Fatima Akbari, 42 ,who migrated to Iran to feed and raise her three children, after the killing of her husband--the family’s only bread earner by Taliban some 12 years ago--returned home in 2004 and established a carpentry school to generate income one year later.
Standing in the carpentry school, a mud-walled courtyard in Afghan capital Kabul, Fatima, the school’s principal, told Xinhua that the vocational institution, with support from an international organization, is offering free carpentry education to the widowed sisters so as to help them earn bread through own hands.
“An Afghan woman, once becoming a widow, will not be welcomed by neither her own or her husband’s family,“ said Fatima, with lightening color shining in the eyes. “We’re left to count on ourselves.“
Back to her homeland from Iran three years ago, Fatima developed a plan, which finally turned out to be a carpentry vocational center.
“We are able to create value and generate income for ourselves through our own hands,“ said Fatima. “I want my fellow sisters to understand the point, and that’s why I have started the school.“
Women are among the weakest groups in terms of economic power and social rights in Afghanistan, a conservative country, which has seen decades-long of war, factional fighting and civil strife.
Taliban regime during its six-year reign had confined women in their homes and deprived them of education and work rights.
Those women, after losing their husbands, had to shoulder the life burden alone in the war-torn country, though most of them were unskilled.
Over two million widows, mostly caused by war, are now living in the post-Taliban nation and those who are unskilled or with little work experiences have even been forced to beg.
In Kabul’s dust-filled roads, usually jammed by imported used cars, one can always see women begging, holding a baby in arm.
A total of 60 widows, Fatima said, are currently learning carpentry in the school which in fact is an income generating project located in one of the poorest areas of western Kabul’s suburbs, from where majority of their learners come.
Fatima said after three-months training, the learners have already gained the ability of making small tables, television stands, and chairs, etc.
What’s more encouraging is that the widows’ carpentry school has managed to sign contracts with furniture marketing firms and sell the work of arts by the learners a little cheaper than the prices in market.
Half of the revenue will be paid back to the supporting organization and the remaining half goes to the pockets of the learners or junior women carpenters.
“Each learner can earn a monthly average of 2,500 Afghanis (about 50 US dollars),“ said Fatima. “Sometimes if we are lucky each one can earn 15,000 Afghanis (or 300 dollars).“

They have to walk to fetch water, fodder or fuel wood. They have to work longer hours in fields that fetch less and less. After floods and storms, they still have to put food on the plate.
Women bear the brunt of climate change every year, a global network of women’s groups pointed out, wrote Sify.com.
As over 10,000 delegates from 187 countries deliberated during the December 3-14 UN conference on climate change, acting coordinator of the alliance called genderCC, Ulrike Roehr, said: “We need to question the dominant perspective focusing mainly on technologies and markets, and put caring and justice at the centre of the measures and mechanisms.“
“The lack of gender perspectives in the current climate process not only violates women’s human rights--fundamental principles agreed on by the UN community--but it also leads to shortcomings in the efficiency and effectiveness of climate related measures and instruments,“ she said.
Anna Pinto, an activist based in Goa, said the current focus of replacing fossil fuels with biofuels--which she called agrofuels--would only make matters worse for women, as they took land away from food crops or forests.
She called the promotion of agrofuels “a threat to human rights, especially for women, because they face extreme burdens in times of food shortages and water scarcity, which are going to get worse if land is taken away for agrofuels.“
The women’s network pointed out: “Yet, as those charged with meeting the food needs of their families, women in most communities hold the most reliable knowledge about promoting food sovereignty, preserving threatened food supplies, managing and maintaining water sources, and ensuring their families’ survival in the face of shortages.“
The network called upon governments preparing a Bali roadmap to “recognize the vital urgency of gender equality in the growing climate crisis and demonstrate leadership through top-level support for considering gender concerns in all UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) and related process and include the installation of a gender-watch system within UNFCCC.“
It recommended governments to:
-Integrate gender aspects into adaptation plans and tools, focusing on specific adaptation needs, and ensuring women’s participation in developing the plans.
-Commit to sustainable and equitable financing scheme and ensure gender equity in all phases and aspects of funding.
-Allocate 20 percent of all donor funds for activities and projects addressing women and designed and implemented by women and gender experts.
-Go beyond the narrow focus on solutions devoted to market-based mechanisms.
-Make full use of the knowledge and capacity of women.

Women bear much of the responsibility for cultivating crops in Africa.

A US$13 million pan-African initiative to increase the role of women scientists in agriculture was launched (5 December) in Kenya.
The Nairobi-based African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) intends to increase the number of women scientists on the continent. It also seeks to provide role models and address the institutional biases that have limited women in agricultural research, reported Scidev.net.
The scheme is funded by a four-year grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and organized by the Gender & Diversity Program of the Consultative Group of International Agricultural Research (CGIAR).
AWARD will initially support 360 female researchers in countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia.
“Training and mentoring young scientists has a multiplier effect that spills over to future generations. The best and fastest way to send a message across the world is to wrap it into a human being,“ said Jenipher Bisikwa, a lecturer at the Faculty of Agriculture in Makerere University, Uganda.
Vicki Wilde, head of the CGIAR Gender & Diversity Program said food insecurity in Africa can only be addressed by ensuring that women have an active role not just on the farm but in the laboratories.
“Women bear much of the responsibility for cultivating crops in Africa, and they face challenging and changing conditions,“ said Rajiv Shah, director of agricultural development for the Gates Foundation, in a press release. “African women scientists can help bring practical, sustainable improvements to the farm sector so that smallholder farmers--most of whom are women--can build better lives for themselves and their families.“

Average working week for a woman in full-time employment in the European Union is 68 hours.

Household duties are still preventing women from furthering their careers and getting into senior management roles in EU, new research has found.
A survey conducted by Cambridge University, based on 30,000 workers in the 27 EU countries, found that gender inequality persists in the workplace, having hardly changed in almost two decades, Personneltoday.com reported.
Women are working longer hours performing household duties such as cleaning and childcare, which often means they take on more part-time work and lower-paid roles, and sacrifice the opportunity to break into top management jobs.
The report, Gender and Working Conditions in the European Union, said that despite British female workers making up just under half of the workforce, fewer than one in six had senior management roles.
Dr Brendan Burchell, who led the study, said: “The working lifestyles of most people in Europe still seem to be determined by gender.“
“Gender segregation in employment is pronounced, and this widens the gender pay gap. In many cases, we were struck by how little the results for the longer-standing EU nations like Britain, Germany and France have changed since 1991,“ Burchell added.
The study found that the average man in full-time employment works about 55 hours a week.
In contrast to this, the average working week for a woman in full-time employment in the European Union is 68 hours.
The study showed that women with part-time jobs worked on average 57 hours a week.
Shirley Conran, author of the 1975 bestseller Superwoman and founder of the Work-Life Balance Trust, said that women needed to fight for “domestic democracy“, with men sharing a bigger burden of the chores and childcare at home.

Iranian artists play Daf, a traditional musical instrument, in Tehran.

As many as 320 literacy centers for women are being set up in tehsil Liaqatpur to provide basic education to illiterate women of 15 to 40 years of age, reported Uniquepakistan.com.
National Commission for Human Development (NCHD) District General Manager Colonel Ikram Rabbani (retd) at a meeting in Katchi Mandi, Liaqatpur, told councilors that literacy program aimed at capacity building of local women, so that they were better able to conduct their homes and their lives, to motivate them to ensure education for their children.
He said the women would also be taught to read the holy Quran and would be imparted religious knowledge at the centers, and urged local philanthropists to donate to the literacy centers.

Women who gain weight after being diagnosed with breast cancer could more than double their risk of dying from the disease.
The danger is 2.4 times higher for an obese woman than one of normal weight and rises 14 percent for extra weight gain, according to data presented at the American Association for Cancer Research’s conference in Philadelphia, reported IANS.
The new study involved 4,000 patients taking part in research started in 1988 in three American states by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Boston.
The researchers surveyed about post-diagnosis weight, weight gain, physical activity and diet of the patients and also identified 121 cases of breast cancer-related deaths, reported online edition of Daily Mail.
Using Body Mass Index--a measure of weight and height--the scientists found that the risk of dying from breast cancer was nearly 2.4 times that of women classified as having a normal body weight.
“Obesity was associated with risk of death even after accounting for age, menopausal status or smoking,“ researcher Hazel Nichols said.

The news that 70 percent of women in parts of Niger find it normal that their husbands, fathers and brothers regularly beat, rape and humiliate them came as no surprise to human rights experts in Niger.
“Women here have been indoctrinated by their families, by religious officials, by society that this is a normal phenomenon,“ said Lisette Quesnel, a gender-based violence advisor with Oxfam in Niger, which produced the statistic from a survey of women in the remote Zinder region of eastern Niger in 2006, according to IRIN.
The frequency of the crimes and the impunity granted to the attackers partly explain the broad social acceptance of it, activists say. Rape is increasingly common in the capital Niamey.
Beatings and mental and physical abuse are “frequently“ part of life in a typical Nigerian polygamous family, said Fatima Ibrahima, who designs projects meant to prevent this kind of violence in Niger.
And women are often made destitute overnight when their polygamous husbands throw them out on the street. Divorces are passed by judges without even hearing “one word“ from the women involved.
The full extent of the abuse goes unrecorded because no national statistics on the incidence of violence against women have ever been drawn up by the police or the medical services.
Hospitals and health centers keep records of injuries people are treated for, but not whether injuries were caused by violence, even when a woman’s bruised face and broken bones are clearly the result of a physical assault, activists say.
“Violence against women remains an absolute taboo in Niger,“ said Ibrahima.
“When a woman is beaten, she can’t even tell her mother,“ said Mariama Moussa, President of the Nigerien NGO, SOS women and children victims of family violence.
“If she does tell her mother she will often force her to keep it private and tell her to go and sort things out with her husband.“ In some cases, the insistence that a woman return to an abusive husband has resulted in the woman’s death--cases in which the men have not been arrested.