Around the world, 644 million women and girls alive today were once child brides. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where the rates are highest, one in every five girls is married before her 18th birthday. As the world observes the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, we must ask an urgent question: are the laws designed to protect girls actually working? […]
Exceptional women business leaders such as African engineer-turned-entrepreneur Norah Magero are demonstrating how lived experience and ingenuity, backed by United Nations support, can turn promising ideas into successful companies, even in societies where their voices have long been sidelined. As a young mother in a remote part of eastern Kenya, Norah Magero struggled to get […]
For three years, thousands of angry messages poured into American actress Azie Tesfai’s phone from a man she’d never seen nor met. One day, the anonymous interaction turned into physical stalking. He texted her exactly what she was wearing. “There is a specific terror in being watched by someone without a face,” Ms. Tesfai told UN officials, Goodwill Ambassadors and civil […]
More than one in four children globally – around 610 million – live with mothers who have experienced physical, emotional or sexual abuse by an intimate partner in the past year, making violence a part of their everyday lives, according to new data released by the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) on Tuesday November 25, 2025. […]
Scolded for wanting to go to school as a girl and dismissed or ignored as an adult, Awrelia from Wau in South Sudan has learnt to advocate for herself, her children and for the women in her community. She knows what it’s like to be silenced. Born into a family that didn’t believe in educating girls, she had to stay home while […]
On the scheduled final day of COP30 in Belém, tense negotiations are stretching into Friday afternoon as divisions persist. Amid the ongoing talks, one message is cutting through the noise: there is no climate justice without gender equality. Women’s voices are rising with clarity and urgency, pressing negotiators to ensure the conference leaves a lasting […]
What was once hailed as a vehicle for empowerment has, for millions of women and girls, become a source of fear. Fuelled by artificial intelligence, anonymity, and weak accountability, online abuse is rapidly escalating. Yet, 1.8 billion women and girls still lack legal protection from online harassment and other forms of technology-facilitated abuse. The alarm […]
When Salma* was just 15, she was forced to get married, even though she wanted to stay in school and become a doctor someday. Instead, she found herself tied to a man who “changed from being kind to being a monster.” He would beat her “with his bare hands,” she said recently. The young mother from Yemen […]
In Somalia, where six out of ten births take place without a doctor, childbirth is often a matter of survival. For women like 38-year-old Farhiya from rural Beletweyne, the consequences can be devastating — a painful obstetric fistula, a hole in the birth canal that left her incontinent, isolated, and cut off from her […]
In war-torn Sudan, rape is likely being used as a weapon of war and simply being a woman there is “a strong predictor” of hunger, violence and death, the UN’s gender equality agency warned on Tuesday November 10, 2025. “Women speaking to us from El Fasher, the heart of Sudan’s latest catastrophe, tell us that they’ve […]
