By: Toh Wen Li A coalition of thirteen Singapore non-governmental organisations (NGOs) submitted on Monday (Oct 2) a joint report on gender inequalities to a United Nations committee, despite earlier disagreements with other organisations over parts of the report. Last week, it was reported that more than half of about 60 NGOs which had been involved in the discussions did not support the report to the UN Cedaw (Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women) Committee. The Straits Times understands that groups such as the Singapore Muslim Women’s Association (PPIS), the People’s Association’s Women’s Integration Network and the NTUC Women and Family Unit decided not to support the report because they found some parts too divisive or irrelevant to their organisation’s interests. Some of the contentious points in the report included a call for the removal of Section 377A of the Penal…

By: Ismail Akwei Moushira Khattab, Egyptian human rights advocate and the country’s nominee for UNESCO director-general position could be the cultural agency’s first leader from the African region. She is contesting with eight other nominees in the October 9 election which will take place at the ongoing UNESCO Executive Board meeting in the French capital Paris. The former family and population minister faces strong competition from China’s Tang Qian who is UNESCO’s assistant director-general for education; former French culture minister Audrey Azoulay; and former Qatari culture minister Hamad bin Abdulaziz al-Kawari. They seek to replace the outgoing director-general Irina Bokova, a former Bulgarian foreign minister who became the first woman and first eastern European to lead the organization in 2009. She served the maximum two four-year terms as one of the only ten directors in its 72-year history; seven of whom have come from Europe and North America. Moushira Khattab’s…

By: Anna Arutunyan Women in this ultra-conservative region have long suffered repressive conditions because of strict Muslim doctrine practiced here. Now they face a new threat: pressure to reunite with divorced husbands in the name of family values. A commission dominated by religious leaders in the autonomous Russian republic of Chechnya convened over the summer with the goal of bringing estranged couples back together. More than 1,000 divorced couples have been reunited so far, even though some may have been in abusive relationships. “We’ve got to wake people up, talk to them, and explain. We’ve got to return the women who left their husbands and reconcile them,” Ramzan Kadyrov, head of the Chechen Republic, told local media. Heda Saratova, a human rights activist who has become loyal to Kadyrov, defends the move even though its objective is to persuade women back into marriages they had chosen to leave. “They are trying to tell us that…

South Korea has approved an $8m (£5.9m) aid package for North Korea, in a humanitarian gesture at odds with calls by Japan and the US for unwavering economic and diplomatic pressure on Pyongyang. The country’s unification ministry agreed to provide the funds, which will go towards programmes for infants and pregnant women, days after the UN Security Council agreed to another round of sanctions in response to the regime’s recent nuclear test. The ministry, which oversees cross-border relations, said humanitarian aid to impoverished North Korea should remain unaffected by rising political tensions on the peninsula. According to the ministry, the aid package did not include cash payments, and there was “realistically no possibility” that it could be of any use to the North Korean military. South Korea’s unification minister, Cho Myung-gyon, said the government had “consistently said we would pursue humanitarian aid for North Korea in consideration of the poor…

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…