 May, while TV anchors debated how Banerjee’s win represented not only a strong force against Modi but also made her a powerful woman in a patriarchal country, a 20-year-old student, known only as Jana (her identity cannot be revealed under Indian law), was cornered by two men in a village, about 70 miles west of Kolkata, West Bengal’s main city.

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Uganda’s ID scheme excludes nearly a third from healthcare, says report

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Vital services including grants financed by UK unavailable without identity cards, with women and the elderly worst affected

Up to a third of adults in Uganda have been excluded from vital healthcare and social services because they do not have national ID cards, according to a report.

Women and elderly people have been particularly affected by the introduction of the digital identity cards, which are required to access government and private sector healthcare, to claim social benefits, to vote and to open bank accounts or buy sim cards.

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End all legal barriers to abortion, say leading European politicians

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Belgium’s prime minister among signatories to open letter backing global right to safe abortions and reopening of clinics closed in pandemic

Government ministers from five European countries, including Belgium’s prime minister, Alexander de Croo, are among 29 politicians, healthcare and women’s rights activists who have signed an open letter calling for the removal of all legal barriers to abortion.

The letter, signed by gender and equality ministers from France, Canada and Norway, and international development ministers from Sweden and the Netherlands, states that women’s right to safe, legal abortion is being eroded by misinformation and attacks on services. It calls for the reopening of abortion clinics closed during the pandemic.

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‘On a rampage’: the African women fighting to end FGM

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Female genital mutilation has revived under Covid but activists are pushing hard to save girls at risk

It was when the phone started ringing with calls from worried mothers in Somalia that Ifrah Ahmed knew she was making an impact. The women told her their daughters had been bleeding for hours after undergoing female genital mutilation and asked what to do. Ahmed told them to seek medical attention, and probably saved lives by doing so.

The mothers called because they had heard the story of a 10-year-old girl who had bled to death after being cut in central Galmudug state in July 2018. It was the first confirmed death in years in a country where any complications arising from FGM are generally denied and it gained worldwide attention. The death was first revealed by a local activist who had been trained by Ahmed’s foundation in how to use the media to publicise her work.

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Green growth: the save-the-mangrove scheme reaping rewards for women in Kenya

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A community project on the Lamu archipelago trains women in preserving this vital ecosystem and provides business loans

Kenya’s mangroves have been harvested for centuries, the timber used in shipbuilding and for ornate doors and furniture as well as shipped across the Indian Ocean and around the world.

The Lamu archipelago accounts for more than half of Kenya’s mangrove forests. But across the country an estimated 40% of this precious commodity has been degraded, as more mangroves have been cut to provide construction materials and charcoal for cooking, and oil leakages from cruise liners and ships that pass along the coast kill off young saplings. The area has become one of the most degraded marine ecosystems in east Africa.

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Gaza damage and Glasgow raids: human rights this fortnight in pictures

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A roundup of the coverage on struggles for human rights and freedoms, from Myanmar to Peru

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Parent trap: why the cult of the perfect mother has to end

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Worldwide, mothers are overworked, underpaid, often lonely and made to feel guilty about everything from epidurals to bottle feeding. Fixing this is the unfinished work of feminism

It’s the middle of a dark, November night, and I’m about to have my first baby. But instead of the joyful experience I’d hoped for, I am being rushed into the operating theatre to have an emergency caesarean under general anaesthetic. I have a dangerous complication and my son’s life is at risk. Four hours earlier, I’d been sent home by a midwife who told me I couldn’t stay in hospital and have an epidural because labour wasn’t properly “established”.

It’s a week later and I’m back home with my son who, thankfully, made it. But I’m struggling. If someone asks me how I am, in a kindly voice, my voice cracks. I’m spending a lot of time sitting on the bed in a milk-stained dressing gown. In a few days, my partner will go back to work.

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‘Hosnia had dreams’: grief in Kabul as girls’ school targeted

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Hazara community in mourning but defiant after more than 60 people killed in school bomb blasts


Latifa and Hosnia had been sharing a wooden bench in their classroom at Kabul’s Sayed Al-Shuhada school for the past three years.

When Latifa transferred to Sayed Al-Shuhada, the two girls were immediately drawn to each other and became best friends, always together in their free time, studying side by side, walking home together after school. They found comfort in each other’s presence; support in a place that has never been easy for girls and women.

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Violence against women ‘a pandemic’, warns UN envoy

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A decade after Istanbul convention was drawn up to end gender-based violence, activists report decline in women’s rights and safety

A decade after the launch of the Istanbul convention, the landmark human rights treaty to stop gender-based violence, women are facing a global assault on their rights and safety, according to campaigners.

This week marked 10 years since the first 13 countries signed up to the convention, seen as a turning point in efforts to address violence against women.

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UK cuts grants for small aid charities to save ‘less than cost of No 10 press room’

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Hospital in Zanzibar and support for child workers in Bangladesh among approved projects to miss out as £2.1m of funding cancelled

The UK has scrapped three rounds of grants to small international development charities, prompting fury that it has wiped out funding for 42 projects around the world to save “less than the [£2.6m] cost of the Downing Street press room”.

The Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) told charities last week that rounds six, seven and eight of the Small Charities Challenge Fund (SCCF) would not go ahead because of aid cuts, cancelling in total about £2.1m of funds earmarked for new and future programmes, including many that had been approved.

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Global shortfall of nearly 1m midwives due to failure to value role, study finds

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Investing in midwifery could prevent two-thirds of maternal and newborn deaths, but investment and training are urgently needed

The world is facing a shortage of 900,000 midwives, with more than half the shortfall in Africa, where nearly two-thirds of maternal deaths occur, according to a new survey.

Insufficient resources and a failure to recognise the importance of the role mean there has been little progress since the last study in 2014, according to the State of the World’s Midwifery report, which looked at 194 countries.

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Biden urged to end US aid ‘abortion ban’

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More than 140 rights groups call for repeal of 1973 Helms amendment widely misinterpreted as total ban on funding abortion services overseas

Joe Biden is being urged to clarify a longstanding US law restricting overseas aid that has been misinterpreted by successive administrations as an outright ban on funding abortion for any reason.

As the US president marked his first 100 days in office on Friday, more than 140 human rights and global health organisations, including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International US and the Global Justice Center, signed a letter asking him to confirm that US aid can be used for abortion care in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is in danger.

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Female political prisoners in Iran facing ‘psychological torture’, say campaigners

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Reports of deteriorating treatment of human rights activists, with an increase in moves to ‘dangerous’ jails often far from families

Female human rights activists imprisoned in Iran face increased jail terms and transfers to prisons with “dangerous and alarming” conditions, hundreds of miles away from their families, according to campaigners.

Warnings of the deteriorating treatment of female prisoners in Iran come days after Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian national who has served a five-year prison sentence in Iran, was sentenced to a further year in jail and a year-long travel ban by the Iranian courts.

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‘Devastating for women and girls’: UK cuts 85% in aid to UN family planning

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UNFPA says £130m being withheld would have helped prevent 250,000 child and maternal deaths in poorest countries

The British government is slashing its funding to the UN population fund (UNFPA) in a move described as “devastating” for women and girls.

The agency confirmed on Wednesday that the UK, its largest donor, is cutting funding for contraceptives and reproductive health supplies by 85% this year – from £154m to £23m – and cutting core funding from £20m to £8m.

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