Advocacy & Development
Since the 1990s, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has been rocked by continuous armed conflicts stemming from various factors, including internal tensions, regional instability, and a legacy of colonialism. Today, more than 100 active armed groups operate in this country.
The conflict currently marring eastern DRC first began in 2012. Rebels from the March 23 Movement (M23) took up arms in the North Kivu Province, claiming that the central DRC government had failed to honor the 2009 peace agreement it had signed with the M23 predecessor, the National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP).
In areas gripped by armed conflict, sexual violence against women is prevalent. However, the perpetrators are not only soldiers or armed rebels. Civilians also take this opportunity to abuse and rape women seeking domestic work in their homes.
This is precisely what happened to Charline, a young woman in her twenties. Staring blankly ahead as tears streamed down her face, her sadness was evident.
In May 2026, I launched the first phase of a project aimed at understanding how sexist hate speech operates in Kosovo’s online public sphere with the help of AI tools. While discussions about online violence against women have become increasingly common, there is still limited local research examining the actual language used in these attacks and the social narratives they reproduce.
The project was motivated by a simple but important question: What role does sexist hate speech play in public discourse? Is it merely a collection of offensive comments posted by anonymous users, or does it serve a broader discursive function?
Understanding these dynamics is important because online discourse increasingly shapes public attitudes, political participation, and perceptions of who belongs in public life. If misogynistic narratives become normalized online, they can discourage women from participating in public debate and reinforce existing inequalities.
A disturbing picture
After putting together a team to facilitate the project, we began monitoring social media comments published on 22 major Kosovo-based Facebook and YouTube pages. We collected and analyzed 625 comments across 67 social media posts published between May 1 and 31, 2026.
These posts were made by well-established media outlets that report on national news.
The monitoring period coincided with the local election campaign and a period of intensive political debate online.
The findings paint a disturbing picture of how women are discussed in Kosovo’s digital public sphere — one that is even more disturbing than many might imagine.
In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), violence against women has become increasingly alarming. Statistics from the first quarter of 2026 expose a major gender-based violence (GBV) crisis. Although the fight is mounting amid security vulnerabilities, social taboos, and citizen mobilizations, victims still suffer the consequences while the problem persists.
In just three months, healthcare professionals recorded more than 1,100 rape cases in the Uvira health zone, an administrative and operational health district located in South Kivu, eastern DRC. Behind this chilling statistic lies an all-too-familiar reality. Violence has become an everyday occurrence, severely impacting women and girls. Chronic insecurity, mass population displacement, and persistent discriminatory norms fuel this physical, psychological, sexual, and economic violence.
Despite several years of awareness-raising campaigns, victims seldom report such incidents. A fear of reprisal, stigmatization, and family rejection forces many into silence, hampering prevention and care efforts.
I am a girl from Afghan soil, a land that has buried countless dreams beneath its surface.
I was a girl with big dreams for my future. Dreams I knew I could only achieve through hard work, education, and resilience in the face of many challenges.
Alongside my father, who stood by me like a strong fortress, I worked tirelessly to move closer to my dreams, sparing no effort in pursuit of my goal.
Then my country was engulfed in the flames of war, and the dreams of many of us were reduced to ashes. Still, I did not lose hope. I continued striving, despite the harsh circumstances, to reach a bright and prosperous future.
Nairobi, Kenya, 27 July 2026 – The Government of Kenya, through the State Department for Gender and Affirmative Action under the Ministry of Gender, Culture and Children Services, UN Women Kenya and partners concluded a two-day National Consultative Forum on the implementation of the Presidential Technical Working Group (TWG) Recommendations on Gender-Based Violence (GBV), including Femicide, with a renewed commitment to translate recommendations into measurable, coordinated and adequately financed action.
Convened under the theme "Translating TWG Recommendations into Measurable Outcomes and Sustained Actions (Pamoja Dhidi ya Dhulma ya Kijinsia: Wakati ni Sasa!)", the forum brought together national and county governments, Parliament, the Judiciary, law enforcement agencies, development partners, civil society organizations, academia, survivors, faith-based organizations, youth representatives, and the private sector to develop a practical roadmap for implementation.
Speaking on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary for Gender, Culture and Children Services, Principal Secretary for the State Department for Gender and Affirmative Action, Ms. Anne Wang'ombe, reaffirmed the Government's commitment to ending GBV and femicide and accelerating implementation of the TWG recommendations through strengthened coordination, legal reforms, survivor-centred services, prevention programmes, and improved accountability mechanisms.
Islamabad, Sep 6 (IANS) Only two per cent of women own land alone or jointly in Pakistan, showcasing the gender gap in land ownership and the economic environment, as per a recent study, local media reported on Sunday.
According to the study conducted by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), 67 per cent of women are employed in Pakistan's agriculture sector. However, only 1.5 per cent of agricultural households are women-headed, the daily Dawn reported.
According to the study, only about two per cent of ever-married women aged between 15 and 49 years own land jointly or alone, while 97.2 per cent of women had not inherited a house or land, it said, citing the study
The study revealed that 99.1 per cent of women in Sindh do not own land alone or jointly. According to the study, 57 per cent of men have a financial account while only 14 per cent of women do so. The study revealed that 11 per cent of women own a mobile wallet, compared with 48 per cent of men.
Earlier in June, a report said that Pakistan secured the last spot in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2025 and its overall gender parity score drop from 57 per cent in 2024 to 56.7 per cent in 2025, showcase the inequalities faced by women in the country regularly across economic participation and independence, social freedoms, political representation, education, health, and personal agency and autonomy.
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Women’s leadership is advancing, but parity remains decades away. Women hold 27.4 per cent of parliamentary seats, 35.6 per cent of local government positions and 30.5 per cent of managerial jobs worldwide – all only slight improvements over 2015 levels.
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Despite progress on gender-responsive budgeting and legal reforms, systemic barriers persist. More countries are adopting gender-responsive budgeting, but only one in four has a comprehensive system. Since 2019, 99 legal reforms have advanced women’s rights, but discriminatory laws and barriers to land ownership and secure tenure remain widespread.
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Violence and harmful practices continue to undermine the rights and agency of millions of women and girls. Nearly one in three women has experienced violence in her lifetime, almost half of married or partnered women lack full bodily autonomy, nearly one in five girls still marries before the age of 18 and 230 million girls and women have undergone female genital mutilation. Regional successes, however, show that legal reforms and changing social norms can drive progress.
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Achieving gender equality requires sustained investment in sexual and reproductive health, decisive action to remove discriminatory laws and end harmful practices, stronger women's economic rights and gender-responsive financing, and a transformation of the social norms and institutions that continue to limit women's and girls' opportunities.
30 global leaders unveiled their groundbreaking solutions for gender equality today as part of UN Women’s HeForShe movement. Addressing critical policy issues, changing the course of business leadership and the futures of our next generation, these proven practices have the potential to see gender equality achieved within our lifetime.
HeForShe’s IMPACT Champions, comprised of 10 Heads of State, 10 global CEOs and 10 University Presidents, came together to share with the world the key obstacles they have faced on their journeys, as well as the innovative proven practices that can now empower the rest of the world. H.E. Arthur Peter Mutharika, President of Malawi, shared the story of how his country has ended child marriage once and for all, allowing more than 1500 girls to return to education. Bob Moritz, Chairman of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited shared the story of how his organization has gone from 18 per cent female representation in the Global Leadership Team in January 2016 to 47 per cent by December 2016. Paul Boyle, President and Vice-Chancellor at the University of Leicester (U.K.) led a dynamic conversation on how students are generating solutions to address gender-based violence on their campuses.
“The results announced in today’s IMPACT 10x10x10 Parity Report are inspirational. In 2015, I challenged the Champions to ‘think big’ and commit to creative approaches that tackled the greatest barriers. We know that incremental steps do not bring us the benefits that we so urgently need,” said Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women. “As leaders in their fields the Champions hold the key to breaking norms and making game-changing progress for both women and men. The report shares strategies, roadblocks and successes so others can follow suit.”
Introduction
Targeted online violence against women in public life is increasingly technologically sophisticated and damaging, triggering alarming rates of mental health diagnosis, heightened self-censorship, and more frequent escalation to law enforcement. For women human rights defenders and activists, journalists and media workers, and writers and other public communicators, online violence is often deliberate and coordinated, aiming to silence them while undermining their professional credibility and personal reputations. It also serves to fuel the reversal of hard-won rights in a climate of rising authoritarianism, democratic backsliding and networked misogyny. Gender rights rollback is both enabled and exacerbated by technologies which — by design — amplify misogynistic hate speech for profit.
Generative AI apps are the latest manifestation of this form of subjugation. They do not just ‘nudify’ women and girls instantaneously without their consent, they simulate them being sexually assaulted. AI-assisted ‘virtual rape’ is now at the fingertips of perpetrators. This phenomenon deepens and accelerates the harm inflicted on women in public life who are increasingly targeted in online violence campaigns with an escalation in associated offline attacks, abuse and harassment, as our previous research has shown. In this publication — the second installment in the Tipping Point series that examines how online violence is constraining women’s participation in public life in the AI Age — we focus primarily on manifestations of image-based abuse and what happens after exposure to such online violence. How are survivors affected personally and professionally? What coping mechanisms do they deploy? And how do they seek legal redress? Our data is derived from a UN-Women commissioned global survey which was distributed in late 2025 in five languages, in partnership with UNESCO and the International Center for Journalists.
Across the globe, deliberate illiberal strategies that exploit entrenched gender inequality are increasingly being used to weaken democratic institutions from within. The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) was not simply a byproduct of chaos at the beginning of U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. Rather, it followed a well-documented authoritarian strategy in which attacks on gender equality are used to consolidate power, narrow civic space, and make democratic governance harder to defend. While the process of dismantling the agency that administered U.S. government foreign assistance has been well documented, significant gaps remain between what insiders witnessed and what the broader public understands. This gap in understanding is not benign. When the public perceives these events as isolated policy shifts rather than coordinated institutional erosion, it diffuses accountability, obscures the impact, reduces resistance, and allows similar tactics to be redeployed without scrutiny.
The administration’s early actions targeting gender equality, women’s empowerment, LGBTQI+ initiatives, and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility functions operated not as peripheral policy disputes but as frontline tactics that weakened foreign assistance infrastructure, government institutions, and democratic norms. Trump has used this approach since at least 2016. It was mapped out in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Drawing on firsthand experience and technical analysis, this report situates these actions within an effective authoritarian pattern of leveraging patriarchal norms and cross-ideological gender bias to justify institutional retrenchment, create administrative compliance, and accelerate structural dismantling. Ultimately, the strategic sidelining of gender equality functions increased institutional vulnerability. Although the Trump administration’s targeting of those functions did not create the vulnerability, it recognized, exposed, and exploited it as part of a wider effort to erode democratic norms. Rebuilding democratic systems and foreign assistance architecture, therefore, will require treating gender equality as a core resilience safeguard rather than a peripheral policy concern. Its strategic targeting is central to the broader authoritarian assault on democracy. Democracy stakeholders must name that pattern, examine the decisions that enabled it, and learn from what unfolded.
Since Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, digital platforms have become central to political participation in the country, enabling female politicians, elections candidates, activists and public figures to mobilise communities and shape public debate.However, this visibility has drastically exposed women in politics to various forms of Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV) : Online harassment, sexualised abuse, defamation, threats and coordinated smear campaigns are routinely used to undermine women’s credibility, silence their voices and deter their participation in political life. Beyond the severe harm inflicted on individual women in politics, TFGBV constitutes a structural threat to all women’s political rights, democratic pluralism and freedom of expression. By reinforcing misogynistic norms and normalising sexist intimidation, it erodes hard-won gains of women’s political participation in Tunisia.
What is at stake extends beyond Tunisia. The 2011 Revolution of Dignity which ended the Ben Ali dictatorship marked a historic turning point, igniting the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ and positioned Tunisia as a symbol of democratic possibility in the region and on the African continent. Earlier milestones, from the Personal Status Code of 1956 to progressive reforms including Organic Law No. 58-2017 on the elimination of violence against women and girls (Law 58), have long cast Tunisia as a reference point for women’s rights and legal reform. Tunisia’s trajectory sends signals across Africa and the Middle East about what becomes possible when women’s rights are defended and what collapses when they are politically sacrificed.
This webinar focused on barriers, challenges and strategies pertaining to the issue of gender parity for women in politics. Our guest speaker for the discussion was Dr. Mona Lena Krook.
Applying an intersectional lens the webinar discussion drew on research from Dr. Mona Lena Krook’s book, Elect Women for a Change: The Path to Gender Parity in Politics, Dr. Krook presented a core thesis: the global political community must move beyond aspirational "critical mass" targets (typically 30%) toward a non-negotiable 50/50 parity framework. This shift represents a transition from viewing women’s participation as an elective "add-on" to recognizing it as a fundamental requirement for democratic legitimacy.