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The CSW Beijing Plus Fifteen Review conference (1-8 March 2010), was an opportunity to combine reflection on progress and challenges over the last fifteen years since the Beijing Platform for Action, with the opportunity to share ideas and experiences on ways forward among gender and women’s activists from around the globe.

The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has issued the African Women Report 2009: measuring gender inequality in Africa Experiences and Lessons from the African Gender and Development Index. Available fulltext in English, this report is based on the use of a technical tool, the African Gender and Development Index and thus makes it distinguishable from previous flagship reports of the African Centre for Gender and Social Development. It provides a gender-responsive definition of accountability and focuses on the key elements that are required to ‘make accountability work’ for women

Hands up anyone reading this who is aware that 18 percent of members of parliament in Southern Africa are women and that this percentage is higher than in the United States and Europe? Ever heard any discussion of this in the media? Now imagine that an ethnic or racial group in any one of our countries represented 55 percent of the population, but only had 18 percent of the seats in parliament.

For better or for worse, Southern Africa is in the grips of a tabloid explosion. Press freedom and the discovery of new markets among the lower paid working classes previously […]

Vision
– A station that reflects our community.
– Gender sensitive/responsive institution in editorial content, marketing/advertising.
– Challenging stereotypes.
– Leading the way

The “B Plus Ten” cyber dialogues are a series of seven real time, online “global citizens chats” during the review of the Beijing Platform for Action (link to press release Beijing at ten) taking place at the United Nations in early March. The cyber dialogues will be linked to “GEM News”, the daily conference newspaper being produced by Gender Links (GL) from South Africa and the African Woman and Child Feature Service (AWC) from Kenya

With an initial 38 media houses targeted, Tanzania had the highest number of media houses targeted under the MAP roll out process. Progress in Tanzania was slow with only two media houses having reached the drafting stage by the end of the 2007-2008 year.

The MAP policy roll out process in Zimbabwe unfortunately is yet to take off. The socio-economic and political situation has influenced a rather tepid response from publishers and managers of media houses in that country.

The spread in the media houses in Zambia and the long distances between them made the implementation of MAP in this country difficult. However the three consultants in this country made significant progress in trying to get the targeted 23 media houses to be part of the MAP policy roll out.

The MAP policy roll out process in Swaziland, like Lesotho was relatively rapid owing in part to the concentration of the targeted media houses in two key cities of Manzini and Mbabane and the relative openness of the media to drafting and adopting the HIV and AIDS policies.