Both Senegalese President Macky Sall and opposition leader Ousmane Sonko urged calm Monday, after days of violent protests over Sonko’s arrest left five people dead.Sonko, who was charged with rape, was ordered released Monday by a judge in the capital, Dakar. Sonko has denied the allegations, and many of his supporters believe they were invented to keep him off the presidential ticket in 2024.Senegal’s President Macky Sall attends The Paris Peace Forum at The Elysee Palace in Paris on Nov. 12, 2020.Addressing the nation for the first time since protests broke out, Sall announced the easing of curfews that had been installed to quell the spread of the coronavirus. Those protocols have been wildly unpopular among workers in the informal economy.”I will use all the powers conferred on me by my office to support a return to calm,” Sall said.Some protests for Sonko’s release turned into celebrations in the capital early Monday when the judge’s decision was revealed. But larger demonstrations near the city’s center turned violent as protesters set a car on fire and police responded with tear gas. Thousands of Sonko supporters marched in the capital Monday.The rape charge against Sonko remains and protests, which have ballooned to include grievances about the economy and vaccine distribution, are expected to continue.Addressing a press conference after his release Monday, Sonko urged calm but called for “larger protests” challenging the state.“This is not the fight for Ousmane Sonko,” he said. “We need to hear the message … of the people. We pay tribute to the young people who understood well before us politicians the stakes of this fight.”Ce n’est pas le combat pour Ousmane Sonko. Nous devons entendre le message et avoir une lecture de ce que le peuple dit. Nous rendons hommage aux jeunes qui ont compris, bien avant nous autres politiques, les enjeux de ce combat. Senegalese’s opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, charged with rape, talks to media at his party’s headquarters in Dakar on March 8, 2021, after being freed from detention.Sall has not publicly acknowledged the violence or theories that he was involved in framing Sonko for the rape charges.Sall defeated Sonko in the 2019 presidential elections to win a second term in office. Sonko, 46, was the youngest person to run for president in the country. Despite enthusiastic support from the younger population, he won just 16% of the vote.Last month, an employee of a massage parlor in Dakar accused Sonko of rape — an accusation he has denied and many of his supporters believe was politically motivated.Sonko was arrested two weeks ago while traveling to a court hearing on charges of “public disturbance” after police said they asked him to reroute his convoy and he refused.Massokohna Kane, Sonko’s lawyer, said that Sonko told his guards, “Do not put up any resistance,” when they met police along the route.“I don’t think that the behavior of such a gentleman could constitute public disorder proceedings,” Kane said.This article originated with Allison Fernandes in VOA’s French to Africa service. 
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In Cameroon, thousands of women are holding events to mark International Women’s Day and protesting their lack of political power in the country.  The women, joined by rights groups, note all of Cameroon’s most powerful offices are held by men and there are only 11 female ministers, out of a 63-person Cabinet, and not even one female regional president or governor.  In Cameroon’s capital, hundreds of women gathered Monday for International Women’s Day sang that all across the world women are longing to be free.  Women no longer want to be in the shadows or forced to stay behind, they sing, but want to be side by side in true equality with men. Cameroon Women’s Peace Movement’s Mumah Bih Yvonne said their protest is part of events to mark Women’s Day.  She said many Cameroonian women are more qualified and professional than men, yet few are in leadership. “We have 63 ministries in Cameroon but only 11 of these 63 ministers are women,” she said. “It is not like these women did not go to the same school like men, acquired the same certificates.  But when it comes to appointments, it takes the political will because it is the head of state who appoints.  A presidential decree was just signed appointing members to the National Commission for Human Rights and Freedoms.  Out of the 15 [members] we have only three women.” Yvonne listed what she called a litany of grievances women have against the state of Cameroon.  She noted there is no female governor out of the 10 appointed by President Paul Biya and no female president elected in any of the country’s 10 regions.   Since independence in 1960, the highest-ranking woman in Cameroon’s military was a colonel, notes Yvonne, and there was only one.   The women gathering Monday defied government instructions not to march for Women’s Day because of COVID-19.  But it appeared police made no immediate detentions.   Cameroon authorities said events were organized in towns and villages across the country. FILE – Marie-Thérèse Abena Ondoa, Cameroon’s minister of women’s empowerment and the family, in Yaounde, Feb. 2019. (Moki Edwin Kindzeka/VOA)Cameroon’s Minister of Women’s Empowerment and the Family, Marie-Thérèse Abena Ondou, said the government supports women’s rights but wants them to guard against the virus.   “All the efforts that are being made for the promotion of women should integrate the existence of the coronavirus,” she said.  “They [the women] want better representation in decision making, in the police, in territorial administration, in ministerial posts. They [women] are there. But we would like the number to increase. The men should not think that women want to come out and take their places. We [women] can share [positions with the men].” Women make up 52 percent of Cameroon’s 25 million people, but all the top government positions are taken by men. Ondou said within the past decade, the government has done a lot to improve women’s representation in decision making.  She noted a third of parliamentarians in the lower house are women, up from less than a fourth just six years ago.  And a quarter of Cameroon’s senators are women, up from a fifth.   FILE – Cameroon lawmakers deliberate at the National Assembly, in Yaounde, Cameroon, Apr. 8, 2017. (Moki Edwin Kindzeka/VOA)But University of Yaoundé lecturer in gender issues Rigobert Ahanda says more needs to be done to end discrimination against women.   He says Cameroon’s parliament should by law ban from elections any political party that does not have a quota of at least 30% for women.  Ahanda says the government could also stop subsidies to political parties that ask women to get permission from their husbands before running for office.  He says a national gender observatory could be created to make an inventory of qualified women to facilitate their appointment in every administration in Cameroon. Women police officers escort activists of the Aurat March during a rally to mark International Women’s Day in Islamabad on March 8, 2021.The U.N.’s women-arranged forum is co-hosted by Mexico in late March and France in June and aims to set concrete goals to reach gender equality.  
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For more than 100 years, International Women’s Day has been celebrated by honoring the achievements of women globally.But this year, because of lost jobs and increased burdens of care at home, women have fared worse economically than men.According to data from the International Labour Organization, a United Nations agency, globally women have suffered more job losses related to the pandemic than men. About 5% of women in 2020 lost work, which could mean losing a job or experiencing reduced hours, compared with 3.9% of men.”Every time something happens in the world, women are hit with twice the violence,” Anchia Mulima, coordinator of Lemusica, an organization supporting women and girls in Mozambique, told VOA.Throughout the pandemic, the United Nations has highlighted the disparities between how women have been affected by the crisis compared with men.“Gender inequalities have increased dramatically in the past year, as women bear the brunt of school closures and working from home,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said.According to U.N. Women, 58% of employed women globally work in “informal employment,” or jobs without much regulation and often without taxes or benefits. Women are also more likely to work in industries hardest hit by the pandemic, such as hospitality and child care.In the United States, Black and Latinx women faced more layoffs in 2020 and have seen slower gains in recent months than their white counterparts.A man holds a sign and the portrait of a victim of femicide in front of a metal fence with the names of other victims surrounding the National Palace ahead of the International Women’s Day in Mexico City on March 7, 2021.According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), 8.9% of Black women and 8.5% of Latinx women were unemployed in February — compared with 5.2% of white women.“It’s easy for us to make general sweeping statements of COVID-19 is affecting women in the workplace, but it’s affecting different groups of women disproportionately,” Minda Harts, an author and advocate for Black women in the workplace, told VOA.“Hospitality, leisure — some of those industries have a very high concentration of Black and brown women. And so in 2020, we realized that a lot of those industries were heavily affected,” Harts said.Even as women around the world have faced economic challenges, higher unemployment, and the burden of child care as schools close, they have found ways to use their skills and inspire others.Nubia Rocío Gaona Cárdenas, a farmer in Colombia, said it broke her heart to see mothers struggling to feed their children in the capital of Bogota. She and her son had an idea.“My son told me, ‘Mom, let’s do something productive. Some YouTube channels … don’t teach anything, let’s teach them how to farm, or teach them something. Let’s give them hope,’” Cárdenas told VOA.Their channel on YouTube, which they launched in April 2020, now has more than 700,000 followers.Across the globe, women working as tailors and seamstresses answered the surge in demand for face masks to curb the spread of the coronavirus.“We believe that women are strong and can make a change. We too have abilities and can work alongside men,” Niga Mohammed, an Iraqi tailor, told VOA.With so much work shifted to remote employees, Harts sees an opportunity for industries to diversify their workforce.“I do believe there will be a lot more opportunities for Black and brown women to work at the high-tech companies, to work at the Fortune 500 companies from rural places that they might live, or from certain areas where they just don’t have the capacity to up and move to a big city,” she said.But as numbers from the BLS indicate from the past few months, those changes may be slow to arrive.This year, the theme of International Women’s Day is “Choose to Challenge.”“A challenged world is an alert world. And from challenge comes change,” according to the International Women’s Day website.For many women around the world amid the pandemic, the immediate challenge may be staying afloat economically. 
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A report coinciding with International Women’s Day on Monday finds the number of women parliamentarians globally is increasing, but so slightly that it barely dents the global male-dominated system.The Inter-Parliamentary Union reports more than one quarter of the world’s parliamentarians are women; however, at the current rate of progress, the IPU says it will take another 50 years to achieve gender parity.Rwanda, Cuba and the United Arab Emirates were the three top-ranked countries in 2020, accounting for 50% or more female members. The IPU attributes much of this success to gender quotas. On average, it notes parliaments with quotas have elected nearly 12% more women to lower chambers and 7.4% more women to upper chambers.IPU Secretary-General Martin Chungong said discrimination against women prevents them from becoming parliamentarians. In some cases, he said, governments have laws that prevent women from running for office.“We have in recent years brought to light the phenomenon of violence against women, and there is ample evidence out there that women are now refraining from entering the dangerous terrain of politics on account of harassment, sexism and outright violence, which is something we need to combat,” he said.The IPU report finds progress has been made in all regions of the world. It says the Americas once again tops all other regions with women making up 32.4% of MPs. This, the report says, was despite political upheaval across Latin America. It notes women represented nearly 27% of membership in the U.S. Congress, the highest level in its history.In sub-Saharan Africa, the report finds Mali and Niger have made significant gains in women’s representation, despite grave security risks. It says a few countries in Europe have achieved 30% female representation, while the Middle East and North Africa have lagged with 17%.The worst-performing countries are in the Asia-Pacific region. The IPU says Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea have no female representation. IPU officials call this a matter of great concern.The report shows the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on elections last year, noting that national parliamentary elections were postponed in nearly 20 countries due to restrictions.
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