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News and events from Denmark and MENA region.MICROBLOG POSTINGS
Countless Moroccan women continue to face abuse and sexual violence at the hands of their husbands. About 6 million women in Morocco are victims of violence, or around one in three.
Morocco’s Social Development Minister Bassima Hakkaoui, the only female minister in the country, says she would try to push forward a law protecting women that has been stuck in Parliament for eight years.
Read more at Bikya.
Arabic version by the international network Women Living Under Muslim Laws here.
The Women Human Rights Defenders program at Nazra for Feminist Studies is launching its manual on Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) tailored specifically for an Egyptian context.
The manual includes sections on Egyptian legislation and military verdicts used to constrain public action; regional and international mechanisms that WHRDs can utilize to report violations committed against them; and security tips that can be of special use during perilous circumstances.
Nazra is a partner organisation to KVINFO.
Read more at Nazra for Women's Studies.
In Morocco, women have achieved impressive gains over the past decades, both legally and economically, and the human development index shows clear improvements in a wide range of areas, namely girl’s access to schooling or a decline in maternal mortality.
But why do women in Morocco play such a small part in the political, economic and social arenas?
Read more at Global Arab Network.
“One lesson from the 1979 Iranian revolution and the 2011 Arab revolutions is that activists seeking to promote women’s rights, human rights and the transition to democracy must challenge patriarchy from within the Muslim legal tradition.”
So writes Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a legal anthropologist and a founding member of Musawah Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family.
Read more at OpenDemocracy.
To combat the predominant mindset contributing to the failure of women in the workforce, the Qatar Career Fair recently hosted its second lecture, The working women in Qatar: professional aspirations and social traditions.
More Qatari women have university degrees than men, yet female participation in the workforce is only 35 percent, well below the national percentages in developed countries.
Read more at Arabian Gazette.
Three Iraqi women journalists have been selected as winners of a United Nations contest which seeks to highlight the everyday challenges faced by women living in the Middle Eastern country.
The stories submitted by Suha Audah, Enas Jabbar and Shatha al-Shabibi were selected by an independent panel for their depiction of women’s situation in Iraq.
Read more at UN.
"I never thought I would marry someone I didn't love, but my family and I have been through some hard times since coming to Amman."
So says Kazal, a young Syrian refugee woman in Jordan. She has just got divorced from a 50-year-old man from Saudi Arabia who paid her family about US $3,100 to marry her. The marriage lasted one week.
Read more at the BBC.
A major two-day conference on 'Supporting open economies, inclusive growth - women's role in Arab countries' will be held at Lancaster House in central London on 25th and 26th June 2013, as part of the UK's presidency of the G8 Deauville Partnership with Arab Countries in Transition.
Read more at AME Info.
With its young population and access to free education up to the university level, Algeria seems to have no shortage of young female entrepreneurs. At the Algeria 2.0 conference - an event designed to encourage entrepreneurship - women participated in the Women's Start-up Weekend, developing their business ideas.
Read more at The National.
As the UN High Level Panel discusses the future global agenda to take over from the 2015 Goals, a coalition of women's organisations warn against what they fear will be a set of reductive goals that ignore the transformational changes required to address the failure of the current development model rooted in unsustainable production and consumption patterns exacerbating gender, race and class inequities.
In a statement, the organisations stress that first and foremost, combating poverty, especially stemming and reversing the feminization of poverty and the structural drivers of women’s poverty and inequality, and addressing the root causes of inequality and poverty is essential in developing a new framework, which has sustainable development at its core. Moreover, that overcoming all forms of gender-based violence is essential to ending poverty.
Read more at Association for Women's Rights in Development.
Read the full statement.
Visit the home page of the Post-2015 Women's Coalition.