The Malalai Maternity Hospital is one of the busiest in the Afghan capital, Kabul, welcoming around 85 babies into the world every day, including 20 by Caesarean section. But the ongoing crisis in the country is drastically undermining the staff’s capacity to care for their patients.
With COVID-19, the situation for women human rights defenders and the prospects for women’s full participation in building peace, has become “vastly worse”, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said on Tuesday.
The Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) is taking advantage of a new initiative, to become the first UN peacekeeping mission to provide gender-sensitive housing and invest in better working conditions for women peacekeepers serving there.
In Somalia, over 90 per cent or more of girls and women, have been subjected to female genital mutilation, or FGM. Despite the practice having devastating health ramifications for women and girls – including pain, bleeding, permanent disability and even death – discussion over how to end the harmful tradition, remains taboo.
Ahead of International Women’s Day, celebrated on 08 March, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has insisted that the world “cannot emerge from the pandemic with the clock spinning backwards on gender equality”.
Mariia Shostak, a 25-year-old woman living in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, started having contractions on 24 February, the day the Russian Federation launched a military offensive in Ukraine, and gave birth amid the sounds of air raid sirens.
Investing in women’s economic empowerment yields enormous dividends for peace and prosperity, the head of UN Women told the Security Council on Tuesday, stressing that countries where women are economically marginalized and shut out of the workforce are much more likely to go to war.
Maya Aktar, a garment worker from Bangladesh, represents other migrants employed in the sector, in Jordan. She explains how she became involved in the union movement, and the positive difference this has made to the lives of her members.
Women across the world face unacceptable mistreatment during childbirth, according to a new study from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Human Reproduction Programme (HRP) launched on Wednesday.
Around three per cent of Costa Rica’s population is now made up of Nicaraguan refugees and asylum seekers, the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Friday.
