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E-commerce platform Kasha has opened shop in Kenya after nearly three years of operation in Rwanda. The platform helps women access health and personal care products. CNBC Africa is joined by Joanna Bichsel, Kasha’s CEO and founder.

Kasha e-commerce platform for women products enters Kenya

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NOI Polls says cultural norms and religious beliefs are some of the main reasons for the marginal representation of women in Nigerian politics. Chike Nwangwu, CEO of NOI Polls joins CNBC Africa to discuss this.

Culture & religion greatest barriers for Nigerian women in politics – NOI Polls

<figure class="wp-block-image is-resized"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="http://cnbc.africa/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Morocco-PxHere1.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-328610" width="671" height="503"/><figcaption>The first university in Africa was founded in Morocco. Image by PxHere.</figcaption></figure>



By Nnamdi Oranye



When we think of where the University came
from, most of us probably think back to the oldest institutions we know &#8211;
perhaps Oxford in England. Or perhaps we think of the top Universities of the
world, like Harvard. We think of how a group of men had a passion for education
and began these amazing institutions. We think of how much we need to thank the
Western world for the University. Certainly the University is one of the most
groundbreaking and important innovations of all time. 



But was it a Western innovation? Actually, as the facts show, the innovation of the University comes from Africa. Morocco, to be exact. The story of Fatima al-Fihri (Al-<g class="gr_ gr_11 gr-alert gr_spell gr_inline_cards gr_run_anim ContextualSpelling ins-del multiReplace" id="11" data-gr-id="11">Fihriya</g>), a Moroccan Muslim woman from Fez, who was born in 800 A.D., is one practically no one hears about. When her father passed away he left money to both her and her sister. She used this inheritance to establish the University of Al Qarawiynn in 859 C.E., which is still existent today &#8211; 1160 years later. 



It is, as a result, the oldest continually operating educational institute in the world &#8211; the first institution to award degrees for different levels of study. The original courses offered were in Islamic Studies, mathematics, grammar, and medicine. It is one of the largest tertiary institutions in North Africa and includes a library with over 4000 manuscripts.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Breaking through cultural limitations</h2>



Think about this for a moment. Here is a woman
in 859 C.E. breaking through all her cultural limitations of her time and
disrupting history for the last 1160 years. One innovation, the University, has
spawned millions of other innovations &#8211; millions of people who have innovated
in many, many other industries. Without Fatima, would there be a Harvard or a
Stanford or an Oxford today? Without and African woman breaking through all the
limitations of her time?



“The darkest thing about Africa,” said George
H.T. Kimble, “has always been our ignorance of it.” This is true for not only
our geography, which was Kimble’s main concern, but for practically every
aspect of our continent. What is even worse is so many Africans themselves are
ignorant of what’s really going on in Africa. We need to change our own
mindsets towards Africa and innovation going on in Africa.



Fatima’s legacy is one that we as Africans can draw inspiration from. In our time, there are a million limitations we are constantly put up against. There is always a reason why our innovations don’t matter as much; why we ought not to think out the box; why we should let the world dictate to us what we should do and how we should move forward. Like Fatima’s legacy &#8211; one we don’t read in the ordinary history books &#8211; we are facing a similar dilemma now: No recognition and a great deal of ignorance, yet we live in an extremely disruptive landscape.&nbsp; 



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">She used her mind &amp; imagination</h2>



Malcolm Gladwell says, “If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.” Fatima obviously worked hard. She obviously asserted herself. She obviously used her mind and her imagination &#8211; and built something that would allow millions to do the same. Like her, we need to start to know what’s going on in the world, what’s happening on the ground in Africa, and use our mind and imagination together with hard work and asserting ourselves in this world &#8211; as individuals and as a collective of Africans.



How did Fatima view the future? It’s worth
thinking about what motivated her. Because the big question is: how do you view
the future? Do you know where it is going? Do you like where it’s going? Do you
know how you can influence where it’s going &#8211; and be a part of where it’s
going? What will two or three generations from now say about your generation? 



These are questions that continue to plague
me, and excite me. Because, right now, we are standing on the cusp of many
opportunities. All we need to do is think differently and see how things all
fit together. As leaders and experts and entrepreneurs, it’s no longer good
enough to just know ‘your thing’. We need to have a horizontal view across
industries to help inform our vertical view in our particular industry. We need
to connect industries, innovations, and people together; think differently; and
create new ecosystems, just like Fatima and her university did. It’s great to
major in your profession, but every profession is an interconnected part of the
whole. Whatever your main work or whatever your side hustle may be, the picture
is bigger than you think &#8211; and therein lies plenty of opportunity for you and
for all of us, together.



Think bigger. It’s time to know your change
and it’s time to step into it.

Op-Ed: Why The World Owes Education to an African Woman﻿

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Women for Women International is a global organisation working to support women who have been affected by conflict and war by helping them earn and save money and improve their health and well-being. Philomena Kwao, Global Ambassador of Women for Women International joins CNBC Africa to discuss the organisation&#8217;s work in Nigeria.

Empowering women affected by conflict

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Joining CNBC Africa to make the case for women being better for business is Refilwe Maluleke the Managing Director at Yellowwood.

Here’s why hiring more women is good for your business

<figure><img decoding="async" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/222801/original/file-20180612-112623-1xh2v9m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt="File 20180612 112623 1xh2v9m.jpg?ixlib=rb 1.1" /><figcaption>African women do a lot of unpaid work that isn’t captured in GDP calculations. 
Rafal Cichawa/Shutterstock</figcaption></figure>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/luke-messac-235133">Luke Messac</a>, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-pennsylvania-1017">University of Pennsylvania</a>
It’s been nearly 80 years since British economists James Meade and Richard Stone devised a method of national income accounting that would <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03086534.2018.1431436">become the global standard</a>. Today, we call it a country’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Their method was intended to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of an entire national economy, by estimating the monetary value of all “economic” production that took place in a country in a given year. Like most economic statisticians of the day, Meade and Stone focused almost entirely on measuring the value of goods and services that were actually bought and sold.
But a problem quickly emerged, thanks to the experiences and observations of a 23-year-old woman named <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-phyllis-deane-leading-and-influential-figure-in-the-field-of-economic-history-8191322.html">Phyllis Deane</a>. She was hired by Meade and Stone in 1941 to apply their method in a few British colonies. In present-day Malawi and Zambia, Deane realised that it was an error to exclude unpaid household labour from GDP.
In a research paper I published recently on the <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03086534.2018.1431436?scroll=top&amp;needAccess=true">history of the GDP</a>, I write that Deane believed this convention excluded a great share of productive activity – especially in rural Africa. She <a href="https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6870920.pdf">argued</a> that it was “illogical” to exclude the economic value of preparing and cooking food and collecting firewood. She contended that such kinds of labour had historically been excluded because they were commonly viewed as women’s work.
To decide which activities to include in her GDP calculations, Deane spent months <a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/June-Messac_What-is-an-economy.pdf">conducting village surveys</a> in order to measure, and include in GDP estimates, particularly burdensome activities like the collection of firewood.
She concluded that if governments wanted to formulate policies that increased aggregate national income and ensured an equitable distribution of that aggregate, the contributions of all producers – including rural women – had to be counted.
Over the next seven decades, GDP calculations would not generally include unpaid (and mostly female) labour. But Deane’s work shows us this was not the only way to measure economic production. As GDP calculations come under increasing criticism, we should look to her research for a way forward.
<h2>Invisibility of female labour</h2>
Richard Stone paid little attention to Deane’s recommendations. In 1953, he oversaw the publication of the United Nations’ first <a href="https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/docs/1953SNA.pdf">System of National Accounts</a>. This report provided detailed standards for calculating GDP.
The system ignored Deane’s call to include unpaid household labour. And because UN technical assistance programmes sought to ensure that low and middle-income countries followed the system’s standards, Stone’s method had global consequences. Activities which were central to every day life in low-income African countries – like fetching water, grinding corn, and weaving mats – were not included in national accounts.
This invisibility of female labour in national income accounting eventually provoked a backlash. While pushing for female domestic labour to be economically quantified, scholar-activists like the Italian-born philosopher Silvia Federici, who taught for many years in Nigeria, <a href="https://caringlabor.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/silvia-federici-wages-against-housework/">argued</a> that male “economic” production was impossible without women’s uncompensated “non-economic” labour.
For instance, without a wife to tend to the children and the home, how would a male factory labourer have the time or the energy to fulfil his stereotypical role as the breadwinner?
<h2>Time rather than money</h2>
Some feminist economists held a different view. In 1999 the New Zealand-born economist Marilyn Waring <a href="https://www.ineteconomics.org/uploads/papers/June-Messac_What-is-an-economy.pdf">articulated concerns</a> about including unpaid labour in national accounts. Rather than using economic activity to measure the value of labour, Waring called for a different indicator: time.
Time, she explained, was “the one investment we all have to make”. Drawing on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS2nkr9q0VU">research</a> she conducted in rural Kenya, she argued that time-use surveys would demonstrate “which sex gets the menial, boring, low-status, and unpaid invisible work”.
Such surveys would show how targeted interventions, like access to clean water and efficient cooking stoves, could alleviate the drudgery of domestic labour and allow billions of women to gain greater freedom in how they spend their days.
In 2008, the authors of the newly updated System of National Accounts responded to their feminist critics by way of a compromise. They <a href="https://unstats.un.org/unsd/nationalaccount/docs/sna2008.pdf">agreed</a> to include the production of all goods – whether these were sold or not – in GDP calculations, so activities like weaving mats or brewing beer would be included.
However, they continued to exclude most unpaid household services, like cooking and cleaning. And the revised system ignored both Deane’s and Waring’s calls for more data on the distribution of time-use by gender. This has caused ever <a href="http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---stat/documents/event/wcms_175150.pdf">more criticism</a> to be levelled at the system.
In recent decades, the work of feminist economics has shown how the methods of calculating GDP render much of women’s labour invisible. Meanwhile, surveys and time-use studies show the toll this has taken on women’s lives, particularly in the Global South. One recent <a href="https://washmatters.wateraid.org/sites/g/files/jkxoof256/files/The%20Water%20Gap%20State%20of%20Water%20report%20lr%20pages.pdf">report</a> found that hundreds of millions of women worldwide have to walk more than a 30-minute round-trip to reach clean water for their families.
<h2>Future of the GDP</h2>
A <a href="http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/118025/118123/Fitoussi+Commission+report">2009 report</a> commissioned by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated that because GDP is “treated as a measure of economic well-being” it “can lead to misleading indicators about how well-off people are and entail the wrong policy decisions”.
More recently, the World Bank <a href="https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/29001">pointed out</a> that GDP only measures flows of income but doesn’t tell us whether health care, education, and the wealth of the natural world are being built up or plundered. The Economist <a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2016/04/30/how-to-measure-prosperity">called</a> for a “new metric” of economic progress that included “unpaid work in the home, such as caring for relatives”.
None of these insights are new. But they do mark a renewed appreciation for the economic indices and policies that feminist scholars have long favoured. For instance, Silvia Federici’s insistence that household labour <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/wages-for-houseworks-radical-vision/">should be paid</a> has been at least partially realised in the <a href="http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4194e.pdf">spread of cash transfer programmes</a> across Africa.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/98110/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />If we want to really bring women’s work out of the shadows and overturn the stereotypical gender roles that relegate women to more than their fair share of household labour, we must first take the blinders of the GDP.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/luke-messac-235133">Luke Messac</a>, PhD in History, M.D. Candidate, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/university-of-pennsylvania-1017">University of Pennsylvania</a>
This article was originally published on <a href="http://theconversation.com">The Conversation</a>. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/womens-unpaid-work-must-be-included-in-gdp-calculations-lessons-from-history-98110">original article</a>.

Why African women’s unpaid work should be captured in GDP calculations

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Today, Africa marks the creation of the OAU, Refilwe Matenche, President of African Women’s Movement (AWM) joins CNBC Africa to discuss this and the role of women in Africa’s transformation.

Women’s role in the transformation of Africa

What you need to know about the women leading Africa

Erica Lawson |Western University
Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the first woman to lead an African country. Her two terms in office ended with elections last month since, like the United States, presidents in Liberia are barred from serving more than two terms.
<div id="attachment_290610" style="width: 1723px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-290610" class="wp-image-290610 size-full" src="http://cnbc.africa/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GettyImages-858054578.jpg" alt="" width="1713" height="1140" />Nobel peace laureate Leymah Gbowee (R), head of the Women in Peacebuilding Network (WIPNET), greets members of the group in Monrovia on October 5, 2017. Dressed in identical printed skirts, 100 Liberian women knelt in prayer after another long day in three weeks of fasting, asking once again that Liberia be spared of violence. Ahead of elections on October 10, 2017, women of all ages are gathering from dawn to sunset on a roadside close to the party headquarters of several presidential candidates, in an echo of protests that eventually helped bring an end to Liberia&#8217;s back-to-back 1989-2003 civil wars. AFP PHOTO / Zoom DOSSO (Photo credit should read ZOOM DOSSO/AFP/Getty Images)</div>
Affectionately known as “Ma Ellen,” Sirleaf took office at the end of a 14-year civil war in which an estimated 200,000 Liberians were killed.
Sickened and fatigued by war, thousands of Liberian women, through mass action, brought about an end to the conflict in 2003.
These same women took great risks to elect Sirleaf on her promise to sustain peace and make gender equality central to her administration’s agenda. Some women hid their sons’ voter ID cards to prevent them from voting for Sirleaf’s opponent; others tricked the young men into exchanging their cards for beer; still others managed market stalls while their female owners went to register to vote and watched babies so that mothers could vote on Election Day.
These women, many of whom belong to the Women in Peace Building Network (WIPNET), are identifiable by their white T-shirts with blue WIPNET insignia. They are a powerful, widely respected group for what they have accomplished and continue to fight for.
When Sirleaf came to power in 2005, the world was electrified. On Inauguration Day in January 2006, proud Liberians, world leaders and dignitaries watched as she took the oath of office.
Sirleaf singled out the women in the peace movement, thanking them for their courage, and committed to supporting their agenda. The Sirleaf administration kept some of its promises but with notable challenges. Liberia has tough rape laws, but weak enforcement mechanisms, and in 2016, Parliament signed into a law a new domestic violence bill but removed a ban on female genital mutilation.
At the end of Sirleaf’s two terms in office, peace has held, but the results of progress on gender equality are mixed.
<h2>Women and peace huts</h2>
Today, some of the powerful grassroots women who brought Sirleaf to power are at the forefront of running what are known as peace huts. Spread across the country, the purposes of these huts are to put women in charge of mediating domestic abuse and other disputes before they escalate, to empower women through entrepreneurial opportunities and to educate them about their rights.
By and large, Liberian women and girls are well aware of their rights, and especially those enshrined in the UN Security Council Resolution 1325.
Adopted in 2000, the resolution recognizes that women bear the brunt and horrors of war, and calls for women’s full participation in conflict prevention, resolution and peace-building. Peace huts in Liberia are instrumental in teaching women — including those not formally educated — about these rights.
Peace huts work for gender equality, peace and human rights. But they do much more. The Ebola crisis of 2014 led to the deaths of an estimated 11,315 people and strained already fragile health-care systems. Women who ran peace huts in some of the communities stepped in to help the sick and dying, and some of them died in the process.
<h2>Gains and losses</h2>
There is general agreement among most Liberians that the Sirleaf administration stabilized the country and attracted investment. But there are those who also feel that, notwithstanding a staunch patriarchal culture, women have actually lost ground, especially in politics.
Of the 1,026 approved candidates in the election cycle, only 163 were women, and, in a field of 20 candidates, only one woman, Macdella Cooper, ran for president, and she lost badly.
Tackling corruption, infrastructure, youth unemployment and reconciliation by promoting national unity and advancing a peace agenda topped ballot issues in the elections.
Noticeably absent was a targeted focus on addressing violence against women and girls.
Yet the UN Women’s Global Database on Violence Against Women report that 39 per cent of Liberian women between 15-49 years old experience physical and/or sexual violence at the hands of intimate partners at least once in their lifetime.
Women who run peace huts spend much of their time supporting victims of gender-based violence. Where they are available, women work with the police to arrest the alleged perpetrators. But justice for victims is often hampered by a weak legal system.
Nonetheless, Liberian women rightly view themselves as the guardians of a hard-won peace connected to the fight for gender justice. They view peace as foundational to prosperity that can take root only if there is an end to gender-based violence and respect for rights.
<h2>An uncertain but hopeful future</h2>
The elections on Oct. 10 did not yield clear results. The frontrunners, Sen. George Weah and Vice-President Joseph Boaki, were scheduled for a run-off election on Nov. 7. However, the Liberian Supreme Court recently suspended the second round of voting pending an investigation into allegations of “fraud and irregularities.”
It is, therefore, too early to tell if gender equality will top the new administration’s agenda, but there’s room for guarded optimism.
Large groups of activist women in Liberia are prepared to continue to fight for equality and are unafraid to do so. Wearing their WIPNET T-shirts, women have come out in force in recent years to press the government to change or implement laws, usually with the support of an engaged public.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/86670/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />The new administration would do well to work with women in the peace huts and in civil society to achieve success. Without a strong voice for gender equality, it’s unlikely that the new Liberian government will realize its political goals.
This article was originally published on The Conversation.

How women bring about peace and change in Liberia

The recent WCA Executive Investment Summit 2017 is a case in point of how well it works when we put innovators and investors together – and also how much change African women are making for our continent.
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By Nnamdi Oranye
Lisa Lambie is one of the most inspiring African women I have had the privilege of meeting. She is truly making a difference for Africa and African innovators and bringing her twenty years (plus) experience to our continent to help form and change our narrative, creating opportunities and networking the right people together.
I recently returned from the WCA Executive Investment Summit 2017, which has been running for four years now (this year, it also included the second Africa Family Office Forum). It was held in Marrakech, Morocco.
What is interesting about the Summit, and what has been key to its successes, is that it successfully manages to do something that I’ve seen sorely lacking in many other instances – connecting actual innovators together with actual investors on a Pan-African scale.
On average, Lambie says, more than 300 executives from around 32 countries come. Of those, 80 percent are investors and 88% percent of them are on an executive level. It’s essentially an investment summit.
<h4>Summit brings together family-owned offices</h4>
This year it also sought to collate and bring together Family Offices. This is a term that&#8217;s new to many, but are essentially investment vehicles consisting of the private capital of families. Family Offices have been a key driver in African economies.
The website, <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/family-offices.asp">Investopedia</a>, puts it well when it says, “They are different from traditional wealth management shops in that they offer a total outsourced solution for managing the financial and investment side of an affluent individual or family.” Essentially, they sit in the space of Angel Investment.
The Summit was all about getting these Family Offices, and the individuals involved with them, to talk about investing in Africa.  It sought to bring family capital and industry innovators, award-winning entrepreneurs, and sector game changers together directly &#8211; without advisors like wealth managers and private bankers playing a role.
The reason for this is it creates an openness with the Family Offices you might otherwise not see. I was really excited about the prospect and the buzz at the conference. it was clear to me that there were real, authentic, and valuable connections being made, which can often be lacking at a conference.
This was also fascinating for me because I work so much with innovators, and attend many conferences with innovators, where the predominant theme is frequently a lack of funding or access to the people with funding. It was so exciting, this time around, to see how those with the ability to fund are looking for spaces to put their money. As I was sitting in this Summit, and talking on two panels, I just kept thinking about innovators I work with and saying, “All we need to do is put all of these people in the same room – the innovators and these investors. They literally just need to talk to each other. It works.”
<h4>It&#8217;s all about action</h4>
Lambie has had the tremendous foresight in putting this together and creating a Summit where people don’t just talk but actually convene and make deals. This is why for the four years it has been running, it has managed to garner a brilliant reputation for delivering actual tangible results. It’s not just another conference. It’s not just a lot of talking. It’s not just motivational. It’s about action. It’s not organised by event planners but by actual investors.
The Summit is run by the Wharton Club of Africa (WCA), of which Lambie is the president. With ties to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (in the U.S.), it’s fascinating to see how Lambie and her team have brought their vast experience and connections to our continent to make a change.
Lambie is also a Director at SHIL, an investment holding firm that works with Family Offices and family-owned businesses in Africa, as well as venture capital. In my book, Taking on Silicon Valley: How Africa’s Innovators Will Shape Its Future, I argue how Africans working abroad can make a difference to our continent here. Lambie is a perfect example of this, and I was struck by her passion and forward-thinking approach. When we talk about Disrupting Africa and changing the narrative or people knowing their change (see the #knowyourchange campaign), everyone plays their part and is a piece of the puzzle in getting Africa where it needs to be.
<h4>Everyone plays their part</h4>
When we talk about Disrupting Africa and changing the narrative or people knowing their change (see the #knowyourchange campaign), everyone plays their part and is a piece of the puzzle in getting Africa where it needs to be. Lambie, and others like her (such as Haweya Mohamed, who I had the privilege of meeting at the Afrobytes Conference in Paris earlier this year – which connects European investors with African innovators) is a very crucial piece of this puzzle. She brings investors together and shows them that we have viable innovations they can invest in. This is simply fantastic.
Not enough of us speak about what African women are doing and the change they are creating. Brilliant examples such as Lambie and Mohamed are not in the news enough, and so much happens under the surface that doesn’t make the headlines. Our women are doing phenomenal work that we&#8217;re not recognising well enough. But if we do, imagine how much more could happen.

Op-Ed: Tangible results when investors and innovators collaborate

Hanne Kirstine Adriansen | Aarhus University
&nbsp;
The idea that knowledge is infused with power and politics may sound abstract, so let me offer an example from my own life to illustrate. I was invited to a dinner proceeding a conference in an African capital city. I had expected to meet all the other speakers. But it turned out to be only for the chosen few. I could not help wondering how we’d been selected. White faces outnumbered black ones, men outnumbered women – at a conference to discuss African universities’ future role.
It was an interesting example of the power and politics of knowledge. These are factors I believe should be addressed to ensure African universities and higher education can play a more powerful role in transforming our world and empowering women.
The UN says its 2030 Agenda, which is made up of 17 sustainable development goals, is aimed at “transforming our world”. Quality education and lifelong learning, along with gender equality and empowerment of women, feature in many of the goals.
Universities and higher education, however, receive little attention in this document. So it may seem odd to focus on higher education in relation to Agenda 2030 and women. But I’ve chosen this perspective because higher education institutions in general and universities in particular are important for achieving Agenda 2030’s goals.
Universities have two main objectives: to educate students and to produce knowledge. They play a major role in procuring the human and intellectual resources needed for fulfilling the various goals of Agenda 2030.
<h2>Power and politics of knowledge</h2>
There have been institutions of learning in Africa for more than 1000 years. But today the most common type of higher education has its rootsin colonial-era institutions.
Frantz Fanon, a Martinique-born Afro-French psychiatrist, philosopher and revolutionary, wrote about the colonisation of the mind some 50 years ago. He argued that colonised people tended to adopt their colonisers’ perspective. Independence in Africa did not really change this tendency, Fanon wrote.
African intellectuals have argued for many years that the continent’s universities and school systems in general reproduce(d) their colonial legacy. This happens, for instance, through curriculum and language. Benin’s Paulin Hountondji and Kenya’s Ali Mazrui are among those who have written about African scholars’ intellectual and epistemological dependency. Examples of this reliance can be seen in modern school books in parts of the continent.
It’s not for me as a European to judge whether Africa’s universities are still suffering from what Kenyan intellectual Ngũgĩ wa Thiong&#8217;o would call the colonisation of the mind.
However, I do know that knowledge production is never neutral. It is neither objective nor power free. African women’s narratives about their journeys in academia show how the power and politics of knowledge are intrinsically linked to gender. Race and history must also be considered. This means issues of colonialism, imperialism and dominance are never far away.
The narratives I have studied show that it is not always simple to determine who exercises power over whom and when. Zimbabwean researcher Bevlyn Sithole sees dominance in action when researchers take ownership over communities’ knowledge. She highlights the importance of co-producing knowledge:
<blockquote>Co-production of knowledge between scientists and communities is a prerequisite for research aiming at a more sustainable development path.</blockquote>
<h2>Marrying Agenda 2030 and local knowledge</h2>
This returns us to the question of Agenda 2030.
How can academics produce knowledge of local relevance and include the perspectives and cultures of the people in question? How can knowledge be built that promotes sustainable development and appreciates culture’s contribution to it, as called for in Agenda 2030’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals?
The debate about Africanisation of curriculum and knowledge production also relates to the discussion about universities’ role as local drivers of sustainable development.
The so-called global knowledge economy has placed increasing demandson universities to internationalise and compete beyond national borders.
Can a university be locally relevant, focusing its teaching and research on local sustainable development needs and also be involved in global competition with an increasing emphasis on standardisation? Transnational capacity-building projects are one way universities try to address both local and global commitments. I have participated in capacity-building projects myself.
It has been argued, though, that capacity-building projects and other types transnational collaboration can lead to dependency. Agenda 2030 is likely to result in more such projects, because this is where funding can be found.
It is imperative to knowledge production that academics continue to collaborate. But it must happen in parallel with the decolonialisation of knowledge and methodology. The question is how it can be done.
The first step is to pay attention to the apparent universality of knowledge. I would warn against moving towards a complete Africanisation of curriculum and knowledge production. The dilemma is that this may entail an unproductive essentialisation of the “African”: for example, who the “African” is, where the “African” lives, and what the “African” can study. And what is “African” knowledge, and who can produce it?
Academic institutions and individual academics should try to contextualise knowledge and pay attention to the difference between universal knowledge and dominant knowledge. Yet we should also acknowledge that without ideas about universality, universal human experiences and human rights, Agenda 2030 would never be realised.
<h2>Contextualising knowledge</h2>
African education will not reach its transformative potential through the mindless transfer of knowledge, theories and methods from other parts of the world. This will reproduce dependency.
Instead, empowerment of women and sustainable development require that more contextualised knowledge be produced. The power and politics of knowledge must be analysed. It is necessary to differentiate between dominant knowledge and universal knowledge and, through this process, decolonise the African academy.
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in BUWA, a journal produced by the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa.

The power and politics of knowledge: what African universities need to do

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Joining CNBC Africa to unpack the role of women in agribusiness today is Africa Enterprise Challenge Fund&#8217;s CEO, Dr. Paul Greener.

The crucial role of women in African agriculture

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Domestic violence against women is a widespread issue, affecting women from all over the world and the continent. Josina Machel, and activist against women abuse, spoke with CNBC Africa for more.

Josina Machel speaks out against domestic violence

Lin Taylor | Thomson Reuters Foundation
A &#8216;period emoji&#8217; on mobile devices could help break the taboo of menstruation, according to an international child rights group, which is pushing for an icon to help highlight the stigma that girls experience when they menstruate.
Menstruation is still taboo in many countries around the world, where it&#8217;s often considered embarrassing or shameful. Women refer to periods using some 5,000 euphemisms, such as &#8220;on the rag&#8221; and &#8220;Bloody Mary&#8221;, a 2016 survey of 90,000 people in 190 countries found.
<blockquote>&#8220;Girls and women have told us about the embarrassment and shame they suffer when it&#8217;s their period. We need to make it easier to talk about something that is part of everyday life,&#8221; said Danny Vannucchi, Plan International&#8217;s campaigns manager.</blockquote>
While there are symbols for avocado, a telescope, and even a unicorn, menstruation is not represented as an &#8217;emoji&#8217;, a small icon on smartphones and tablets commonly used to express emotions or physical things.
But that is something Plan International wants to change. The charity last week launched five &#8216;period emojis&#8217; and invited the public to vote for their preferred icon. As of Monday, more than 15,000 people had voted, it said.
The winning design will be submitted to coding consortium Unicode for consideration, which distributes emojis across mobile devices.
&#8220;We&#8217;re not saying that an emoji would solve all of these problems, but it will start a conversation, and raise awareness of the challenges women and girls face worldwide – and that can only be a good thing,&#8221; Vannucchi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
He said issues related to reproduction and the sexual health of girls are often considered &#8220;dirty&#8221;, so girls are forced to keep quiet about menstruation which adds to the taboo.
&#8220;It&#8217;s completely normal, but in many settings there is still a false belief that menstruation is dirty and shameful,&#8221; he said.
&#8220;These taboos can have a damaging impact on the lives of girls and adolescents, from missing school because they face bullying or unfair treatment, to causing infections due to a lack of menstrual hygiene education and products.&#8221;
On any given day more than 800 million women between 15 and 49 have their period. However, globally 1.25 billion women do not have access to a toilet during menstruation, according to the charity WaterAid.
The United Nations estimates that due to a lack of facilities, one in 10 girls in Africa will miss school during their period and will eventually drop out of school as a result.
(Reporting by Lin Taylor @linnytayls, Editing by Ros Russell; Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters that covers humanitarian issues, conflicts, global land and property rights, modern slavery and human trafficking, women&#8217;s rights, climate change and resilience. Visit <a href="http://news.trust.org/">news.trust.org</a> to see more stories)

Charity calls for ‘period emoji’ to address taboo of menstruation

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) &#8211; South African President Jacob Zuma said on Thursday that a spate of violent attacks against women and children represented a national &#8220;crisis&#8221; as he visited the family of a three-year old girl who was raped and killed.
South Africa has one of the world&#8217;s highest rates of violent crime but a string of grisly murders of women and children has sparked widespread outrage, with Zuma&#8217;s visit underscoring the growing political significance of the issue.
&#8220;We as the citizens of this country must say enough is enough,&#8221; Zuma said in televised remarks after visiting the family of toddler Courtney Pieters, who went missing from her Cape Town home on May 4. Her body was found over a week later buried in a shallow grave.
&#8220;This is one of the saddest incidents I&#8217;ve come across. It&#8217;s a crisis in the country, the manner in which women and children are being killed,&#8221; Zuma said, adding that 19 children had been murdered so far this year in the Western Cape province which includes Cape Town.
Local media reported that a 40-year-old boarder in the child&#8217;s home had been arrested for her rape and murder.
Elsewhere, the bodies of four murdered women were discovered at the weekend in and around Soweto, the sprawling black township near Johannesburg, local media reported.
South Africa&#8217;s murder rate is 34 per 100,000 people, according to data released by police last year, almost seven times the rate in the United States.
(Reporting by Ed Stoddard)
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South Africa’s Zuma says spate of women and child murders “a crisis”

Thomson Reuters Foundation
When Islamic State militants brutally invaded her hometown of Kobani in Syria, Shorash didn&#8217;t initially see it as a career opportunity.
Grabbing only what she could carry, Shorash and her family trekked on foot across the Turkish border. After months of sleeping rough in parks and bouncing from one refugee camp to another, they eventually settled near Erbil, in Iraq&#8217;s relatively stable Kurdistan region.
<blockquote>&#8220;I had been looking for work without any success, and was feeling rather bored and frustrated,&#8221; said 23-year-old Shorash, who did not disclose her surname for security reasons.</blockquote>
One day, her husband told her about a local women&#8217;s centre, run by non-profit group &#8220;Women for Women International&#8221; (WfWI), that offered training to help women establish businesses.
A law graduate, Shorash was a diligent student and attended all classes, even giving birth to her daughter just hours after her final exams.
She developed a plan to establish a greenhouse construction business &#8211; in demand in the region as a modern way to grow fruit and vegetables.
&#8220;The programme changed my life &#8211; I no longer feel lonely and isolated as before,&#8221; she said.
Gender equality and empowerment of women are among the 17 global Sustainable Development Goals designed to tackle poverty, inequality and climate change by 2030.
Nowhere is support for women more important and urgent than in post-conflict situations, experts say.
<blockquote>&#8220;We believe that women survivors of war are agents of change, (and) that through empowering women we will actually empower the entire community,&#8221; said Mandana Hendessi, WfWI&#8217;s director for the Syria crisis response and Iraq.</blockquote>
The WfWI centre, one of three in Iraq, enables women to rebuild their lives after conflict, to meet in a safe space, and to learn new skills.
&#8220;People do have a very distorted view of refugee life,&#8221; Hendessi told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. &#8220;They think everybody is just sitting there in a tent waiting for food to arrive or for medicine&#8230; but we&#8217;re talking about women who back in Syria were incredibly resourceful, generally quite educated and losing all of their identity once they became a refugee.&#8221;
WOMEN BREADWINNERS
Some 4.9 million Syrians – the majority women and children – are refugees in neighbouring states, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.
The WfWI programme in Iraq supports around 400 mainly Syrian and Yazidi female refugees, and also works with men to ensure social cohesion.
As is common in post-conflict societies, many of the women have lost their male relatives to war, and find themselves thrust into the position of sole breadwinner. One in four Syrian refugee families is now headed by a woman, according to WfWI.
Projects like that supporting Shorash encourage women to grasp entrepreneurial opportunities, nurturing start-ups from wedding services and hair-salons to bakeries and sweet shops.
Research suggests men often do not adapt as well as women to new roles in times of conflict, said Nicola Jones, principal research fellow at the London-based Overseas Development Institute.
&#8220;Often women have been more flexible,&#8221; she said.
Rather than waiting for institutions to be rebuilt after wars, which can take generations, women&#8217;s informal networks are an increasingly powerful tool for driving forward economic and social recovery, she added.
NIGERIA NURSES
In northern Nigeria, a region under the shadow of Boko Haram militants, Fatima Adamu is working to equip young women to become midwives and healthcare practitioners.
In patriarchal rural communities, Adamu negotiates with local leaders to nominate a young woman to train in the city who will then return home to help close the village healthcare gap.
&#8220;The reality is nobody is coming from the city to fill that space for you, (so) you must provide,&#8221; said Adamu, explaining how she persuades villages to participate.
The &#8220;Women for Health&#8221; programme, led by Health Partners International, aims to train more than 6,000 female workers and deploy them to rural health facilities in a region where up to 90 percent of women deliver their babies without a skilled birth attendant present.
On graduating, the young women are usually employed by local governments, and must work for a minimum of three years in their villages before they can move elsewhere.
The programme has faced some resistance, however.
At least a handful of women have been divorced during their absence or returned home to find their husbands have taken another wife, said Adamu.
In some cases, the community has rallied to pressure the husband to support his wife&#8217;s training, knowing the village will benefit in the long term.
The women often take up leadership roles when they return and are more able to negotiate power structures, said Adamu.
Educating women and girls is &#8220;the surest way to address the challenges of extremism, poverty and&#8230; break the cycle of inequality&#8221;, she said, in the region ravaged by Boko Haram, an Islamist group whose insurgency has killed 15,000 people and forced some 2 million from their homes. [nNRA3ixr5l]
Historically, conflicts can accelerate women&#8217;s rights and social opportunities, as seen after World War Two in Europe, while working women can help pick up the pieces and contribute significantly to rebuilding war-torn communities, experts say.
&#8220;Often post-conflict there are real opportunities to rethink the social and political contract with citizens,&#8221; said ODI&#8217;s Jones.
(Reporting by Adela Suliman; editing by Megan Rowling. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women&#8217;s rights, trafficking, property rights, climate change and resilience. Visit <a href="http://news.trust.org/">news.trust.org</a>)
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How to fix war-torn societies? Help women to work

Increasingly women are showing an appetite for investing in stock market related products such as Exchange Traded Funds and Shares. This is according to FNB data, which has shown a fivefold growth in share investments by female investors over the last 8 years.
Aneesa Razack, CEO of Share Investing at FNB, says “In 2008 FNB introduced a suite of share investment products aimed at encouraging South Africans to invest in shares online. For as little as R300 anyone can open a share account and invest in some of the biggest companies listed on the stock exchange.”
“While we have seen a steady increase in the number of investors across the board, we have also noted an upsurge in female investors. This is a good sign considering that when we introduced shares through the FNB Online platform there was a small percentage of female investors.”
The youngest group of female investors falls within the 21 – 25 age group, and while this group is by no means the biggest, it’s encouraging to see that young people are starting to invest in shares much earlier.
The general misconception is that share investing is for the wealthy; however this is not true because anyone can invest in shares as long as they are willing to stay in it for the long-term.
With FNB Share Investing investors have the added benefit of investing in Krugerrands via the online platform or the FNB Banking App.
“Investing in shares has become a lot more accessible because it can be done online, which makes the process cost effective,” adds Razack.

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Op-Ed: Why The World Owes Education to an African Woman