Global News by Topic: Gender Justice
DIKOME BALUE, CAMEROON – James Elangwe, 87, is a native of Dikome Balue. Dikome Balue is one of the 28 villages that make up the Balue tribe in the Ndian division of Cameroon’s Southwestern province.
Of the 10 tribes that make up the Oroko community in Cameroon, the Balue is the only clan that practices matrilineality, the practice whereby inheritance passes through the female line.
NAIROBI, KENYA – It is 2:30 p.m. in Kibera, Kenya’s largest slum. The sun is vengefully hot, and foreheads are polka-dotted with sweat droplets.
A 5-foot-5-inch figure wearing a green and white checkered dress, matching socks and a red sweater approaches from the shade. With each step the shadowy figure takes, the bright sunshine reveals the face of a smiling young girl. She cradles a wooden box in her sturdy arms like a newborn.
KATHMANDU, NEPAL – “What had my little son and myself done that my husband brought home a second wife?” asks a frail-looking Janaki Adhikari.
Her eyes well up with tears.
“Yes, I then divorced him and raised my son on my own,” she says. “He is now 15 years old.”
JÉRÉMIE, HAITI – Mirlene Jeudi is an expecting mother from Jérémie, a small town in southwestern Haiti. Her due date is only a month away, yet she has not been able to stop working. Her husband died after she became pregnant so she is now a single mother and must save enough to support her children.
KIGALI, RWANDA – It’s Friday afternoon at Groupe Scolaire St. André, a secondary school in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. Students are headed home for the three-week spring holiday.
Clad in white shirts, khaki skirts and trousers with yellow sweaters, the nearly 700 students, who range in age from 11 to 20, gather excitedly. They talk and wave their newly received report cards.
BUEA, CAMEROON – Lorantine Keukam, 34, is a mother of six children in Buea, the capital of the Southwest region. She serves as the chief of the Unit of Reproductive Health at the Ministry of Public Health’s regional delegation. Although some are still getting used to a rise in male midwives in Cameroon, she says enthusiastically that they are a force to reckon with.
KIGALI, RWANDA – It is not yet 7 a.m. on a Friday, and players are already on the football field at Nyamirambo Stadium in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. Sixteen young women, ages 15 to 22, are clad in white jerseys and running drills in advance of Sunday’s game in the national women’s league.