Kenyan Nobel Laureate Dies

From Inside Africa:

Kenyan Wangari Maathai, the first woman from Africa to win the Nobel Peace Prize, died Monday after a battle with cancer. She was 71.

Maathai, an environmentalist, had long campaigned for human rights and the empowerment of Africa's most impoverished people.

More than 30 years ago she founded the Green Belt Movement, a tree-planting campaign to simultaneously mitigate deforestation and to give locals, especially women and girls, access to resources like firewood for cooking and clean water. They have since planted more than 40 million trees.

"Professor Maathai's departure is untimely and a very great loss to all who knew her -- as a mother, relative, co-worker, colleague, role model and heroine -- or who admired her determination to make the world a more peaceful, healthier and better place," her organization said.

Kenya: Women Fight Back Against Violence

From Media Global:

According to the Nairobi Women’s hospital, one person is raped every thirty minutes in Kenya. Sexual violence leaves many women fearful for their lives. However, many are discovering a way to fight back.

Dr. Jake Sinclair, founding member of Ugamaan, a non-governmental organization that provides help to rape victims told MediaGlobal, “A recent survey found that in the village in Korogocho (a slum outside of Nairobi), one in every women are raped every year. The same survey also found that over 70 percent of women had been raped at least once in their lifetime.”

Sinclair explained, “Rapes in Kenya are often incomprehensively heinous, old grandmothers brutally raped, sometimes to their death, and babies or young children can be permanently disfigured. However, very little is being done to help these women.

While the number of women affected by sexual violence in Kenya remains high, women’s self-defense programs offer a glimmer of hope in an otherwise dire situation. While waiting for the government to implement a new bathroom strategy, these women are taking their lives into their own hands and protecting themselves against sexual violence in Kenya.

Kenya: Women In Slums Vulnerable

From the Daily Nation:

Women and girls in Nairobi’s slums live under constant threat of sexual violence, a new report says.

Because of this, they are too scared to leave their houses to use communal toilets, says the report to be released on Wednesday by human rights group Amnesty International.

Titled Insecurity and dignity — women’s experiences in the slums of Nairobi, the report details how the government’s failure to incorporate slums in urban planning has resulted in poor access to services.

“Women in Nairobi’s settlements become prisoners in their own homes at night and sometimes well before it is dark,” AI East African researcher Godfrey Odongo says.

“They need more privacy than men when using the toilet or bathing and inaccessibility of facilities makes them vulnerable to rape.”

Mr Odongo says inability to access the limited communal toilets also puts them at risk of illness.

Kenya: Women & Abortion

From CNN News:

Women are being forced into backstreet abortions in Kenya because of the country's restrictive abortion law, a study says.

And the law could soon get even tougher with church groups urging a ban on almost all abortions.

The U.S.-based Center for Reproductive Health, which advocates abortions rights, found that women and girls in Kenya use metal wires, knitting needles and other unsafe practices to abort tens of thousands of unwanted pregnancies.

Musya said fetuses are dumped in the sprawling Kibera slum. She said that every week they find aborted fetuses in one garbage-filled stream. They wash away or get eaten by pigs, she said.

The report says that Kenya's current confusing abortion law forces women to the backstreets.

So in Kibera, where shacks are packed together on a warren of garbage strewn streets, they search out abortionists.

Now church groups in Kenya are pushing for the new constitution, coming up for a parliamentary vote soon, to make almost all abortions illegal. The church groups want to define 'life as starting at conception,' and heavily restrict abortion except for cases where a mother's life is in immediate danger.

Kenya: Women Say No To Local Brew

From Capital FM:

Kenyan women have taken issue with recent plans by government to legalise local brews saying it will facilitate moral decay.

Maendeleo Ya Wanawake Organisation(MYWO) chairperson Rukia Subow said it would increase violence against women and their children and that it would also derail the youth from development activities.

Ms Subow said the government should instead focus on eradicating drug abuse in the country.

“I think they shouldn’t (legalise these brews); local brews are wrong. There are many unemployed young people in this country and they indulge in these cheap brews which is bad for their health and their minds. The police, the people themselves and the community policing programme should be strengthened so that people can fight it (local brews),” she said.

She also said MYWO was concerned with the recent killings of women by their husbands in various parts of Kenya that had so far seen three women killed in the past 11 days.

Women Face Mutilation

From Di Bain @ ABC News:

The Federal Opposition is refusing to support legislation that could protect two
young Kenyan women who fear they will be mutilated if they are deported from
Australia.

The women came to Australia on tourist visas for last year's World Youth Day and have asked to stay, saying they will be persecuted if they are sent home.

For eight years, the Refugee Council of Australia (RCA) has been fighting for the Government to enshrine in law protection rights for women who faced genital mutilation in their own country.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans says he is still waiting to receive the women's appeal, but has put legislation before the Parliament that would prevent the women being deported.

The laws known as "complementary protection" have been introduced but not yet debated in Parliament.

Kenyan Women: "Sex Strike"

From Al Jazeera:

Women's groups in Kenya have started a week-long "sex strike", in an attempt to press the country's leaders to resolve rifts and work together.

Ten non-governmental organisations urged women across the nation to boycott sex with their husbands and partners along with a statement calling for reforms in government and action on promoting women's rights.

Rukia Subow, chairwoman of the Women's Development Organisation, said the group believed the boycott would persuade men to press the government to make peace.

"This is a national boycott to show that the women of this country have resolved to push for reforms," she said. "We want an urgent solution to the political problems facing this country."

The group would pay prostitutes so they would participate in the strike, Subow said.