Masarat Daud, a 26-year-old woman originally from Fatehpur Shekhawati in Rajasthan (India), and now residing in Dubai, UAE, left her high-flying job to create a eight-day learning academies to help Indian villagers learn computer, public speaking and communications skills.

Each skill takes eight days (three hours per day), for a total of 24 hours to educate communities!

No need for months and years; the road to empowerment just got shorter.

As anniversaries go, it's a bleak one – and only Amanda Lindhout herself truly knows how bleak.

It was one year ago today that the Alberta-bred journalist and two colleagues were kidnapped at gunpoint in Somalia, plucked from a road near Mogadishu.

Since then, little has been seen or heard of the 28-year-old Sylvan Lake native, aside from a mute video of her and Australian reporter Nigel Brennan kneeling before their masked and armed captors aired on Al-Jazeera television weeks after they disappeared, and a few scattered, horrifying calls to media outlets by a distraught woman claiming to be Amanda Lindhout in recent months in which she essentially pleads with the Canadian government to save her life.

In the 19th century, the paramount moral challenge was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. In this century, it is the brutality inflicted on so many women and girls around the globe: sex trafficking, acid attacks (Juliette: Acid Attack Survivor, Amazing Woman; Beauty Is More Thank Skin Deep; Afghan Girls, Scarred By Acid, Defy Terror, Embrace School;), bride burnings and mass rape (Tackling South Africa's rape epidemic; 29-Year-Old Jordanian Gets 7.5 Years For Killing Sister Who Had Been Raped).

Yet if the injustices that women in poor countries suffer are of paramount importance, in an economic and geopolitical sense the opportunity they represent is even greater. “Women hold up half the sky,” in the words of a Chinese saying, yet that’s mostly an aspiration: in a large slice of the world, girls are uneducated and women marginalized, and it’s not an accident that those same countries are disproportionately mired in poverty and riven by fundamentalism and chaos.

There’s a growing recognition among everyone from the World Bank to the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs of Staff to aid organizations like CARE that focusing on women and girls is the most effective way to fight global poverty and extremism. That’s why foreign aid is increasingly directed to women. The world is awakening to a powerful truth: Women and girls aren’t the problem; they’re the solution.

Read the full story by:
Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
NYT Magazine

A recent study by Menf Association for Development, an Egyptian non-governmental organisation, found that 40,000 underage and young girls have been “wed” in tourism marriages in Egypt since 2006, which has resulted in the birth of 150,000 children.

Mr Wael Karam, chairman of the Menf board, cited one case he found particularly shocking: “A father of a girl named Iman, 17, has made her marry 10 rich Arab men already. He didn’t mind her moving from one man to the other as long as he was being paid in advance for each of these ‘marriages’, which is done under the pretence of keeping with law and religion.”

Moushira Khattab, the new minister of family and population, said the “husbands” rarely recognise the children from these marriages and more often than not return to their home countries, never to see the girl or the child again.

“This is so disgraceful to Egyptian women and Egypt,” Magdi Afify, a member of the Shura Council, parliament’s upper house, said at a press conference held by Menf on Saturday to launch a parallel campaign against the “dangers of touristic marriage in Egypt”.

An Afghan bill allowing a husband to starve his wife if she refuses to have sex has been published in the official gazette and become law.

The original version, which caused outrage earlier this year, obliged Shia women to have sex with their husbands every four days at a minimum, and it effectively condoned rape by removing the need for consent to sex within marriage.

Women's groups say the new wording still violates the principle of equality that is enshrined in their constitution.

It allows a man to withhold food from his wife if she refuses his sexual demands; a woman must get her husband's permission to work; and fathers and grandfathers are given exclusive custody of children.

Click here for the full story by:
By Sarah Rainsford
BBC Online

A court in Myanmar sentenced the pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi to 18 months of additional house arrest Tuesday, drawing widespread condemnation from around the world.

Playing up a moment of suspense, the court first sentenced Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi, 64, to three years of hard labor for violating the terms of the house arrest where she has spent 14 of the past 20 years.

Moments later, it reduced the sentence and sent her home from the prison where she had been held since the trial began three months ago.

Click here for the full story by:
Seth Mydans
NYT online