Female “footballers,” or soccer players, are invited to an event in Buwate, Uganda, to celebrate this year’s IWD. Girls have an opportunity to participate in soccer drills with the Buwate Youth Soccer club, while a similar event is held in Sierra Leone, sponsored by the Craig Bellamy Foundation. Both events aim to raise awareness of issues related to gender inequality and empowerment of women through sport.
In Bamako, Mali, some women are marking IWD with a peaceful march to raise awareness about female genital mutilation. They hope to educate men and women about the thousands of females exposed to the dangerous practice, which has powerful cultural roots but can cause serious health problems for women.
Progress Watch:
+ Twenty-eight countries have reached or surpassed 30 percent female representation in legislative bodies, and of those countries, eight are located in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the UN.
– Nearly 50 percent of respondents to a seven-country survey by the UN in sub-Saharan Africa agreed it is sometimes or always justifiable for a man to beat his wife, according to UN Women.
Mark Sappenfield
Dear Reader,
About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:
“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”
If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.
But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.
The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.
We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”
If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.
