TMS sits down for a chat with Ory Okolloh to talk about her transformation from young nerd to one of the most effective activists for citizen empowerment to come out of Africa in the past decade.
The push to police the way that women dress continues across Africa on the pretext that it causes sexual harassment and violence against women. What really underlies this censorship of women’s expression? asks Bibi Bakare-Yusuf
Women’s dressing has become the site for pernicious policing and debates about social and moral decay in Africa, with calls for intervention within Nigeria’s higher education institutions, by religious organisations, and the media. Over the past decade, some universities have banned the wearing of trousers and any 'revealing' clothes by young women because they are seen as a distraction to male students and lecturers. The argument is that revealing attire has made sexual violation and harassment a marked feature of university life in Nigeria, and therefore imposing a strict dress code on female students is the only way to stop it...[continue reading]
More here“THE gele is my trademark,” says the Nigerian finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, describing the colourful head wrap she puts over her short, greying hair before she allows pictures to be taken. “I am very Nigerian from dress to everything.” Some of her critics disagree. During anti-reform protests in January, demonstrators focused their anger on the finance minister. They called her an unwelcome outsider because she spent long periods abroad. She was a managing director at the World Bank before coming home last year.
Pan-African News Wire File Photos
Sitting in her half-moon-shaped office overlooking Nigeria’s dusty capital, Abuja, Ms Okonjo-Iweala faces an unenviable task. President Goodluck Jonathan has given her just three years to overhaul sub-Saharan Africa’s second-biggest economy, one riven with corruption and inefficiencies, carved up by political bosses and vulnerable to bursts of communal violence.
Dawn Okoro is an African visual artist who specializes in pop art. Based in Dallas, Dawn is international known for her strong portrayal of black women. She works across several mediums experimenting with various techniques in order to communicate the effect of popular culture in society.
The Art Trade Presents: Dawn Okoro from TheArtTrade on Vimeo.
Tecee Boley is a leading radio and print reporter in Liberia. She works at Liberia Women Democracy Radio as a reporter and presents programs on gender education and rural women. She also contributes to FrontPage Africa newspaper and Front Page Africa, Liberia’s most widely read newspaper and website, and is regularly heard on United Nations radio.
Image courtesy of New Narratives
‘I am already living out my dream, to broadcast voices that are rarely heard. But I don’t just want those voices to be heard, I want authorities worldwide to take action.’
Taiye Selasi, a young Ghanian writer talks to the Daily Beast from the Jaipur Festival about the challenges of the young African novelist and the unique connection she sees between the Indian readers & African literature.via Bombastic Elements
Sokari Ekine meets women’s movements in the Niger Delta and discovers that in this militarised country even small acts take courage
The Niger Delta has been at the centre of Nigeria’s post‑independence military project from the first coup in 1966 through to the present. To the outside world it remained a forgotten outpost, however, until the 1990s and the rise of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP). Since then, unequivocal evidence has emerged of how the region and its commerce – primarily the oil industry – has been systematically militarised, with violence by the state, multinationals and local militias deployed as an instrument of governance and intimidation to force the people into total submission...[continue reading]
..."[Winning the award] gave me a huge push forward to write research proposals, mentor new graduate students and spend more time in the lab," Lubna Tahtamouni, chair of the department of biology and biotechnology at the Hashemite University in Jordan, and a recipient of an OWSD award, tells Times Higher Education.More here
She says that, in Jordan, smart women are "labelled as unattractive, not feminine enough or even masculine," and told to prioritise their family and household, adding that "many times over the years I thought of leaving academia because of the frustrations".
"It is important to highlight that women, even from developing countries, are doing great things: making breakthroughs, contributing to advances in medicine, science, chemistry and engineering — becoming leaders and experts in their fields," says another researcher honoured in the 2011 awards, Denise Evans from South Africa.
...September 2010, international organizations, heads of state, celebrities and specialists gathered to review progress on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).As you may know, the MDGs were set in 2000 to achieve eight anti-poverty goals by 2015. In the midst of the coverage of these grand events, high profile attendees wined, dined and debated the relative merits of each MDGs plan, while the actual “poor,” were not invited to these elite events.
Via 2010 from Project Diaspora on Vimeo.
Project Diaspora decided to change perceptions about the poor by building the Villages in Action platform whereby the voices of the poor can be heard. On November 27, 2010, the first conference was held in a village outside Masindi, Uganda. The goal of this one-day conference was to showcase the grassroots efforts driving economic development and improving the lives of the community – all with little or no assistance from international aid organizations...[continue reading]
Amid the drab suits of international finance, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala’s colorful and vibrant traditional African attire always guarantees she will stand out in a crowd. Often wearing a coordinated head wrap, Okonjo-Iweala is a big personality with matching opinions. “I feel very Nigerian, very African, and I love it,” she says.On where her grit comes from
Okonjo-Iweala tells how during the civil war, while her mother was ill and her father away in the army, she rescued her three-year-old sister who was sick with malaria and at death’s door. She put her sister on her back and walked 10 kilometers to a clinic in a church, where she’d heard there was a good doctor. When she arrived, there were a thousand people outside, trying to break down the door. Undeterred, she crawled through their legs with her sister on her back and climbed through the window to see the doctor. “I knew if she didn’t get help she’d die,” says Okonjo-Iweala.The doctor gave the girl a shot of chloroquine and put her on rehydration therapy, and within hours she was back to health. The injection saved her sister’s life. “The 10 kilometers home with her on my back, that was the shortest walk of my life. I was so happy,” she said.She has shown the same pluck and determination ever since....and manner
Affable, approachable, and hardworking, she was known for her rigor and strong technical knowledge. “I would say she is an eternal optimist and a straight shooter,” says Tijan M. Sallah, who currently heads the Capacity Development and Partnerships Unit for Africa in the World Bank and who wrote a book with Okonjo-Iweala (see Box 2). “She is also a strong advocate for women,” he adds, pointing to her efforts to help promote promising young women into managerial positions in the World Bank. She also helped set up a private equity fund to invest in African women–owned businesses.More here
Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan is facing opposition to his decision to cut fuel subsidies, which saw petrol prices double overnight when the decision was made at the start of the year.
Labour unions have now called for a nationwide strike to begin on Monday. This comes following a series of demonstrations held over the past week.
Sectarian violence in the country has also worsened recently, causing a rise in tensions on the street.
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Nigeria's finance minister, spoke to Al Jazeera from the capital Abuja...[more here]
Read here for detailsAlthough women comprise 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, they typically aren’t able to own land. Cultural barriers also limit women’s ability to obtain credit and insurance.Strengthening women’s rights can help strengthen the global food system. According to the World Food Programme, allowing women farmers access to more resources could reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 100-150 million people. Nourishing the Planet highlights five innovations that are helping empower women farmers around the world,they are:
Image courtesy of CIDSE
-Vertical Farming
-Food, Agriculture & Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network’s (FANRPAN) Theatre
-Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA)
-Women’s Collective
-GREEN Foundation
via The Prepaid Economy BlogWomen play a prominent role in informal trade, and in informal business activities in particular. These few figures are proof enough: four to five million women in West Africa are involved in collecting, processing and marketing shea nuts and butter, bringing in an estimated 80 per cent of their income (Plunked and Stryker, 2002). In Benin, women are 80 per cent of those involved in informal trade, and the figure rises to 95 per cent for informal marketing of unprocessed goods.
Image courtesy of parallelozero
Madam Tinubu’s fame has no doubt been surpassed by the rich merchant women of contemporary Togo, known as the “Nana-Benz.” While these women have followed varying routes to success, they share several characteristics. Then, as now, these women conduct their businesses on the regional, and even international, stage, drawing on a long history of trading experience as informal actors. This results in their economic success, rather than initiating it. The volume of trade that passes through their hands enables them to regularly increase their economic and social capital (Humarau, 1999) even if their absence from or minimal institutional representation in formal political decision-making tends to minimize the crucial role that they could play in the development of intra-African trade. The factors that bring them together also separate them from most of the small-scale West African traders operating daily, who barely succeed in breaking even with their investments. All these groups constitute the major trading agents of both the formal and informal sectors.
They started off from nothing in the Fifties and became amongst the richest in their homeland, Togo. They're the Nana Benz, the women who sell traditional African fabrics. Particularly the sought-after “wax” which is printed in Holland. They've made a fortune, they've travelled the world over, becoming a reference point for the fabric trade in Western and Central Africa. They were the first to purchase what, at the time, was a real status symbol: the Mercedes Benz. Hence their name. Today their fame has waned a little. And the economic crisis has affected them too. Turnover has dropped, but they're still here, together with their daughters – the Nanette, - to whom they've entrusted their work. You can find them in the Grand Marché in Lomé or in the boutiques around the city. Keeping always an eye on their businesses.
Image courtesy of Parallel Zero
Every sub-Saharan African state already allows pregnant women to abort when their lives are in danger, and in recent years Benin, Chad, Ethiopia, Ghana, Mali, Swaziland and Togo have been working at expanding their laws to allow abortions in more circumstances.More here
Still, in all of sub-Saharan Africa, abortion is legal only in Cape Verde and South Africa. And the number of unsafe abortions on the continent is staggeringly high: every year, there are over six million unsafe abortions conducted in Africa, and about 30,000 women die from the procedure. Unsafe abortions are among the leading causes of death for women admitted to hospitals around much of the continent.
Two recent high profile public events in London this year focused on female filmmakers working in African cinema. We can’t repeat the significance of this enough: This is high exposure for a demographic of the African film industry that is generally low on the radar.Late last month a group of academics, filmmakers and critics from around the world converged at a conference in London to celebrate the work of African women in film. The event was held at the University of Westminster. Those attending heard from important female filmmakers such as Jihan El-Tahri, director of “Behind the Rainbow” (2008) and Yaba Badoe, director of “The Witches of Gambaga” (2010) who discussed their experiences as independent filmmakers. Writing at subtitled,Katy Stewart records that both women passionately broached controversial issues, denying labels that are often imposed upon them for the benefit of funders and commissioners...[continue reading]
Still from Zina Saro Wiwa's "Phyllis"
