BringBackOurGirlsOver 200 girls are missing in Nigeria – Please RESCUE THEM! #BringBackOurGirls

When the school girls were abducted on April 14th, the mass media barely made mention of the fact. The international campaign to rescue them finally caught the attention of the mass media, only after Nigerian women, women’s organisations and other movements used social media to call for solidarity. International rallies are being held around the world and Change.org is circulating a petition (see link at end of article).

25 July 2013

PRESS RELEASE

2013 Ramon Magsaysay Awardees Announced

The Board of Trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation (RMAF) today announced that this year three individuals and two organizations from Afghanistan, Indonesia, Myanmar, Nepal and the Philippines will receive Asia’s premier prize, the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

Letter from Hibaaq Osman

http://el-karama.org/

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

On January 25th of last year, the Egyptian people sparked an unexpected series of protest against the decades-long rule by the Mubarak regime. 

According to Gallup, Egyptian women made up almost a third of the protesters during the revolution. Women were on the front lines and at every stage, caring for the wounded, protecting their communities, leading demonstrations, and building coalitions.

Photo: Brendan Brady/IRIN

Maria De Fatima Kalcona and her daughter DILI, 5 June 2012 (IRIN) - When Indonesian forces invaded Timor-Leste in 1975, Maria De Fatima Kalcona hid in the jungle with resistance fighters, but after years on the move, and hobbled by a gunshot wound, she was eventually captured in 1979.

proposed by

Focus on the Global South (Thailand), Instituto Nupef (Brazil), IT for Change (India),
Knowledge Commons (India), Other News (Italy) and Third World Network (Malaysia)

and endorsed by
organisations and individuals listed at the end of the statement

The Internet is a major force today, restructuring our economic, social, political and cultural systems. Most people implicitly assume that it is basically a beneficent force, needing, if at all, some caution only at the user-end. This may have been true in the early stages when the Internet was created and sustained by benevolent actors, including academics, technologists, and start-up enterprises that challenged big businesses. However, we are getting past that stage now. What used to be a public network of millions of digital spaces, is now largely a conglomeration of a few proprietary spaces. (A few websites like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Amazon together make much of what is considered the Internet by most people today.) We are also moving away from a browser-centric architecture of the 'open' Internet to an applications-driven mobile Internet, that is even more closed and ruled by proprietary spaces (like App Store and Android Market). In fact, some Internet plans for mobiles come only with a few big websites and applications, without the open 'public' Internet, which is an ominous pointer to what the future Internet may look like. What started off as a global public resource is well on its way to becoming a set of monopoly private enclosures, and a means for entrenching dominant power. At this stage, it is crucial to actively defend and promote the Internet's immense potential as a democratic and egalitarian force, including through appropriate principles and policies at the global level.

BeyondMDGsMore than 120 activists, advocates and representatives from CSOs across movements and generations from 27 countries in Asia and the Pacific gathered in Kuala Lumpur from May 2-4 have spoken! The Kuala Lumpur Call to Action outlines our 12-point Call to governments, international organisations, including UN agencies, development partners and other duty bearers, for sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) for sustainable development.