Adolescent sexual and reproductive health remains a major public health challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Comprehensive sex education (CSE) has been hailed as a key strategy to inform young people about sexual health and wellbeing and prevent negative health outcomes. This paper presents an overview of the trends and challenges around sex education in SSA and puts forth key recommendations for future research and policy initiatives.
Background
This paper presents findings from a qualitative effectiveness evaluation of an intervention aimed at improving caregiver-young adolescent sexual and reproductive health (SRH) communication including training modules for caregivers on parent-child SRH communication.
Methods
Data was collected (October 2021-November 2021) using a narrative interviewing technique with thirty caregivers (8 males and 22 females), who received the parent-child communication intervention in Mbarara district, south-western Uganda. We explored caregivers’ experiences with the intervention based on four domains of change: caregiver-young adolescent communication on SRH issues, knowledge and attitudes towards adolescent SRH, parenting skills, and personal life and family. Thematic analysis was used to code and analyse the data, with attention to gender differences.
Results
Findings highlight positive parenting as a key attribute of SRH communication, along with a transformation of knowledge and attitudes towards the SRH of young adolescents leading to an overall improvement in SRH communication. However, communication is still limited to comfortable topics.
Conclusion
Our findings indicate improved caregiver–adolescent SRH communication practices following a community intervention. Programming for adolescent health on broader sexuality topics, comfortability and attitude change among caregivers could promote behaviour change on a long term. Future studies may focus on the long term impacts of interventions of this nature and test interventions aimed at addressing comfortability with discussingSRH issues.
The book is about gender politics in Mozambique over three decades from 1975 to 2005. The book is also about different ways of understanding gender and sexuality. Gender policies from Portuguese colonialism through Frelimo socialism to later neo-liberal economic regimes share certain basic assumptions about men, women and gender relations. But to what extent do such assumptions fit the ways in which rural Mozambican men and women see themselves? The author argues that gender relations should be investigated, not assumed, and that policies not matching people’s lives are unlikely to succeed.
The empirical data on which the author draws are from a unique body of material collected in 1982-1984 by the Mozambican National Women's Organization, and from more recent fieldwork. Her research demonstrates short-comings in Western feminist conceptualizations, and shows how insights from African feminist thinking may enhance understandings of gender, both in and beyond Africa.
Contemporary forms of precarity, migration, connectivity, and sociality have transformed what it means to be a man in many African communities. Responding with agency and creativity to various incentives and constraints, Africans have adapted practices pertaining to labour, marriage, and sexuality to the exigencies of modern life amid the impacts of European colonialism, rapid urban growth, economic hardship, and political conflict. Drawing upon ethnographic and historical research to study settings in East, West, and Southern Africa, the articles in this special issue review the social changes that have taken place regarding men's roles and assess prospects for the emergence of counter-hegemonic masculinities.
The difficult position of women in Ghanian society lies both in structures that are manifested through the policy of the state, and in factors that are specific for this society, having their origin in this traditional structure. The relinquishment by the peasants of control over their immediate situation has led to the loss of traditional techniques and distortion of social relations. Money rather than labour claims has become the medium of social interchange.
A case study conducted in a village in Ghana is used to illustrate the position of women in a patriarchial society subjected to pressures from various directions. Changes in the traditional agriculture caused by the introduction of cocoa resulted in greater pressure on land used for food production. Together with overcopping and the destruction of forests by charcoal-burners, there has been a general impoverishment of land resources and a reduction of the nutritional value of the crops grown.
In 1972 the role of women as food producers began to be recognised and the role of female extension officers has become more important. The disadvantageous position of women in agriculture and in coping with the exigencies of social life is emphasised. The analysis shows how a new type of woman-headed household has emerged. In relation to the male-head the womanhead is always in an inferior situation since she has to cope with subsistence responsibilities at the same time as her access to resources is poorer.
Den botswanska kvinnans dilemma - självständig och samtidigt beroende. Trots att det mesta av det vanliga jordbruksarbetet utförs av kvinnor och trots att en fjärdedel av hushållen på landsbygden har en kvinna som överhuvud, står enligt traditionell rätt alltid en kvinna under en mans förmyndarskap - hon betraktas som ett barn.
All too often in conflict situations, rape is referred to as a 'weapon of war', a term presented as self-explanatory through its implied storyline of gender and warring. In this provocative but much-needed book, Eriksson Baaz and Stern challenge the dominant understandings of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. Reading with and against feminist analyses of the interconnections between gender, warring, violence and militarization, the authors address many of the thorny issues inherent in the arrival of sexual violence on the global security agenda. Based on original fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as well as research material from other conflict zones, Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War? challenges the recent prominence given to sexual violence, bravely highlighting various problems with isolating sexual violence from other violence in war. A much-anticipated book by two acknowledged experts in the field, on an issue that has become an increasingly important security, legal and gender topic.
As a policy field largely characterised by handbooks and manuals, gender and Security Sector Reform (SSR) has been insufficiently studied and analysed. Analytical discussion of what gendering SSR means is quite rare, as is the study of the already gendered nature of the security institutions that are the subject of intervention. This policy dialogue unpacks aspects of the discourses and practices regarding gender and SSR. It highlights limitations and problems both in the conceptualisation of gender and its incorporation into practical SSR work. The publication also demonstrates how researchers and policymakers often have divergent views of what gendering SSR means. Finally, it calls for closer and more constructive dialogue between researchers and practitioners, a dialogue which acknowledges the conditions and constraints in these two spheres of work.
Kärleksdrömmen är berättelsen om Malika, en kvinna i en by i norra Marocko. Den återspeglar ett stycke marockansk kvinnoverklighet och kvinnodröm.
The recent South African election marked a historic shift, as the ANC lost the parliamentary majority it had held ever since the end of apartheid. Women remain underrepresented in both parliament and government. Leaving aside the numbers, the new political landscape, with its multiparty cabinet and increasingly violent opposition, has brought fresh challenges for women in politics. They will have to join forces across party lines to resist the rise of big man politics, marked by patriarchal behaviour and violent masculinity.
This book explores the work of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola and how it can enhance our understanding of gender and peacebuilding in Africa. Critical feminist contributions on how a gender perspective can broaden inclusion in post-conflict processes, as well as change institutions and mindsets are surely innovative but have not succeeded in dislodging liberal peace as the means of dealing with conflict on the African continent. Such works also draw their critiques from largely rationalist, Western roots. Entering Tutuola’s world, where human and non-human characters change and interchange, allows scholars and practitioners to see peacebuilding as organic, reliant on multiple identities and interlocutors, and grounded in local knowledge. I contend that such an expanded lens that integrates exogenous and endogenous knowledge systems non-hierarchically is not only relevant to the peacebuilding context, but could also find application in other areas in need of decolonisation.
Amna, Kvinna i Sudan, bestämmer ingenting själv. Det är hennes man som fattar alla beslut både för henne och familjen. Och det inte mannen bestämmer i hennes liv avgör djuren, vädret och den muhammedanska religionen. Amna är en av de många kvinnor, som lever ett nomadiserande liv i oändliga halvöknar.
Berit Härd ger i den här boken en närbild av en kvinna från kababish-nomaderna och en inblick i hennes vardag.
The five permanent members (P5) of the UN Security Council have a lot of power – thanks largely to their right of veto, but also on account of other advantages. To curb the imbalance in power and strengthen their position, the ten elected (E10), non-permanent members should collaborate more and share their experiences – both among themselves and with the next group of E10 states waiting to replace them. One of the best means of gaining influence is to work with civil society. There are different ways of doing this, and many have shown themselves to be constructive in advancing the agenda for women, peace and security (WPS).
In this highly original work, Mary Njeri Kinyanjui explores the trajectory of women's movement from the margins of urbanization into the centres of business activities in Nairobi and its accompanying implications for urban planning.While women in much of Africa have struggled to gain urban citizenship and continue to be weighed down by poor education, low income and confinement to domestic responsibilities due to patriarchic norms, a new form of urban dynamism - partly informed by the informal economy - is now enabling them to manage poverty, create jobs and link to the circuits of capital and labour. Relying on social ties, reciprocity, sharing and collaboration, women's informal 'solidarity entrepreneurialism' is taking them away from the margins of business activity and catapulting them into the centre.Bringing together key issues of gender, economic informality and urban planning in Africa, Kinyanjui demonstrates that women have become a critical factor in the making of a postcolonial city.
I den här boken får vi träffa trötta, starka, arga och glada kvinnor som berättar om sig själva, sina tunga minnen och ljusa förhoppningar. Birgitta Lagerström skriver om Angola som blivit självständigt efter fem sekler av slaveri och portugisisk kolonialism och om hur kvinnorna deltog i befrielsekampen och idag fortsätter arbetet på att förändra kvinnans villkor och bygga upp ett fritt Angola.
Overcoming the gender gap in agriculture is nowadays one of the focal points of major international institutions, governments and development agencies. In this paper, we discuss some effects of international aid in rural contexts on gender dynamics and women’s empowerment. Through the analysis of some small-scale projects in Northern Senegal – implemented within a wide rural development aid program in West Africa - we develop some reflections on the observed women-oriented projects: we stress the risk that women end up being “locked” into pre-defined roles, namely in small-scale food processing activities, by a standardized logic of aid projects. We develop an analysis of the practices that may lead to this outcome and of the characteristics of such “women roles” in value chains. We discuss this observation in the light of the gendered division of tasks in primary products value chains and of the literature on the integration of “gender” in development thinking. By means of this analysis, we draw some reflections on the discrepancy between explicit empowerment goals and unintended outcomes of aid.
About half of the people of Sub-Saharan Africa live below the poverty line, and 80 per cent of them are women. Their access to justice is guaranteed by international and domestic laws. But these laws mean little or nothing without government support and adequate funding. This policy note offers recommendations on how to secure access to justice.
During the course of the past three decades efforts of democratisation and institutional reforms have characterised the African continent, including demands for gender equality and women's political representation. As a result, some countries have introduced affirmative action measures, either in the aftermath of conflicts or as part of broader constitutional reforms, whereas others are falling behind this fast track to women's political representation. Utilising a range of case studies spanning both the success cases and the less successful cases from different regions, this work examines the uneven developments on the continent.
By mapping, analysing and comparing women's political representation in different African contexts, this book sheds light on the formal and informal institutions and the interplay between these that are influencing women's political representation and can explain the development on women's political representation across the continent and present perspectives on an 'African feminist institutionalism'.
A new book, Gendered Institutions and Women’s Political Representation in Africa calls for a focus on institutional barriers to women in politics – formal and informal – as an introduction of isolated formal gender equality reforms have provided mixed results. Despite this, African countries without quotas are still looking towards these reforms as the main model for promoting political empowerment. This policy note argues that these need to be combined with a regendering of institutions working against more women in politics and suggests steps towards an African feminist institutionalism for women in politics.
With its high level of female representation and its successful reconciliation process after the 1994 genocide, Rwanda has emerged as something of an African and global 'model' of gender equality and conflict resolution. But beyond the 'politics of numbers' lies a male-dominated structure, where women and feminist thinking have little or no influence. This policy note assesses how Rwanda has adopted UN Security Council Resolution 1325, and offers policy advice on how to break gender barriers in the traditionally masculinist security sector.
With only 13 per cent female representation in parliament, Ghana is lagging behind most other African states. A proposal for affirmative action is currently being debated. This policy note assesses the barriers to women’s political representation in Ghana, and gives recommendations on how the issue might be addressed.
In the forthcoming Ghanaian elections, for the first time ever a woman has emerged as a vice-presidential candidate for one of the two major parties. Her candidacy has given rise to hopes of progress on gender equality issues, but it has also led to anti-feminist and misogynistic comments. This policy note addresses certain challenges and opportunities to break the male dominance of Ghanaian politics.
This chapter explores the dynamics of contemporary political citizenships in West African Ghana and East African Uganda with a focus on junctures of convergences and divergences shaping the pathways for gendered in-/exclusions of citizenships. It interrogates the ways women’s political citizenships have developed and the pathways to power in the two countries. It draws on the notion of Ubuntu and afro-communitarianism as a pathway for understanding collective political citizenships and belongings as an alternative to Western state centric and individualised notions of citizenship. By mapping historical trajectories, the chapter seeks to understand the continuities, and changes defining present gendered citizenships. Despite being on similar paths in terms of the development of political systems, institutions and the gender subtext in the postcolonial eras, the two countries have developed unevenly. Whereas Uganda is characterised by authoritarian features with a relative high level of women’s political representation, the more democratic Ghana has a low level of women’s political representation. It concludes, that related to the notion of Ubuntu the achievement of women’s substantive political citizenship will be located within women’s collective lived realities and demands a broad based intersectional mobilisation.
Constructions of gender, embodiment and agency among male Hamas youths in the West Bank are discussed in this article through the prism of violence. It focuses on the constructions of uncertain masculinities in a complex interplay of violence, political Islam, suffering and loss, and the importance of analyzing the body in such processes – both as agential and as victimized – is highlighted. To be able to move away from the sensationalist Western media that often portray Middle Eastern Muslim men as “violent,” and as terrorists, we need to understand the motivations and the meanings of violence. The method of analysis is to use a discourse-centered approach and to use experience-near ethnography that begins with men’s own practices and attends to how they understand themselves, how their bodies are involved, and how they live out norms and ideologies in their everyday lives. Thereby we are able to understand how men’s realities and identities are interpreted, negotiated and constructed and how the body is actively involved in these processes. This approach is relevant since it is possible to analyze the singularity of experience, not only as a form of social interaction, but as linked to social structures and discourses, which implies negotiations of tensions, conflicts, and uncertainties.
The percentage of women aged 15-49 in Egypt who have undergone the procedure of female circumcision, or genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) stands at 91%, according to the latest research carried out by UNICEF. Female circumcision has become a global political minefield with 'Western' interventions affecting Egyptian politics and social development, not least in the area of democracy and human rights. Maria Frederika Malmstrom employs an ethnographic approach to this controversial issue, with the aim of understanding how female gender identity is continually created and re-created in Egypt through a number of daily practices, and the central role which female circumcision plays in this process. Viewing the concept of 'agency' as critical to the examination of social and cultural trends in the region, Malmstrom explores the lived experiences and social meanings of circumcision and femininity as narrated by women from Cairo. It is through the examination of the voices of these women that she offers an analysis of gender identity in Egypt and its impact on women's sexuality.