Filipino voters who have yet to make up their minds about their choice for their next president are being advised: look at each aspirant’s stance on reproductive health to help them gauge the candidate’s leadership mettle and political guts.

A candidate’s position on issues like reproductive health, which has a long history of opposition from the Catholic Church in this mainly Catholic country, reveals clues regarding his or her capacity for governance, says Ramon San Pascual, head of the Philippine Legislative Committee on Population and Development (PLCPD).

The European Union (EU) delegation in Tanzania revealed its "Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Tanzania for the period 2010-2012," which will be presented in Dar es Salaam. It is the first of its kind, representing a collective effort by EU member states to "strengthen and coordinate action on gender issues at country-level." The EU collectively by large is Tanzania's biggest donor.

The new action plan is to promote the establishment of gender-sensitive domestic accountability mechanisms as an integral part of good governance. This is set to hold the government accountable to its citizens and empower women and men to voice their interests and needs, especially at local level. The new EU Gender Action Plan aims at capacity building of key stakeholders, strengthening accountability, monitoring and evaluation systems using gender-sensitive performance indicators and supporting concrete actions to redress situations where women and girls are particularly disadvantaged.

Economically, women are vastly underrepresented in the work force as employment is still limited to mostly the army and the police. The Women's Ministry barely has any budget allocations, which has led to the resignation of ministers (most notably, Nawal al-Samaraie, minister for women's affairs, tendered her resignation in February 2009). Girls have a high rate of illiteracy and often drop out of schools due to economic and security reasons. Domestic violence is increasing, as is trafficking in women, and the Iraqi government estimates there are up to 3 million widows in Iraq today.

Senator Pia Cayetano left the campaign trail in the Philippines momentarily to preside a special meeting of parliamentarians at the United Nations and to take part in another meeting with American legislators in Washington, DC.

Cayetano was elected President of the Coordinating Committee of Women Parliamentarians of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), the highest position ever achieved by a Filipino in the 119-year-old IPU, considered as the United Nations of parliamentarians around the world.

A top Islamic cleric Wednesday welcomed the passage of the Women’s Reservation Bill in the Rajya Sabha, describing it as ‘a great step towards women’s empowerment’.

‘This is a great step towards women’s empowerment. I would urge Indian Muslim women to enter politics and get themselves elected to parliament and state assemblies. They will have to empower themselves,’ the Grand Mufti of Kashmir, Maulana Bashir-ud-Din, told reporters here.

Women in the Asia-Pacific region have little economic and political power, impacting economic growth prospects of developing nations, the United Nations said in a report released Monday.

According to the UN Asia-Pacific Human Development Report to mark International Women’s Day, the region ranked near the worst in the world on issues such as protecting women from violence or upholding their rights to property.

“The key message [of the report] is that to meet any development goals that a society sets, you need the full participation and involvement of women,” Helen Clark, head of the UN Development Program (UNDP), said.