When Marcelina Bautista Bautista left her indigenous Mixtec community in Nochtixtlan, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca, at the age of 14 with only a primary school education and no knowledge of Spanish, she didn’t dream that one day she would end up contributing to the development of an internation

The stories of gang-rape, forced marriage and fathers being forced to rape their own daughters at gunpoint keep her awake at night.

Accusations of sorcery are widespread in the communities of the highlands in Papua New Guinea. Often for deaths or illness, for theft or accident, the cause is believed to be sorcery, with the villain more often than not being allegedly a woman.

Mother of three children and a home-maker for more than a decade, few in her sleepy village would have imagined that she would be planning bridges and schools today.  But that is Vandana Bahadur Maida’s life in Khankhandvi, in the populous state of Madhya Pradesh, India.

Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 35 parliamentarians between March and November 2009.