Women are the answer

At the annual United Nations summit in New York delegates are discussing the eight millenium development goals, set ten years ago. There will be a lot of hot air about putting women at the centre of attaining these goals.

It is undoubtedly true: none of the goals can be achieved without the involvement of women in the developing world, because women generally do most fo the work and raise the children.

However, many of the nations swapping platitudes about improving the position of women remain fundamentally opposed to genuine and meaningful female empowerment. In their societies, where men take the decisions and women labour in the fields, women continue to have very low status. They are denied the right to the money they earn in agriculture, they cannot own or inherit land, and they do not even have the right to the chidlren they have brought into the world.

Human Rights Watch found that one of the reasons HIV spreads in some countries is that infected husbands threaten to torture their own children unless their wives will have sex with them. Their wives have to stay within such abusive relationships because they have no legal rights to their own children. If they want to escape from their husbands, they have to also leave their children behind. As long as this situation persists in so many develooping countries, lip service to women's rights is hypocritical nonsense.

I AM SLAVE

Channel 4 screened an important drama recently about a young Sudanese woman taken into slavery, who ended up as a domestic servant in London. Her story reflects the vile experiences of thousands of young women. Sadly, the slave trade never went away.
Click on the link below to hear an interview with the woman on whom the drama is based. Essential listening for those interested in the continuing slave trade in Africa.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/2010/09/100907_outlook_slave.shtml

Welcome Penny Marshall to N4A

Network for Africa is delighted that the distinguished journalist Penny Marshall has become our patron. She is a particular hero of mine because she uncovered the death camps run by the Serbs in Bosnia. Her reports finally prompted President Clinton to act, which in turn caused the Serbs to run away.

Penny has had an unrivalled career. She was the first woman in Britain to be appointed as a foreign correspondent based abroad for the national TV news. She has won an EMMY, a BAFTA and an RTS award for her work in Eastern Europe and Russia in the 1990s. For three decades she was one of the key faces of ITN’s news coverage: from the revolution in Romania to the release of Nelson Mandela from prison.

Her exclusive reports revealing the Serb-run detention camps of Northern Bosnia in 1992 had an impact across the world and remain one of the most important TV exclusives of this era.

Her work on the Sudan border in 2005 was the first to highlight the refugee crisis in Eastern Chad. Her reporting has been recognised by Amnesty International for its insight and courage. She has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in Moscow and South Africa. Penny now works as a freelance broadcaster and reporter appearing regularly on ITN and Radio 4. She also teaches TV reporting to professional journalists in emerging democracies.

We are honoured to have her on our team.