#women

Last week I was one of around 300 people who attended the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation’s event on “Violence against women – an obstacle to development”. The audience was a mix of parliamentarians, interested members of the public, and activists and members of civil society organizations from the African Great Lakes region – […]

How can we best ensure that development assistance reaches those who need it most? Here are six building blocks.

By Carol Bohmer and Amy Shuman Political asylum is a gender neutral concept.  The law of asylum is based on the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, currently adopted by 147 countries, so the actual asylum law of receiving countries is quite similar.  The impact of this ostensibly gender neutral law is, however, far […]

by Cordelia Rizzo In 2010, more than 465 women were murdered in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, most of them after being raped and severely tortured. They were the latest victims of the nearly 18 years of systematic killings of women in the city, which have claimed more than 1,052 lives. In the past two months, two […]

by Hugh Hunter For almost 10 years I was the British consul for Florida, based in Orlando. During this time, that office was the busiest British consulate in the world in terms of the numbers of British citizens in prison: many hundreds arrested every year and almost 200 long-term inmates at any one time. Once, […]

By Cordelia Rizzo In 2007, Mexico City’s legislature affirmed a woman’s right to choose to terminate her pregnancy during the first trimester. Today, this remains the only pro-choice law in the whole country. In response, conservative congresses in other parts of Mexico have toughened their own anti-abortion laws. But ordinary Mexicans are just beginning to […]

Sean Patrick Murphy just posted a good review of The Stoning of Soraya M. over on the Global Films blog. The film is based on the book of the same name by French-Iranian writer Freidoune Sahebjam which tells the true story of one of Iran’s many stoning victims under Sharia law. More than anything, it […]

Present Dangers A Counterterrorism Ally In North Africa  Morocco’s remarkable soft-power strategy By Ilan Berman    Morocco can trace its contemporary approach back to the end of the Cold War. While many in the region saw the Soviet Union’s collapse as a destabilizing development–and consequently tightened domestic control–Morocco’s monarch did the opposite. The previously authoritarian […]

Today I want to focus on Water and Health (my fellow FPA blogger, Bill Hewitt, has something to say on the environmental front as well). The UN has dubbed March 22nd World Water Day, and in my reading I stumbled upon a pretty amazing statistic. According to the World Health Organization, each $1 that we invest in clean water access gets returned to us 3-34 times in time savings, productivity, improved education and reduced healthcare costs. Compared to the majority of social investments – which often achieve only a 1:1 return, and very frequently, less – this is phenomenal. In terms of “social return”, improved access to clean water is clearly a sound investment.

It is no secret that Mexico lags well behind European, North American and other Latin American countries in regards to women’s participation in government. Though Mexican women have been legally entitled to vote and stand for election since 1953, there is still a wide gap in terms of their equal representation in the three branches […]