The year 2020 began on a high note for the African Women Leaders Network (AWLN). As the world was preparing to mark 25 years since the Fourth World Conference on Women, AWLN sought to commemorate the anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action with the launch of 25 National Chapters across Africa.

Hundreds of women rallied across the capital of Belarus on Wednesday to protest a brutal police crackdown that has left hundreds injured and thousands detained while challenging election results extending the 26-year rule of the country's authoritarian leader.

President Alyaksandr Lukashenka seeking re-election next month for sixth consecutive term.

Activists threatened that their children will be taken into state custody, and with sexual violence.

Elections in Belarus are usually a boring, predictable affair.

The decision to run for office arrived for Myya Jones in the winter of 2016. She was 22, a campus leader for the Black Student Union at Michigan State University, and determined to change her home town of Detroit for the better. For months, she researched the process of gentrification, which pushed black people out of the neighborhoods where she grew up and went to high school; for months, she waited for a name to support.

Biden announced that Kamala Harris would be his running mate in the 2020 presidential election, making Harris, a senator from California, the first Black woman and the first Asian-American woman to run for U.S. vice president on a major party ticket.