International Day Of The Girl: A global news collection
Context Newsroom
Know better. Do better. News and analysis on the most critical issues affecting people, society and the environment.
The International #DayOfTheGirl shines a light on a generation of girls who have been disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, conflict, poverty and global pushback on hard-won rights and gender equality. Across the world millions of girls are still denied their rights, restricting their choices and limiting their futures.?
The following collection of stories shines a light on some of these struggles, as well as the incredible women and girls fighting to build a better future ??
Ranks of Afghan girls barred from school swell under Taliban rule
?? Reporting from Emma Batha
The Taliban administration shut most girls' secondary schools after seizing control of the country in August 2021 and barred women from university in 2022. Girls can still attend primary schools and some religious schools .
Afghanistan is the only country in the world that excludes girls from education.
The school closures have now impacted almost 1.4 million girls, 300,000 more than in 2023, the U.N.'s cultural and educational agency UNESCO said, with numbers increasing every year as more students finish primary level.
UNESCO says the education ban is costing the country 9% of its GDP annually .
Shut out of learning, some Afghan girls are turning to underground schools and online courses.
Unheard, unseen, off air: Afghan law could erase women in media
?? By Emma Batha and Orooj Hakimi
Afghanistan's draconian new "morality law", which bans women from speaking in public, could force them out of the media and silence those offering hope to girls already shut out of schools and studying at home, journalists and U.N. experts say.
Women presenters and journalists - many with families who depend on their earnings - fear they could lose their jobs after Taliban leaders said women's voices were "intimate" and could lead to vice.
"First, they deprive women of education by closing girls' schools, and now they want to silence women in society altogether. It's a symbolic violence."
?? Read more here: https://www.context.news/socioeconomic-inclusion/new-afghan-morality-law-risks-erasing-women-from-media?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=context-newsroom
Afghan women defy Taliban gym ban with secret fitness clubs
?? Reporting by Bahaar Joy and Emma Batha
Hidden in the basement of a private home in the Afghan capital Kabul, gym instructor Laila Ahmad takes a group of women through a clandestine exercise class - the windows are blacked out, there is no pumping music and visitors arrive by a back door.
The Taliban banned women from gyms and parks, the latest clampdown in a progressive erosion of their freedoms that drew swift international condemnation.
But Ahmad, a 41-year-old divorcee with qualifications in bodybuilding and yoga, remains defiant.
"Women can't go to restaurants and cultural events by themselves any more, or even walk alone in the park, so these underground gyms are like a beacon of hope for us," she told Context.
?? Read more here: https://www.context.news/money-power-people/afghan-women-defy-taliban-gym-ban-with-secret-fitness-clubs?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=context-newsroom
It costs just $14 to protect a Kenyan Girl from FGM
?? By Nimco Ali
Nimco Ali, CEO of The Five Foundation, which supports grassroots activism to end violence against women and girls.
I underwent FGM at age 7 in Djibouti, East Africa. As one of the 200 million women and girls who survived it, I know that we cannot end this abuse of a girl’s rights unless we support grassroots activists - people who look like and know the communities they are working in. A woman in rural Somaliland is not going to do anything that some sociologist from London tells her to do, irrespective of how supposedly robust their “theory of change” is meant to be.
When I co-founded The Five Foundation ion nearly four years ago to help prioritise the issue on the global agenda and leverage new sources of funding to end it, I was told by donors that they cannot provide funds to any great extent as (apparently) we do not have enough evidence to show what works. This was in spite of the fact that they fund all sorts of social change activism that is not easy to measure.
Instead of education, orphaned Nigerian girls and women face threats of forced marriage
?? Reporting by Bukola Adebayo
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A plan to marry off 100 Nigerian girls and young women in a state-sponsored mass wedding has sparked heated debate about child marriage and female education, with last-ditch efforts underway to ban the ceremony.
Nigeria’s women’s minister, who is leading the campaign to shelve Friday's wedding, told Context that she had filed a court injunction to stop it.
Uju Kennedy-Ohanenye said the wedding violates Nigeria’s Child Rights Acts and Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act that criminalises forced marriages for women and girls.
“This marriage impinges on the rights of girls and women, who are my constituency, and I have taken action to put an end to it,” the minister told Context in an interview.
Indian girl gamers fight keyboard warriors and online abuse
?? By Vidhi Doshi
When Sonali Singh was little, she would beg then brawl with her brother for a turn on his video games. Her mother would broker peace by handing Singh a story book.
"It's our Indian culture. Girls don't play games," Singh said.
Fast forward to adulthood and Singh now works remotely as a software engineer for a big U.S. university, adding an extra 50-60% to her already high earnings playing video games by night.
Singh's success comes as India's $1.5-billion-dollar gaming industry grows rapidly and opens up - slowly - to a generation of women and girls who play, earn and even date via video games.
But female players say they face a barrage of abuse when they talk to fellow gamers online, with rape threats a daily hazard.
Add to that abuse the vastly lower prizes offered in female tournaments, and gamers and industry experts say the eplaying field is far from fair, despite all the gains made.
?? Read more here: https://www.context.news/digital-divides/indian-girl-gamers-fight-keyboard-warriors-and-online-abuse?utm_source=linkedin&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=context-newsroom
In Jordan camp, Syrian refugees choose school over child marriage
?? By Lin Taylor
About 35% of Syrian refugee girls living in neighbouring Jordan are married before they turn 18, and child marriage rates have soared there since the start of their country's decade-old civil war, according to the latest data from the U.N. children's agency UNICEF.
They are also far higher than in Syria, where the charity Girls Not Brides estimates that about 13% of girls are married before their 18th birthday.
But as refugees, many families marry off their young daughters for financial reasons or to protect the girls from sexual violence in refugee camps, UNICEF says.
For Ukraine's refugee children, schools promise a fresh start
?? By Emma Batha
Among the crowds of Irish revellers lining Dublin's streets for 2022's St Patrick's Day parade stood a small girl in pigtails with Ukrainian flags painted on her cheeks and an oversized green hat - a gift from her new school.
Eight-year-old Varvara Koslovska was among more than 1.5 million children who have fled the war in?Ukraine , triggering Europe's fastest-growing refugee crisis since World War Two.
From Ireland to Poland, countries expanded classes, fast-tracked the registration of Ukrainian teachers, translated curriculums and offered online lessons to ensure children uprooted by the war did not lose out on education.
Varvara, her brother Platon, 5, and cousins Ivan, 9, and Egor, 7, started at their new primary school just days after arriving in Ireland, at the end of a long journey from their home city Kyiv.
How is an election-packed 2024 shaping up for women in power?
??By Joanna Gill
Billed as 'democracy's biggest test', 2024 is a major election year with billions of citizens casting their votes. But commitments to gender equality in politics are falling short in some parts of the world.
While there have been historic moments, such as the election of Mexico's first female president Claudia Sheinbaum in June and Kamala Harris' bid to become the first female president of the United States, elections in Indonesia, India, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and South Africa had no female frontrunners.
The picture isn't much better in houses of parliament around the world. The percentage of women in parliament globally stood at 26.9% on average on June 1, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an independent organisation promoting democracy.
And for the girls looking to the governments of the world for help and inspiration this is a problem.
At the current rate, it will take 130 years before gender equality is reached in the highest positions of power, according to the United Nations.