Women’s rights have come a long way since the first International Women’s Day in 1900.
Today all around the world, women are celebrated for their strength, their wisdom and their love. As the Africans say a world without women is an unthinkable world, for behind every success of a man there is always a woman.
Today there are currently 17 countries that have women as there head of states and the number is growing, in Africa women can be seen in all major sectors of the government, women nobel laureates, CEO of companies etc. from Lady President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia, to our own Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, or the young fiction writer Ngozi Adichie who won the Commonwealth writers prize and the Orange prize for fiction
However, women in third world countries and the middle east are still regarded as second class citizens, some have no rights at all, girls as young as 9 years given off as brides, forced arranged marriages, rape and abused victims, subject to violence and oppression and denied of their basic human rights.
This week Afghan President Hamid Karzai was proudly quoted as saying ‘men are fundamental and women are secondary‘! Girls are hardly educated, given them a lesser chance to be financially Independent.
