Abuja, Nigeria’s capital city, will from Monday, September 25, play host to rural women farmers from more than 15 countries on the continent. Delegates are expected from Ghana, Senegal, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Burundi and Rwanda. Other countries expected to attend are; Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Gambia, and Cameroun. ActionAid Nigeria is hosting the program under its Rural Women Farmers Forum (RWFF), which is a leadership capacity building training and planning meeting. Reports state that the Abuja meeting is under the Public Financing of Agriculture (PFA) project which is currently in its second phase. According to the document, the project “is aimed at catalyzing increased quantity and quality of public investment in agriculture in order to increase the productivity and well-being of women smallholder farmers, their households and communities in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.” It also added that it is “to solidify, leverage, and enhance the impact of…

Saudi Arabia has invited women to a sports stadium for the first time to attend the annual national day celebrations with their families, state media recently. Families will be allowed into the King Fahd stadium in Riyadh, used mostly for football matches, and seated separately from single men to mark the kingdom’s 87th National Day this weekend. “The stadium is ready to receive about 40,000 people divided between individuals and families to be seated separately,” the official Saudi Press Agency said in a statement, citing the general authority of entertainment. This marks a shift from previous celebrations in the kingdom where women are effectively barred from sports arenas by strict rules on segregation of the sexes in public. Saudi Arabia has some of the world’s tightest restrictions on women and is the only country where they are not allowed to drive. Under the country’s guardianship system, a male family member…

Protests are being planned at urinals across Amsterdam over the lack of female public toilet facilities after a judge criticized a woman for not using public male toilets after getting caught short on the streets of the city. Geerte Piening, 23, was fined after she asked her friends to cover for her as she urinated off a street on a night out in Amsterdam’s Leidseplein district. Amsterdam has 35 public urinals for men and only three public toilets for women. It was past the closing time of local bars, and Piening was a couple of kilometers from the nearest women’s toilet facilities. Piening decided to fight the charges in court, only to be criticized by the judge who said that despite the lack of toilets available for women she should have made use of the facilities made available to men. “It would not be pleasant but it can be done,”…