[Via ThinkProgress.]

The Guttmacher Institute provides a full summary of the article. Not surprisingly, the more restrictive abortion laws are, the higher the proportion of unsafe abortions (with Eastern Europe being a significant outlier, with the highest global abortion rates). About half of all abortions are unsafe, leading to the deaths of roughly 47,000 women each year, or 13 percent of all global maternal deaths—almost entirely in developing nations, where restrictive abortion laws are more common and access to contraception and medical care are generally lower.

Take action to help protect women’s right to choose in the U.S.—mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade by taking part in the Trust Women Online March and display your support for reproductive rights.

This post originally appeared at Sociological Images, reprinted with permission.

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Overall abortion rates dropped between 1995 and 2003, then remained steady at 28 per 1,000 women a year through 2008. But the proportion of unsafe abortions rose significantly from 44 percent in 1995 to 49 percent in 2008. Unsafe abortion is one of the main contributors to maternal death and includes procedures outside hospitals, clinics and surgeries, or without qualified medical supervision.

Unsafe abortions are especially common in developing countries, particularly those countries with more restrictive abortion laws. In Africa, for example, 97 percent of the abortions performed are considered unsafe, compared to 95 percent in Latin America, 40 percent in Asia and 9 percent in Europe.

The WHO also found that countries with restrictive abortion laws did not have any corresponding decrease in the number of abortions performed. In fact, usually the opposite was true, proving yet again that criminalizing abortion does not end abortion, it just unnecessarily risks women’s lives.

Most disturbing from the report is the inescapable conclusion that the progress made during the 1990s in making abortions safer has not just stalled, it has reversed. Setting policy that stigmatizes women and criminalizes the need to end a pregnancy is nothing short of a complete failure of public health policy.

Family planning saves lives, especially in the developing world. Whether it is legal or illegal, women will seek and obtain abortions because abortions are a fundamental component of women’s health care. It’s time we recognize it as such.

It’s Trust Women Week! To mark the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Silver Ribbon Campaign, in partnership with MoveOn.org, is leading a national Online March to mobilize pro-choice supporters and build solidarity and momentum for reproductive health, rights and justice in 2012. We at Ms. urge you to join the Online March.

Reprinted with permission from Care2

 Photo of memorial to women who died from illegal unsafe abortions at 1989 pro-choice rally in Washington, D.C. from Wikimedia Commons

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As a vice-presidential candidate in Sierra Leone’s elections next year—the first woman ever included on a major party ticket in my country—I carry a great responsibility to revive the push for both female political representation and gender equality in my region of Africa. And across our continent there are promising advances. At 49 percent, Rwanda has the world’s highest ratio of women in parliament. Women in South Africa and Mozambique have held deputy presidential positions, while in Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has proved that women can reach the highest office.

Yet these exceptions stand alone in contrast to the situation across Africa as a whole where women remain politically sidelined. In Sierra Leone, warm words by our current President Koroma have remained just that, and his promise of 30 percent representation of women in public office by the end of his presidential term next year simply has not been enacted. President Koroma has displayed a brazen ambivalence towards existing female representatives with his less than generous cabinet appointments. The recommendation of Sierra Leone’s National Commission for Democracy and Human Rights—which I was privileged to Chair—of the crucial need for political gender balance, it seems, is not a priority for the incumbent president.

My candidacy is fuelled by a desire to change this state-sanctioned apathy towards women’s rights and offer renewed hope to women in the country who have, despite a lack of representation, always been at the forefront of change. In 1996 when Sierra Leone was still under military rule, thousands of my sisters demonstrated despite the risk to their lives in support of restoring democracy. Today, just as then, women remain at the epicenter of any true democratization. And in this upcoming election, I intend to force the issue of female political representation to the forefront of the campaign.

However, there are significant hurdles to overcome—whether they are cultural stereotypes or engrained male-dominated hierarchies. These feed into a dangerous mix of apathy, tension and resentment towards women in Sierra Leone. Women in Africa must constantly challenge what the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance calls the ‘masculine model’ of politics that still prevails throughout the continent.

The need to engage with those who are under-represented extends beyond the cause of women’s rights. The civil war that ravaged my country for over a decade displaced three million, both internally and externally. Some 200,000 Sierra Leoneans now reside in the UK, most having fled during the civil war. As my Sierra Leone People’s Party pushes for further stability and democratization in the upcoming campaign, it is imperative that we re-engage with this Diaspora. They are crucial to the future of the country: the funds they send home to friends and family are the largest single source of income for many in Sierra Leone. Their professional expertise, including their experience of living and working in Britain where the rights of women and equality are further advanced, can provide their homeland with a wealth of opportunity. We must tap this reservoir of intellect to re-energize our workforce and bring much needed skills to our fragile economy.

However, I am under no illusion that such a re-engagement won’t be a challenge. Despite their love of their country, many in the Diaspora remain disaffected. This has not been helped by the politicization of the current government’s Diaspora office. Staffed entirely by members of President Koroma’s All-Peoples’ Congress party, it has become a largely partisan operation. And continuing accusations of high-level corruption in the Koroma administration has not helped. Only last month, an undercover report by Al-Jazeera implicated the Vice-President in the illegal sale of timber licenses. US Diplomatic cables made known to the world through Wikileaks have shone a light onto the favoritism and protection the President and his administration has given to those guilty of corruption and illegality. And, after five years in power, President Koroma’s Sierra Leone ties with Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe in the Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index. So it is understandable that many in the Diaspora are uncertain whether to engage more substantially in investment and support for Sierra Leone under its current government, despite their love for their country.

But help is on the way. My party’s presidential candidate Julius Maada Bio was the head of state who handed the country back to multi-party elections in 1996, and for whose decision so many women of Sierra Leone campaigned in the streets to support in that dangerous year. Other leaders, not least the current president, have offered visionary words but few have the track record of Julius Maada Bio of acting on their pledges. If elected, together we will increase the number of women in the cabinet and high office across the country. We will enact in full the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. And we will ensure that contracts and business dealings by the government are made transparently, allowing for members of the Diaspora to have the confidence they can invest in their country knowing it is a nation led by an administration committed to transparency, equality and fairness.

Sierra Leone is still scarred from a painful decade of civil conflict—our economic platform and democracy remain fragile and our people remain wary of those that promise so much and deliver very little. Lucretia Mott was correct when she said a nation’s progress can be measured by the status of its women. As a female African politician, now under an increasing spotlight as the election nears, I have a duty to reengage with those that have been left outside of the mainstream, whether through gender discrimination, social exclusion or conflict. Only by opening up civic institutions, government and business to all, and challenging the unwritten rules that exclude so many from political participation, can we ensure lasting change in Sierra Leone.

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The harvest marks the end of the “lean season,” the dangerous months after the year’s food supply has dwindled and the next crops have not yet arrived—a time that leaves many women foraging for their children.

West Africa—and much of the rest of the world—is facing a food crisis. Nearly one billion people are hungry, according to the World Hunger Education Service, and farmers throughout the Global South are experiencing escalating anxiety over the appropriation and control of land, seeds, and farming techniques by foreign governments and corporations—manifested in “land-grabbing,” seed monopolization, genetic modification, and the imposition of high-tech, water-, chemical-, and energy-intensive monocrops.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) is a Gates Foundation-funded initiative based in Nairobi and spearheaded by Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the U.N. It’s a multimillion-dollar project that seeks to increase food production in Africa by implementing vigorous Western-style agricultural techniques, promising high-yield results for food-insecure populations.

According to the Gates Foundation and other supporters, it’s an African-led endeavor, modeled on the previous Green Revolutions of Latin America and the Indian sub-continent but placed in the hands of Africans. It sounds like a good idea.

But a growing movement of local farmers—largely led by women—argue that the surest path to food security is securing food sovereignty. It’s a concept that was put forward in the early 90′s by Via Campesina, an international alliance of peasant, indigenous, and women’s organizations that advocates for communities’ control over how food is produced, and who gets to eat it.

The original Green Revolution, beginning in the 1940′s, pushed widespread use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and equipment whose expense was out of reach for most peasant farmers. Critics point out that years of water-intensive farming has depleted water tables, while increased use of chemicals has severely damaged soil in some areas. And while new seeds and tools may bring higher production in the short term, many Africans fear the consolidated control corporations exercise over the food supply, the precarious dependence on large amounts of water and energy inputs, and the environmental toll such methods may eventually take.

The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), sponsored by the U.N. and published in 2009, found that the adoption of agrochemicals and monocropping, among other technologies, have harmed more than the land. They’ve also hurt local communities and economies, benefiting transnational corporations with “near-total control” of food production.

Marcia Ishii-Eiteman, lead author of the IAASTD report, emphasizes instead the importance of agroecological farming, an approach that supports localized farming and draws on traditional agricultural knowledge. It not only considers productivity, sustainability, and resilience, but also equity.

This is good news for women. Women, according to Ishii-Eiteman, make up a huge percentage of the world’s small food producers (who, she says, together grow about 70 percent of the food supply). They do the most to get food on the table, and they’re usually the last to eat it.

Fatou Batta works with Groundswell International, an organization that partners with small-farmer groups across the world, including in Burkina Faso. She’s helping to lead a broad grassroots alliance that shows that small farmers‚ and especially women, can feed the world if we give them the resources to control their food, and the right to eat it too.

Christa Hillstrom: Let’s talk about food sovereignty. How do people in West Africa understand this concept?

Fatou Batta: In our context, it is related to the type of food we want to eat and produce, and having the ability to produce what we eat. It seems that in the U.S., food justice is much better understood than food sovereignty. But in our context, controlling the production of what we eat is key—not just get something that is imposed.

You talk about equity—economic equity, gender equity—as a key ingredient of sovereignty. I think a lot of people don’t think equity when they think about food security. They think of resilience, sustainability, and high yields. Why is it important to include equity in building long-term security in food production? How does that bring women into the picture?

First of all, it’s a question of rights. Women are key in producing food. They are working on the farm, they’re producing through labor, and when it comes to using food, they are the last ones to be able to eat it. It’s important to make sure those who contribute to producing the food also have access to eat equitably. In the family, usually males have the right to eat first. I think it’s unfair. It’s discrimination. So if we’re talking about the right to food, we have to be looking at the gender imbalance.

Could you give an idea of what it’s like to be a woman farmer in West Africa?

The way it works is, there is land for the whole family. On that land, it’s the head of household—the man—who manages it. But the labor is largely produced by the women and children. In many places in Burkina, the woman has a small plot of land with which to produce something like okra because she has the responsibility of feeding the family using extra ingredients. The whole family produces staples like millet and sorghum. But they still have to make some type of sauce—like a soup with vegetables. This is the responsibility of individual women.

Read the rest of this interview at YES! magazine.

Top: Fatou Batta; All photos courtesy of Groundswell International

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Ashtiani is currently serving 10 years in prison after being convicted as an accessory to her husband’s 2005 murder. In a separate trial, she was found guilty of adultery and sentenced to stoning, but the Iranian judiciary suspended the punishment in 2010 after international outcry.

On December 26, Malek Ajdar Sharifi, prosecutor general of Persian Azerbaijan, told the press that the facility holding Ashtiani was not equipped to carry out a stoning, and that experts were determining whether Islamic law permits the sentence to be converted to death by hanging. “As soon as the result of the investigation is obtained, we will carry out the sentence,” he said.

But human rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch say there is nothing to indicate that Ashtiani is in new danger of execution. Instead, the statement by Sharifi (who has since claimed he was misquoted) may amount to mere bluster in a political tug-of-war between a hardline provincial court and the more moderate, image-conscious central government. Or it may represent an attempt to test the international temperature around Ashtiani’s case after a more than a year of near-silence.

In any case, the absence of a definitive answer leaves Ashtiani in a precarious position: Until the adultery conviction is officially overturned, she is subject to the whims of Iran’s judiciary.

“It’s very disturbing that her case is still hanging in the balance,” says Amnesty International’s Iran specialist, Elise Auerbach. “We don’t know what’s going to happen to her. Anything could happen.”

“I think what’s important to remember here is that Ashtiani is still in prison and the judiciary has not thrown out her adultery conviction, which carries a death sentence under Iranian law,” says Faraz Sanei, a Middle East researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Both groups have called for the death sentence to be vacated on the grounds that adultery does not merit capital punishment under international law. They also argue that the lack of transparency in Iranian legal proceedings casts serious doubt upon a case whose details–up to and including the verdict–remain murky. Ashtiani’s 2006 adultery conviction rested on an Iranian legal provision that allows judges to rule based on their hunches in the absence of hard evidence. Subsequent accounts from Iranian authorities alternately confirm and refute that a stoning sentence was ever handed down. In the meantime, her first lawyer was forced to flee the country and her second was arrested and imprisoned, leaving her without proper legal representation.

“This poor lady is just sitting in prison right now, and I think it’s going to be quite a while before her fate is decided,” says Auerbach.

To pressure the Iranian government to halt Ashtiani’s execution, you can add your name to this Amnesty International petition:

Photo from Flickr user olgaberrios under Creative Commons 2.0.

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Today, several hundred women gathered for a march to expose the military’s sexual violence against female demonstrators and demand a regime change. Activists used Twitter to organize the rally, with the hashtag #bluebra. Protesters carried pictures of women, elderly people and teenagers who had been beaten up by the police. Many men formed a protective circle around the women marchers so they could not be assaulted.

There is a reason why Time magazine picked The Protester as its Person of the Year–and there is a reason why the protester on that Time cover is a woman. Throughout the Arab Spring, from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Egypt, women have been on the frontlines of the protests, demanding more rights, as well as behind the scenes, shaping their countries’ revolutions.

The problem is not getting women on the streets during these times of passionate protests, but getting them into the conversations that follow. It is after the euphoria fades, after the dictator is placed in custody, when the political blueprint of a country is being laid out, that women are nowhere to be heard.

We have seen this repeatedly. From Bangladesh’s ’71 War of Independence, to Iran in ’79, to Libya of 2011, to Egypt today, where are the women when it comes to forming the new government? Women have already been effectively shut out in the ongoing elections for Egypt’s lower house of Parliament.

Egyptian women’s march today is truly revolutionary, because it is a refusal to be sidelined from the process of determining their country’s future. They were and are a part of Egypt’s revolution. Social media and the Internet are women’s weapons to ensure that their protests will be seen and their voices will not be silenced.

If the image of the woman in her blue bra being stomped senseless on the streets of Cairo shows us anything, it is that, with the help of new media, this revolution is being televised, and the world is watching. Egyptian women are demonstrating that without women’s participation, no country can become a real democracy.

UPDATE: 12/21/11—The New York Times reports that Tuesday’s march was the most important demonstration by Egyptian women in nearly a century, with attendance in the thousands:

Historians called the event the biggest women’s demonstration in modern Egyptian history, the most significant since a 1919 march against British colonialism inaugurated women’s activism here, and a rarity in the Arab world. …

The protest’s scale stunned even feminists here. In Egypt’s stiffly patriarchal culture, previous attempts to organize women’s events in Tahrir Square during this year’s protests almost always fizzled or, in one case in March, ended in the physical harassment of a small group of women by a larger crowd of men.

“It was amazing the number of women that came out from all over the place,” said Zeinab Abul-Magd, a historian who has studied women’s activism here. “I expected fewer than 300.”

Photo of Egyptian women marching on International Women’s Day, March 2011, by flickr user Al Jazeera English under Creative Commons 2.0

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The first of three rounds of elections for Egypt’s lower house of Parliament took place at the end of November in nine of 27 Egyptian provinces, including the major cities of Cairo and Alexandria. Elections proceeded as planned despite violent clashes between police and protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, as well as sporadic violence across the country and several organized boycotts. Over 50 percent of eligible Egyptian voters participated, and news outlets reported a notably large presence of Egyptian women voters.

Women also made up about 30 percent of all Egyptian parliamentary candidates, most running as independents rather than on a party ticket. Along with the high turnout of women voters, that would seem grounds for feminist optimism. But all of the women running as independents in the first round of elections lost, including media personality and activist Gameela Ismail, one of only a handful of self-identified feminists running, and the candidate whom many saw as the woman most likely to be elected.

Egypt has an elaborate electoral system that is part direct and part by party. On each ballot, Egyptians vote for two independent candidates as well as a party. One-third of Parliament is made up of the independent candidates, and another two-thirds are drawn from party lists, based on the proportion of votes each party receives.

However, when the final party-list results are announced in January, they are likely to add only a few women to the 498-member lower house. New election laws repealed a previous stipulation that Parliament be 12 percent women, instead merely requiring parties to include one woman on each of their lists. This led to party lists that were, on average, only 6 percent female. Moreover, the new law did not specify where women fell on the list, and placement is everything: Each party’s share of parliament members will be drawn from the top of its lists.

However, it was the more conservative Islamic and Islamist parties that had the greatest success at the polls, and these tended to put women low on their lists. For instance, the Salafist Islamic Al Nour party, which won nearly 25 percent of the vote, placed women on the very bottom of its lists to ensure they would not see political office, publicly stating that women’s inclusion was “evil” and that they had been “forced” to include these names by law. In contrast, moderate Islamist party the Muslim Brotherhood, which won almost 37 percent of the vote, touts its inclusion of women, known as the Muslim Sisters. The fourth female candidate with a chance to reach parliament is Dr. Omayma Kamel, a Muslim Sister placed fourth on the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom & Justice Party (FJP) list in Cairo’s fourth district. Even if she is seated–the FJP will need to win four seats in her district for that to happen–many secular activists wonder if such women’s power will be limited, noting that women do not hold leadership positions in the Muslim Brotherhood.

Overall, liberal parties placed women higher on their lists than their Islamist and Islamic counterparts. Three secular seats for women have been potentially secured through such placement, according to the The Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights. The secular nationalist Wafd Party has promised two top seats for women in Cairo and Damietta, and the Egyptian Bloc included Sana’a El-Said, a female candidate from Assuit, on the top of their winning list.

Together, the Salafist Al Nour Party and the Muslim Brotherhood won upwards of 60 percent of the vote in the first round of elections, which included Egypt’s most secular regions: its cities. As the second round of voting, which concludes today, and the final round, scheduled for January 3, both occur in more rural provinces, Islamist and Islamic parties are expected to win by even greater margins over the fragmented, secular opposition. In light of these trends, the prospect of women’s participation in Egypt’s new Parliament appears bleak.

The role of the first parliament will be to draft a new Egyptian constitution, guiding the transition into “The New Egypt.” Under the transitional authority of the army, women were initially excluded from the first constitutional committee, and, based on the first round of election results, women may not gain significant representation through electoral politics. Secular women’s organizations have been particularly concerned about the exclusion of women from the crafting of the constitution, which could mean that women’s rights are not codified there, allowing conservative laws to be enacted.

Salafist parties have advocated significant conservative reforms to assert the “Islamic character” of the state. Their platform has included assaults on individual rights (women’s dress, for example) as well as implementing different educational curriculum for girls and boys in public schools. The Muslim Brotherhood, on the other hand, claims that it will respect individual rights, but even its Muslim Sister members have called for separate roles for women in Egyptian society. Secular Egyptian women worry that these demands will nudge working women back into the domestic sphere and discourage women’s higher education.

“Giving the Islamists’ electoral victory, women’s rights will go from bad to worse,” says Egyptian journalist, Dina Sadek. Sadek articulates her frustration, however, with Egypt’s secular parties. “While the liberals fought amongst themselves, the Islamist parties were well-organized and united under mutual goals. You can’t blame the Islamists for working hard.”

Sadek hopes that these early Islamist victories will backfire in the long run. “When people see that their only accomplishment is the implementation of Sharia law or the oppression of women instead of focusing on the real issues, like poverty, unemployment, the people will rise against them.”

Feminist Egyptian writer Zainab Magdy also voiced this hope for an Islamist implosion, but worries about the regression of women’s rights in the meantime:

The entirety of Egyptian society has seen the power of our women in the Revolution. They know that we played a pivotal role in toppling Mubarak, and no one can deny that power. But the Islamic bloc saw this too, so pushing women out of politics into ‘their proper role under Islam,’ which I can only assume means ‘the home,’ will be a top priority in consolidating their power. Many people expect this to backfire, but I worry what the cost will be to women in the meantime.

After the third round of lower-house elections on January 3rd, the final results for the lower house are expected by the end of January. The three rounds of upper house elections are scheduled for January 29, February 15 and March 4. The military recently announced that the Egyptian presidential election will occur in June of 2012, with a transfer to total civilian leadership in July of 2012.

To follow developments in Egypt and to learn more about the role of Egyptian women in the uprising, follow these Egyptian Women on Twitter:

@AsmaaMahfouz

@SarahCarr

@HannahAllam

@MonaSosh

@SarrahsWorld

@MonaEltahawy

Photo of an Egyptian woman in Tahrir Square by Al Jazeera English under Creative Commons 2.0

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The appointment of Ambassador Barrie Walkley as special advisor to Africa’s Great Lakes region, which includes the Congo, comes after more than a year of pressure from NGOs, activist groups and 51 members of Congress requesting a special envoy under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to coordinate the scattershot U.S. policy toward the region. At the top of advocates’ list of concerns were the mass atrocities being committed in the Congo—known among United Nations officials as the rape capital of the world.

Many Congo-watchers are privately calling the appointment of a lower-level ambassador, rather than a special envoy, an empty gesture. In this role, Walkley likely won’t have the influence or authority of a special envoy, nor does he bring any special Congo expertise to the table. Insiders also say that relegating the new appointment to the authority of a regional bureau chief betrays a lack of real ambition in U.S. policy toward the Congo. The State Department’s official press release suggested that Walkley would be working closely with both Secretary Clinton and Assistant Secretary Johnnie Carson, but failed to clarify to whom exactly he will report. The general sentiment in advocacy circles is that little change can be expected from U.S. policy toward the Congo without strong action from Secretary Clinton herself.

Meanwhile, mounting tensions over elections in the Congo reached a boiling point on Friday, when violence broke out after preliminary results confirmed incumbent President Joseph Kabila as the winner of the country’s second-ever democratic election. The elections have been condemned as fraud-ridden by some international observers. Congolese opposition groups have called for peaceful mass protests, which some believe could spark a “Congolese Spring” pro-democracy uprising in 2012. But the notorious brutality of Congolese security forces has many worried that the country’s stability—and civilian safety—now rest on a knife’s edge.

“If the present electoral crisis is not resolved, it will likely lead to violence, disorder, and potentially the breakout of revolts in various parts of the country,” says Eastern Congo Initiative fellow Anthony Gambino, who was the Congo mission director for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2001-2004. He continues:

In an area where there’s conflict, you can’t move in with programs to try to protect women. ‘Conflict’ here does not mean men fighting men in battles. In the Congo, it has meant and continues to mean armed men and boys going into villages and terrorizing unarmed civilians—girls, boys, men and women—killing them, raping them, and just doing unspeakable things. If we don’t find a way out of this crisis, we’re heading back in that direction.

The political developments in Congo are bad news for the country’s women in multiple ways. Women have historically suffered the greatest consequences during periods of bloodshed and instability. In addition, Kabila’s administration has never seriously addressed the country’s staggering rape epidemic and may actually be fueling it. In 2008, he announced a zero-tolerance policy for gender-based violence, but that policy has led to few prosecutions. Meanwhile, a woman is still reportedly raped nearly every minute in the Congo. Both rebel and national forces perpetrate the mass rapes.

Lisa Shannon, a Congo activist and author of the book A Thousand Sisters, worked with a number of advocacy groups to urge the State Department to appoint a special envoy to Africa’s Great Lakes region. Shannon says,

The U.S. spends about a billion dollars a year on the Democratic Republic of Congo. Yet our support remains uncoordinated at best, and at worst reinforces existing power-holders that actively work against the security of Congolese women. Grassroots advocates pushed hard for a special envoy who would report directly to Secretary Clinton. While we appreciate the State Department’s renewed attention to Congo through Special Representative Walkley and welcome him, the only true measure of progress will be a coordinated, cohesive, comprehensive U.S. policy, a plan that addresses the roots of violence in Congo rather than the symptoms, one that translates to real-life security for Congolese families.

Photo from Flickr user Julien Harneis under Creative Commons 2.0

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This year, millions of people decided the time had come to claim their rights. They took to the streets and demanded change. Many found their voices using the internet and instant messaging to inform, inspire and mobilize supporters to seek their basic human rights. Social media helped activists organize peaceful protest movements in cities across the globe – from Tunis to Madrid, from Cairo to New York – at times in the face of violent repression.

One example of the kind of revolutionary activism that’s been making headlines all year is Saudi women’s struggle for the right to drive. At the forefront of the Women2Drive movement is Manal al-Sharif, who was arrested in May for posting a video of herself driving on YouTube. She was later released—on the condition that she quit the campaign.

In spite of this, al-Sharif is back behind the wheel. In honor of International Human Rights Day, she’s taken to YouTube again to share her message that “mobility is a basic human right.” Al-Sharif honks for women’s driving rights in Saudi Arabia and asks you to do the same:

Dozens of people have joined the “Honk for Saudi Women” campaign by submitting their own videos. Here are a few of our favorites:

You can celebrate International Human Rights Day by participating in the campaign! Say you support Saudi women’s driving rights, honk, upload the video to YouTube, and send the link to honkforsaudiwomen@gmail.com. Your video will join others from supporters worldwide on the channel http://www.youtube.com/honkforsaudiwomen.

Want more ways to support Saudi women’s right to drive? Go here to email world leaders and sign below to contact King Abdullah:

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“I thought about her a lot on the long truck rides from Kenya to South Africa,” says Winnie Asiti, a 25-year-old Kenyan environmental activist, of her mentor, the late Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. “I thought about my peers teasing me and calling me a treehugger, and how I told them, just wait and see: I am going to be the next Wangari Maathai.’”  She smiles. “I guess now is my time. Call me a treehugger. Tease me if you want. I am going to help save Africa, and I need the people of the world to join me.”

Asiti’s truck was headed for the United Nations Global Conference on Climate Change in Durban, South Africa, a momentous conference of global leaders charged with negotiating a treaty to address the urgent problem of climate change. On Friday, talks went into overtime when world leaders failed to agree on a plan to reduce carbon emissions.

Asiti brought with her a youth-led caravan to speak up for Africa’s youth at the conference (young people make up three-quarters of the continent’s population). On the road to Durban, they traveled through six countries, holding massive climate-justice concerts in each and stopping locally to connect with communities and gather stories.

“People across Africa asked us to be their ambassadors in Durban–to share their stories with leaders from around the world and demand they act now,” says Asiti. “Sometimes we would pull [the bus] away from a community meeting and I would just feel overwhelmed because people put so much hope in us.”

That is why, in Durban, Asiti has been racing the hallways, running from meetings to press conferences to panels. An outspoken leader, everywhere she shares people’s stories and calls for the United Nations to act now.

She tells attendees that her hometown was once the breadbasket of Africa, producing enough to feed all of Kenya and a surplus to export to neighboring countries–but all that has changed.

It used to be we knew exactly when the rain season would come. We had one long season and one short. Now they are totally unpredictable. Sometimes we have to plant up to a month late, and many crops–including the trees we use for our cooking–just are not growing very well anymore. Some women spend half their day just trying to gather enough wood for their household and struggle to put enough food on the table.

Like her mentor, she approaches environmental justice from an ecofeminist perspective. Standing in front of a room filled with young people, Asiti raises her voice to say,

Look, people in my community are suffering, especially woman and girls. We are the ones that collect the water, do the cooking, gather the fire wood and do the farming at home, so we are the ones that are bearing the brunt of these changes in our climate.

Asiti has started a program in Kenya through an international climate change organization called 350.org and the African Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC). Its aim: to raise awareness about the effects of climate change and provide community members with the resources to adapt. With her volunteer team of youth activists, she conduct educational workshops in women’s circles, teaching them about drought-resistant crops, water-saving methods and efficient new stoves.

“Once women are empowered, half the problem is solved,” says Asiti. “But we need a global community to raise up and stand with us to demand that our leaders act boldly.”

She takes a deep breath and says,

If our leaders don’t do the right thing on this issue, we are just going to make our voices louder. Because if we don’t adjust to the realities of climate change, we will die. I am going back home fueled with the energy of the people I met on this journey, and I will build a movement large enough that the world will hear us!

Wangari Maathai would be proud.

ABOVE: Winnie Asiti, 25-year-old environmental activist

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