'Unseen' News and Views
In Malawi, where half of girls are married before age 18, UN Women played a key role in lobbying for a new law that raises the legal age to wed, while raising awareness and working with traditional leaders to annul marriages.
There are 1.1 billion girls today, a powerful constituency for shaping a sustainable world that’s better for everyone. They are brimming with talent and creativity. But their dreams and potential are often thwarted by discrimination, violence and lack of equal opportunities. There are glaring gaps in data and knowledge about the specific needs and challenges that girls face.
The UN Women, the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, has issued a series of feature stories ad information ahead of the International Day of the Girl Child, marked on 11 October 2016. The following ones are some of them:
“My girl is not for sale”: Escaping child marriage in Moldova
A Roma family challenges cultural norms by refusing a reparatory marriage. In their community, school drop-out rate is a stagerring record 58 per cent, mainly driven by child/early marriages, unplanned pregnancies and childcare responsibilities.
Ahead of the International Day of the Girl Child on 11 October, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) released a report warning that the worldwide disparity between unpaid household chores assumed by girls aged five through 14 as compared to their male counterparts, amounts to 40 per cent more time – or 160 million more hours a day.
A young girl carries her sibling on her back and firewood on the head. Girls always bear the burden of doing most of the house chores. Photo: UNICEF/Stephen Wandera
Drawing attention to the melting of the Arctic ice cap, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 8 October 2016 underlined the urgency of implementing the Paris Agreement on climate change and the need to help developing countries in their efforts to combat climate change.
Rabi Island, Fiji. Rising sea levels and more extreme weather events pose an imminent threat to low-lying atoll islands across the Pacific. Photo: OCHA/Danielle Parry
“The Arctic supports key pillars of the climate system regionally and globally. The fate of the Arctic is tied to the fate of Miami, Mumbai, Shanghai and coastal cities across the world — and so much else of course,” said Ban in an address to the Arctic Circle Assembly in Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik.
Credit: IPS
The attacks on hospitals, he warned, were “war crimes and violations of international humanitarian law”.
HUMAN WRONGS WATCH 