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Below is a saddening video that gives you an idea of different statistics of women and kids worldwide. All experiencing poverty, hunger issues, no electricity, clean water etc.

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This is a video on statistics of women and children living in poverty

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This article discusses ways to try and help women in developing countries be better off. The stats don't lie. Worldwide women are living in poverty, always coming second to men. There are so many not for profit organizations out there that are working hard to stop this cycle. The one discussed below has a goal of trying to teach it to the children from young.

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'Women make up half the world's population and yet represent a staggering 70% of the world's poor. We live in a world in which women living in poverty face gross inequalities and injustice from birth to death. From poor education to poor nutrition to vulnerable and low pay employment, the sequence of discrimination that a woman may suffer during her entire life is unacceptable but all too common.' The Global Poverty Project.

Millennium Development Goal 3 is to promote gender equality and empower women. This MDG is critical for tackling poverty and improving prospects for women. But how can women break gender based stereotypes to minimise discrimination and reduce gender based violence when they are trapped in societies with socio-cultural practices which routinely discriminate them from having equal opportunities in education, health and livelihood? These women are invisible and the obstacles in their way prevent them from accessing the most basic human rights and needs. The outlook is bleak.

Women make up 70% of the world's working hours and earn only 10% of the world's income and half of what men earn. This leads to greater poverty, slower economic growth and a lower standard of living. In developing countries, millions of women also die each year as a result of gender-based violence. This deep-rooted gender discrimination creates a bleak outlook for women in developing countries. For millions of girls living in poverty, it is often those closest to them who work against the child's interests and their immediate environment is often dysfunctional and sometimes, downright harmful. Parents arrange marriages when you are a child. Neighbours say, if you are a girl, you must limit your activities to your home. Friends say, it is OK not to go to school.

So what is the solution? The World Bank believes that 'putting resources into poor women's hands while promoting gender equality in the household and in society results in large development payoffs'. It is therefore fundamental to nurture their self confidence and empower girls and young women living in poverty to make informed choices about their own lives as well as those of their communities.

Magic Bus' mentoring programme works to enable behavioural and attitudinal change for boys and girls, young people and communities living in poverty in India, focusing on education, health and gender equality. By enabling girls, the world will allow them to be equal participants, with an equal voice, with equal access to opportunities in society. Women and girls in developing countries are currently denied basic human rights, freedom, respect and dignity, so what can the world's girls do to change this? Some questions you could consider in your feature are:

* What role do women have to play in ending global poverty?
* What role can communities play at a grassroots level to create an equal playing field for boys and girls?
* What does the future hold for the girl child living in poverty?
* What impact has the recent global media focus on the rape victim in Delhi had on changing attitudes and behaviour towards women globally?
* Why does gender equality make good economic sense?
* What impact does lack of education and poor health have on a woman's prospects?
* What needs to be done to address cultural and traditional discrimination against women?
* How can women be enabled to break the poverty cycle and have the same rights as men?

Using your own research and investigative methods, you are invited to delve into these issues in developing countries and make the stories behind them come to life. Make sure you use facts to support your article.

Helpful resources to begin your research:

* magicbusuk.org
* globalpovertyproject.com/infobank/women
* un.org/millenniumgoals/gender.shtml
* unifem.org/gender_issues/women_poverty_economics/
* worldbank.org/mdgs/gender.html
Topics

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Is empowering women the answer to ending poverty in the developing world?

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'Women make up half the world's population and yet represent a staggering 70% of the world's poor. We live in a world in which women living in poverty face gross inequalities and injustice from birth to death.

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Being a woman is hard enough. Women and poverty go hand in hand. As a woman, we automatically make less than a man. Studies show, some of the main reasons why women are poor is because we spend more time in a day doing unpaid work. Due to women trying to keep up with raising kids, and being in charge, they tend to settle for jobs that don't pay well or are temporary.

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This video is another example of poverty women are forced into, even at the hands of abuse. This woman documented has to take medication, just to cope with memories of what men have done to her. Leaving her unable to properly function. She at times doesn't even have enough money to eat. An interesting quote from this video stood out to me," The simple fact of being born a woman puts you at a disadvantage".

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As Parliament pushes for legislative change to stop gender inequalities driving women into poverty, we hear one woman's story of how abuse left her destitute. Comment on: Google + http://tinyurl.com/orh99s6 Facebook http://www.facebook.com/europeanparliament Twitter https://twitter.com/Europarl_EN EuroparlTV video ID: 78ec4831-32e4-4779-b938-a5ec01056fbf

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This is a real personal story of a young girl living in Uganda, living in poverty and unfortunately has to go through situations that she can only try to make the most out of. Imagine being raped at 14 and then getting pregnant, then getting kicked out of school because of it. Poverty affects women in many ways.

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Unsurprisingly, I often find myself in conversations with people, chatting about the work I am a part of in Uganda. I love discussing the impact our work is having but I know that I have limited time with this person before the bus comes/the lecture starts/their kids start demanding they're hungry. Whatever the reason, the time I have is short. I'm sure you know what I mean, when we simplify our work to fit in a sentence, only to think but there is so much more to it. Even when I have 20 minutes in front of an audience, I can give a comprehensive overview of the work we do but only really hint at the complexity of the issues that often lie hidden.

So I am going to use this blog to talk about poverty, global development and the challenges we face as a Charity/NGO working in Uganda. I will be referring to books, podcasts, news articles, academic research, real life stories and conversations that my friends and I are having in Uganda and around the world. Even though poverty is complex, I will try my best to break it down into easy to grasp blog posts. I am not an expert, just someone who has something to say. I would love it if you could join in the conversation too; share your thoughts in the comment section below this blog post or on our Facebook page. We would also love for you to recommend interesting articles, books etc. on the subject that you think that we should read too.

So lets get a taste of the complexity by hearing a story about Sarah.

Sarah lives with her family in Uganda. At the age of nine, she had to drop out of her school in the village because her mother, recently giving birth to her fifth child, can not afford to feed the whole family, never-mind send even one of her children to school. You don't have to pay fees to attend the local school but you do need to buy a uniform, school lunches, and each term present your teacher with three toilet rolls, two brooms and a ream of paper, which was simply not feasible. Sarah was disappointed to be away from the class, learning with all her friends but at least she had a couple of writing books and half a torn text book to keep her satisfied. (It didn't help that she had learnt to recognise some words because the text book was written in a completely different language). Shortly after her mum got pregnant with her latest child, Sarah's father disappeared from the family home. For years her parents struggled to earn enough money though farming their small plot to care for the family, so Sarah's father attempted to find work elsewhere. After realising he couldn't find anything in the village, he left for Kampala, the city of endless opportunities!

In the meantime, Mamma Sarah persisted in tilling her land because what other choice did she have. She certainly didn't get schooled as a child, education was for boys in her family. All she knows it tilling, planting, harvesting, repeat. Up before the sun, black tea for breakfast, newborn strapped to her back, cracked bare feet, soil between the toes, hoe in the air, sun overhead. At least she was able to put her two eldest children to work in the earth, Sarah being one of them.

A year after Sarah's father had left, he had returned with some money, and news of the job he had in the city, unloading matooke, the country's famed staple food, into the bustling, vibrant market. Six months later the family of seven had sold their plot of land in the village and moved to the city with hopes of a better life. They moved to an urban congested slum, a community of mud and brick rooms built on a drainage wasteland. Through the sale of their land and the income Tatta Sarah was receiving from his job, they were able to enrol their oldest three children into school, as well as comfortably provide a big meal of rice, matooke and beans per day.

Sarah was 12 when her younger brother was withdrawn from school because money was getting tight and 13 when her brother was finally caught by a shop owner for stealing (something he did in between scavenging and selling large sacks of plastic bottles). By now Mamma Sarah was selling bananas in rows of traffic to provide a little extra income but it wasn't helping as much as she'd hoped. She kept being threatened by the council and police to never return to hawking on the streets because she was unlicensed but of course, she was illiterate and didn't know how to fill out forms, or whatever it takes to get a licence! The money they had from selling their land has now all been spent. The main culprit was health, draining their savings on medication for malaria that the family kept getting now they essentially live on a mosquito infested swamp, and also the bribes the parents had to pay the doctors, to ensure their son got treated for severe burns when the charcoal cooking pot fell over.

The family heard about an NGO working in the area who might be able to help. The first thing they were able to do was give the family a mosquito net for protection at night. A week later the mother had cut the net up, made it into scrubbing brushes and then sold each of them on individually, earning enough to buy a huge sack of rice. Next, the NGO suggested that Mamma Sarah should join a vocational training class and learn tailoring. After successfully completing the training, the NGO bought her a machine so that she could work and earn money from home. Two months later, someone had broken into the home and among other things had stolen the machine, not hugely valuable in its market price but extremely valuable if you know how to utilise the instrument.

Sarah is 14 when she becomes pregnant after being raped for the third time by a neighbour in the slum. She keeps it quite for fear of shame but her pregnancy soon becomes apparent and the school has no choice but to drop her out of school. At the age of 15, the NGO seek to support Sarah by offering the opportunity to further education or vocational training; she chooses to join the hairdressing class. On her first day of training she meets Laura, a refugee who has recently fled the civil war in South Sudan. Laura didn't live in poverty in her home country but now her family's home, business and possessions are destroyed, they have all moved to Kampala to escape the war and start again.

This is an example of the multidimensional poverty impacting many families all over the world. Clean drinking water without improved sanitation will not stop children getting malaria. Access to education means nothing if you get raped, get pregnant and are forced out of school. Theft can quickly destroy any livelihood opportunity that was provided. Violence within a community can mean that you loose everything you have worked so hard to gain.
Join the conversation; what are your thoughts? Perhaps you can let us know by adding a comment below or on our Facebook page. Do you know someone who would love to weigh in on the conversation, click on the share buttons and let them know. The next blog in the series we will looking at Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence.

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Unsurprisingly, I often find myself in conversations with people, chatting about the work I am a part of in Uganda.

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http://www.canadianwomen.org/facts-about-women-and-poverty

Articles
http://reliefweb.int/report/world/women-and-development-worlds-poorest-are-women-and-girls

Videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVW858gQHoE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHa6vFyi1fw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2qCzRvPX80

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This an interesting animated video with subtitles to show how hard a woman is put to work, while in turn to still get paid barely anything while expected to do everything.

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Who Cares: Unpaid care work, poverty and women's / girl's human rights

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The film 'Who Cares' takes a unique approach to presenting research on unpaid care work linking women and girl's economic empowerment and their human rights. The story follows a woman caregiver, living in poverty, throughout her daily journey as she struggles against the drudgery associated with unequal care responsibilities.

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Article
This is a good article discussing the fact that women and girls are the largest percent in the world living in poverty. It also brings forth a good discussion about gender equality. Why are women the ones in such poverty?

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Women make up 70% of people living in poverty in rural areas. Although they play a key role for sustainable development and fighting hunger.

Gender equality is a recognised human right. However, millions of women are still disadvantaged and suffer discrimination and poverty. They are often being under-estimated or even suppressed. Welthungerhilfe gives women strength and supports them in demanding their rights themselves. Goals can only be reached together - both men and women benefit from Welthungerhilfe's work.

In developing countries, women produce up to 80% of the food, however they own less than one fifth of the cultivation areas.

The yields from the fields can be increased in such countries by 20-30% according to the FAO, if women were granted the same access to land ownership, loans, markets and education as the men.

30 million women are fleeing from war, hunger, sexual violence, forced marriage and discrimination, many of them leaving their home regions together with their children. On their journey to seek refuge, many become victims of assaults by men. Further facts and figures can be found in this infographic.
How do we promote gender equality?
Welthungerhilfe wants to strengthen women and make gender equality reality. Along with our partners, we have been a supporter of Gender Mainstreaming in our programme work for many years. That means...

Gender issues are an integral part of the thinking, decision-making and action-taking of all concerned.

Besides projects that explicitly support women and girls, gender equality plays a role in all the projects.

Project phases, project participation and methods are explored from a gender-specific perspective, so as to gain a comprehensive understanding of role distribution and potential.

Examples from our project regions
Welthungerhilfe advocates gender equality and the women's empowerment in various projects. For example:

In Kashmir, women are supported with loans and special courses, enabling them to set up small businesses.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we are working together with the local partner organisation "Femmes Engagées pour la Promotion de la Santé Intégrale (FEPSI), which provides traumatised women with medical care and supports their social and economic reintegration.

In Peru, together with our partner organisation Puririsun, we educate women about their health-related rights and possibilities.

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Women and development: The world's poorest are women and girls

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Women make up 70% of people living in poverty in rural areas. Although they play a key role for sustainable development and fighting hunger. Gender equality is a recognised human right. However, millions of women are still disadvantaged and suffer discrimination and poverty. They are often being under-estimated or even suppressed.

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How much do we know about poverty and women around the world?