By Ballah M. Kollie The Executive Director of Community Healthcare, Naomi Solanke, has cautioned that women will only support aspirants who will champion their cause and concerns in their political manifestoes. “If our agenda is not inclusive in terms of what we support at the grassroots levels of women, we are not going to carry you,” she stressed. She sounded the caution at the start of a three-day Feminist Agenda Setting meeting funded by Urgent Action Fund Africa held at a local hotel in Monrovia. Solanke said she expects that after the workshop participants will return to their respective communities and sensitize other women on the matter. According to her, women will continue to push local actors and make them knowledgeable of the need to continuously protect women, even after the presidential tenure of President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. “She has played her part and is about to leave; so the…

A Chinese court has convicted American businesswoman Sandy Phan-Gillis for spying and ordered her deportation. Phan-Gillis was sentenced to three and a half years in prison by a court in Nanning, but it is unclear if she will have to serve the time. She was arrested in March 2015 while travelling with a business delegation from Texas through mainland China. She has already spent more than two years in detention and her family has consistently maintained her innocence. Phan-Gillis, who has Chinese origins but was born in Vietnam, was accused of espionage and stealing state secrets, according to the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. Her lawyer, Shang Baojun, told the AFP news agency that he expected she would be “deported very soon”, which would mean she would not have to serve the sentence. The 57-year-old business consultant, who lives with her family in Houston, Texas, was in “okay” condition,…

Saudi Arabia, a country where women are not allowed to drive cars, has been elected to the United Nations women’s rights commission, sparking anger. The kingdom was elected recently by secret ballot to a four-year term on the Commission on the Status of Women and will join 45 other countries on the panel, a UN press statement said. The commission’s role has been to “promote shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women”. Algeria and Iraq were also elected to join the commission along with ten other countries. Under the kingdom’s conservative interpretation of Islamic law, women face many restrictions in work and travel. UN Watch, a monitoring group, has harshly criticized the UN for allowing Saudi Arabia onto the commission. “Electing Saudi Arabia to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” said Hillel Neuer, Executive director of the watchdog. “It’s…

Born at the turn of the past century, Maria Félix is old enough to remember the Mexican Revolution – but too old to get the bank card needed to collect her monthly 1,200 pesos ($63) welfare payment. Félix turns 117 in July, according to her birth certificate, which local authorities recognise as authentic. That would put her in the ranks of the world’s oldest living people. She went three months without state support for poor elderly Mexicans after she was turned away from a branch of Citibanamex in the city of Guadalajara for being too old, said Miguel Castro, Development Secretary for the state of Jalisco. Welfare beneficiaries now need individual bank accounts because of new transparency rules, Castro said. “They told me the limit was 110 years,” Félix said with a smile in the plant-filled courtyard of her small house in Guadalajara. Félix, who sells candies from a stand…

Women in the UK technology industry are paid on average 16% less than men, new research into the wage gap claims. A survey across more than 750 organisations also found that the technology sector had the largest “like-for-like” gender pay gap in the UK, with women being paid 6% less for doing the same job. Researchers pointed to a lack of women holding senior positions in technology companies as a key cause for the divide. Advisory firm Korn Ferry Hay Group, which carried out the research – coinciding with Girls in ICT Day – called on the technology sector to address how it recruited women in order to reduce the gap. Ben Frost from the group said: “The tech sector is admired for encouraging innovation at work and fostering flexible working processes, yet it must do more to institutionalise a culture where women can thrive. “Of course, this issue would…