Category: MIL-OSI

Source: APO

.

The Government of Sierra Leone, through the Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs (MoGCA) in partnership with UN Women today launches the Gender Accountability Framework and the 2025 Annual Report on the Implementation of the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) Act 2022, marking a significant step in advancing gender equality and strengthening accountability for the realization of women’s and Girls rights across the country.

The initiative was supported by World Bank, the Government of Ireland and the Government of Iceland whose partnership has contributed to strengthening gender-responsive governance, accountability mechanisms, and the implementation of the GEWE Act.

The launch brought together representatives from Government, Parliament, civil society organisations, development partners, women’s rights organisations, the private sector, the media, traditional and religious leaders, and other stakeholders to reflect on progress made in advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment in Sierra Leone.

Since the commencement of his presidency in 2018, significant progress has been recorded across all 12 critical areas of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, particularly in strengthening institutional, legislative and policy frameworks for the promotion of gender equality and women’s empowerment. Progressive legislation has been enacted, institutional mechanisms strengthened, and policies implemented to expand opportunities for women and girls and advance their meaningful participation in Sierra Leone’s development.

His Excellency Dr Julius Maada Bio highlighted the enactment of the Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) Act 2022 as a significant milestone in this journey.

“The GEWE Act 2022 represents a landmark legislative intervention to address long-standing gender inequalities and create greater opportunities for women to participate in leadership, governance, employment and economic activities,” President Bio said.

Emphasizing the Government’s commitment to ensuring the full implementation of the GEWE Act, Dr. Isata Mahoi, Hon. Minister of Gender and Children’s Affairs said, “The Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Act 2022 is one of Sierra Leone’s most transformative pieces of legislation.”

She said that, the Gender Accountability Framework and the Annual Report provide important tools for strengthening transparency, coordination and accountability in the implementation of our commitments to gender equality and women’s empowerment.”

Adding that, we must all use the evidence and lessons emerging from this process to accelerate action and ensure that no woman or girl is left behind.

The Gender Accountability Framework is a practical mechanism to support the implementation, monitoring, and reporting of commitments under the GEWE Act 2023 and GEWE Policy 2020 and the Sustainable Development Goals. It provides a structured approach for tracking progress, identifying challenges, and strengthening institutional accountability to ensure that gender equality commitments translate into meaningful outcomes for women and girls throughout Sierra Leone.

Commending the Government of Sierra Leone for its leadership and commitment to advancing gender equality, Dr. Maxime Houinato, UN Women Regional Director for West and Central Africa, said, “The launch of the Gender Accountability Framework demonstrates Sierra Leone’s determination to move beyond commitments and focus on measurable results.”

Adding that accountability is pivotal for achieving sustainable progress on gender equality.

During the launch stakeholders will examine the findings of the 2025 Annual Report, discuss key implementation priorities and strengthen collective action towards the effective implementation of the GEWE Act 2022.

The event will also underscore the importance of sustained political commitment, adequate resources, institutional coordination and evidence-based monitoring in advancing gender equality and women’s empowerment across Sierra Leone

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of UN Women – Africa.

Source: APO

August 19 is World Humanitarian Day, a moment to honour humanitarian workers and stand with people affected by crises around the world. It is also a call to protect civilians, humanitarian personnel, and the communities they serve, especially in conflicts where women and girls often face heightened risks of displacement, violence, loss, and trauma. 

In Sudan, where conflict has uprooted millions and left families searching for safety, women are not only among those most affected by the conflict but are also among those responding to its impacts. Across displacement camps, host communities, and fragile local networks, women are helping survivors heal, linking them to services, sharing life-saving information, and working to build peace from the ground up.

The stories of Majeeda Al Nour and Eshtiyag Ali, both 27-year-old Sudanese women, show the human cost of war, but also the courage and leadership of women who are turning pain into purpose, with support from UN women and its partners. The conflict altered the course of their lives in unimaginable ways. Both women lost the security of the lives they once knew. They were displaced, witnessed immense suffering and transformed their experience of loss and displacement into actions to support others. 

A life turned upside down

​​Before the war, Eshtiyag Ali lived an ordinary life in Khartoum and expected her future to follow a familiar path. But as fighting engulfed the capital in April 2023, daily life was replaced by fear and uncertainty.

For two weeks, she awoke to the sound of gunfire. As violence intensified, her family made the difficult decision to flee in search of safety. The journey separated them at a time when they needed each other most. While Eshtiyag and her brothers headed to White Nile State, her father travelled separately to visit relatives in Al Jazirah State. 

“We couldn’t stay longer, we were scared. I wanted to be a strong heroine, but the conflict turned my world upside down. I lost my father, my normal life, and became a displaced person.” 

The conflict would soon bring another devastating blow. When violence spread to Al Jazirah State, Eshtiyag’s father fell seriously ill. During his treatment, the hospital came under attack, disrupting medical services and leaving patients without adequate care. He eventually slipped into a coma. Desperate to reach him, Eshtiyag attempted the journey from White Nile State, only to discover that the area had been placed under siege and travel was impossible. Her father died before she could say goodbye. 

“I wanted to be with my father before he passed away. Unfortunately, he died before I could say my final goodbyes. I missed him.” 

Finding strength amid displacement

Hundreds of kilometers away, another young Sudanese woman was facing her own struggle.

Before the conflict reached her village in eastern Al Jazira State, Majeeda Al Nour had completed her university studies and was preparing to pursue a master’s degree in art. Her dreams were interrupted when violence forced her family to flee their home in December 2023. Like thousands of Sudanese women, she became internally displaced and spent five months in a camp in River Nile State. 

The journey to safety was harrowing.

“The fear and painful memories are unforgettable,” Majeeda says. “I left my home with my family and walked for two nights in search of a safe place to hide. During that journey, I witnessed horrors, including the death of my brother, and endured humiliation. I saw and heard the cries of sick women, girls, and older persons.” 

Arriving at the displacement camp brought physical safety, but not relief from the trauma. Surrounded by hundreds of displaced women and girls, Majeeda encountered countless stories of loss, violence, and hardship. Instead of withdrawing into her own grief, she chose to support others.

“As a woman, I experienced the same fear and stress. Therefore, I saw it as my role to stand with and support women and girls.” 

She began organizing informal conversations, creating spaces where women could share their experiences and encourage one another.

“We sat together, shared our stories, and, most importantly, encouraged one another to confront our inner fears, grow stronger, and find our voices.” 

From survivors to changemakers

In White Nile State, Eshtiyag continued her work as a women’s rights activist despite the hardship she had endured. Through UN Women Sudan’s Women’s Leadership Empowerment Programme, she participated in training on United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security. The programme strengthened her understanding of women’s critical roles in mediation, negotiation, conflict resolution, and peacebuilding. ​

“The training equipped me with knowledge and tools that will assist me in facilitating mediation and negotiation sessions in my community and becoming a peacebuilder,” Eshtiyag explains. 

Today, she is determined to pass that knowledge on to others.

“I will transfer the knowledge and skills I gained to my peers so that all of us can play great roles in peacebuilding,” she says. “Words alone are not enough, but action and strength can bring about real change.” 

For Majeeda, a chance encounter opened the door to an unexpected leadership role. While living in the displacement camp, she met Ms. Marriam, the head of Al-Ruhama, a local community-based organization and UN Women’s implementing partner. Recognizing Majeeda’s commitment to supporting survivors of gender-based violence, Marriam invited her to become more actively involved in the organization’s work. 

“I was impressed by her skills and willingness to support survivors of gender-based violence,” Marriam recalls. “She successfully linked many women to service providers for treatment.” 

Seeing her potential, the organization appointed Majeeda to coordinate one of its UN Women-supported projects. Today, she leads community outreach efforts and advocates for women whose voices often go unheard. 

Supporting women to lead recovery and peacebuilding

The stories of Eshtiyag and Majeeda reflect a broader reality across Sudan. Millions of women continue to face displacement and insecurity, yet many are also playing a critical role in strengthening community resilience, supporting survivors, mediating local conflicts, and advocating for peace. 

Through support from partners including the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and the Women’s Peace and Humanitarian Fund (WPHF), UN Women is working with women’s organizations and community groups across Sudan to strengthen women’s leadership, peacebuilding capacities, psychosocial support services, and economic empowerment opportunities. These efforts equip women with the skills, networks, and confidence needed to respond to the needs of their communities and contribute to recovery and peacebuilding during one of the country’s most challenging periods. 

For Eshtiyag and Majeeda, the conflict took away loved ones, homes, and certainty about the future. Yet it did not take away their determination.
Instead, they have emerged as powerful examples of Sudanese women’s resilience and leadership, showing that even in the darkest circumstances, hope, agency, and change can take root.

Their journeys are reminders that women are not only surviving the conflict in Sudan. They are actively helping shape the country’s path toward recovery, healing, resilience and peace. 

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of UN Women – Africa.

Source: APO

By Sharon Cheramboss, Senior Growth Director, APO Group (https://APO-opa.com).

In 2014, I watched a global technology company lose a government digital infrastructure tender in Kenya. The project was valued at about USD 170 million and attracted strong international and regional competitors. On paper, the global company looked like the obvious winner. It had delivered similar initiatives across multiple continents, had deep technical expertise, substantial implementation capacity, and an international reputation.

The contract went to a regional technology company with a fraction of the global company’s footprint.

My first assumption was that the technical evaluation or commercial proposal must have favoured the regional bidder. But nothing that emerged afterwards supported that. There was no indication the proposal had been weaker, no suggestion the pricing was uncompetitive, and no flaw in the procurement process to point to.

In the weeks that followed, I spoke with people involved in East Africa’s tech ecosystem and looked more closely at the two organisations’ presence in the market. A pattern emerged. The regional company had spent years becoming part of the market it wanted to serve. Its executives regularly shared perspectives on issues decision-makers faced, from digital identity and data governance to the practical realities of implementing public sector technology in East Africa. They spoke at regional forums alongside regulators, development finance institutions, and government agencies. They wrote for The EastAfrican and Business Daily, which policymakers and senior executives read.

By the time procurement began, it was no longer simply another bidder. It had become recognised as an organisation that understood how the sector worked.

What the Questions Reveal

Over more than 14 years working with technology, telecommunications, and innovation organisations across East Africa, I’ve seen the same pattern emerge repeatedly. Companies often assume opportunities are won or lost on pricing, product features, or proposal quality. Those factors matter, but they rarely explain why one organisation consistently wins while another, equally capable, falls short.

Over time, I noticed an early indicator.

Long before organisations submit a proposal or begin serious commercial discussions, they reveal how prepared they are by the way they talk about growth. So, I listen for how they speak. The questions they ask in those early conversations reveal more than leaders realise. Some want to know how quickly they can generate leads, who the largest customers are, or how soon they can begin selling.

Others ask different questions.

Who influences this sector? Which ministries, regulators, or industry associations shape decisions? Which publications do policymakers and business leaders read? Which conferences matter? Which conversations should we be contributing to before we have something to sell?

Those questions tell me an organisation is preparing to participate in a market, not transact in it.

It becomes clearer still when they describe their strategy.

If they simply say they are expanding into “Africa” or even “Sub-Saharan Africa”, it usually tells me their presence is organisational rather than commercial. They may have established a regional office, but they haven’t yet developed a market position.

The conversation changes when leaders begin naming countries, sectors, institutions, publications, and stakeholders. They understand that credibility is built market by market. What builds trust in Nairobi isn’t necessarily what builds confidence in Dakar. That’s exactly what the regional company had spent years doing before the tender was ever announced. I’ve also seen the reverse play out.

A private education company with a technology-enabled model for reaching underserved communities entered several African markets, believing its global reputation would open doors.  It had a proven model, technology built for the market, and funding behind it. What it never built was local visibility. Its coverage, interviews, and public statements were aimed at donors and international financiers. The story it told was about global scale and capital, not local relevance. Its own impact report, the document that should have built confidence in the market, was never published in local media. It existed for an international audience and never made it home.

Before organisations commit millions of dollars or award strategically important contracts, they rarely rely on proposals and presentations alone. They look for evidence that a company understands the market, has invested consistently in the sector, and has earned credibility with the people and institutions that shape it.

This isn’t about private networks or knowing the right people. It’s about building a public track record of expertise over time. Publishing informed perspectives. Speaking at respected industry events. Contributing to policy discussions. Demonstrating an understanding of local priorities before asking anyone to buy.

Any organisation can do this. But very few do, because this kind of investment is slow. It costs for two or three years before it produces anything a finance team can point to. It cannot be attributed to any specific contract, because by design it happens before the contract exists. And it usually must be approved by a head office that sets budgets against near-term pipeline.

The people who understand this best are often the ones least able to fund it. The country director who knows exactly which forums matter and which relationships take years to build is asking a global CFO to spend against a return that will show up in someone else’s reporting period.

That’s the real barrier. Not conviction. Structure.

When Growth is Fragmented

Budget isn’t the only obstacle. The work of building credibility is also spread across different parts of the organisation.

Market understanding sits with one team. Stakeholder engagement with another. Communications is responsible for visibility. Business development is expected to convert opportunities into revenue. Each has different budgets, different leaders, and different performance measures. Individually, they’re doing exactly what they’ve been asked to do.

Clients don’t experience them separately. They experience a single organisation and form a single judgement: does this company understand the market it wants to serve?

When these activities aren’t connected, credibility is built in fragments rather than over time. The organisations that consistently succeed treat these as one discipline, not four. They’re different expressions of the same growth strategy.

Communications is usually the thread that holds them together, though it’s rarely described that way. One company won because it published, spoke, and contributed to the debates its buyers cared about. The other lost because the document that could have earned it local confidence never reached a local newsroom. We see this almost daily at APO Group. Organisations looking to grow into new markets must understand the market, identify the stakeholders who matter, and build credibility with them over time.

Growth isn’t built at the point of sale. It’s built in the years beforehand. The question worth asking is not whether your next proposal will be strong enough. It’s whether the market will already know who you are when it lands.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of APO Group Insights.

Media Contact:
marie@apo-opa.com 

About APO Group:
​Founded in 2007 by Nicolas Pompigne-Mognard, APO Group is the communications consultancy built for performance – combining strategic advisory, on-the-ground execution, and guaranteed visibility across all 54 African markets. Its owned newswire, Africa Newsroom, secures placement on 250+ Africa-focused news sites, connecting organisations directly with 450,000+ journalists, analysts, investors, and policymakers worldwide.

Recognised internationally for communications excellence, including SABRE, Davos Communications, and World Business Outlook distinctions, APO Group partners with global and African organisations for whom the continent is a strategic priority. Clients include the African Development Bank Group, Africa CDC, Afreximbank, NFL, Nestlé, Emirates, Canon, Western Union, GITEX Global, and Cassava Technologies.

Source: APO

.

• Ambulance attack highlights dangers facing responders
• Motorbike riders are key to tracking infections
• Surveillance and treatment capacity reinforced

“Almost on a daily basis we face some kind of reaction from the communities,” said Dr Thierno Baldé, WHO Incident Manager for the Bundibugyo virus disease in the DRC. “These are difficult situations. People are having their relatives who are sick, who are dying.”

Speaking via video from the outbreak’s epicentre in Bunia, the medic told reporters in Geneva that on Monday, one of the ambulances used in the response was attacked. It was not an isolated incident.

According to local authorities on Monday, the Ebola Bundibugyo outbreak has killed 2,325 people, surpassing the 2,299 deaths recorded in the DRC’s 2018-2020 outbreak, previously the most lethal. The fatality rate has risen to 46 per cent, according to Government data. 

Dr Baldé said that the milestone of 5,000 confirmed cases has been crossed and confirmed that cases have been identified in a sixth province, Bas-Uele. 

Working day and night

“The situation is quite difficult, but people are working here days and nights trying to control this outbreak,” Dr Baldé insisted. 

“We are really recentering all of the operational approach, all of our activities, around the engagement of the communities,” the WHO official said.

Describing the multi-pronged scale-up underway, he said that one of the key targets of the response is the association of motorbike riders, involved in the transport of patients and dead bodies. 

Hand-washing stations and disinfectant have been made available, but the new objective is to recruit them as surveillance and response officers, Dr Baldé said.

The WHO medic explained that the bikers are one of the most affected categories in the population because of their transport duties. Some have lost multiple family members to the virus. 

Because the motorbike riders are a key link in the chain of disease surveillance, they need to “be able to tell us wherever they transport a sick person”, contact the surveillance team and enable the suspected case to be tested, Dr Baldé explained. 

This grassroots engagement is taking place “in a very dignified manner”, Dr Baldé said, “by convincing them, explaining to them…this is for the good of themselves, the good of their family”.

Treatment capacity push

In other response measures, WHO plans to deploy 100 additional expert epidemiologists in health zones. They will be supported by more than 500 community health workers who can pursue contact tracing and identify infected individuals and convince them to seek treatment.

Some 400 beds have been added in facilities in various localities over the past two weeks.

Dr Baldé insisted that an extra push is needed to ensure safe and dignified burials “by engaging those local people who are doing that in the villages and equipping them with chlorine and gloves “to be able to handle these bodies in a very safe manner”.

The WHO official highlighted the localities of Lita and Nizi as examples of progress today, whereas “we were overwhelmed by the number of community deaths about six weeks ago, seven weeks ago”. 

“Today, we are reporting only few cases, few deaths, and those deaths are being safely and dignifiedly, buried at the right time…We have seen a kind of stabilization of the situation where we are capable of intervening as quick as possible,” he concluded. 

The outbreak of Ebola Bundibugyo virus disease, for which there is no vaccine and no approved treatment, was declared by DRC authorities on 15 May.

Experts meet

On Tuesday, the International Health Regulations Emergency Committee met for the second time on the epidemic, which has already been declared a public health emergency of international concern. The panel was expected to advise on the current risk level in its recommendations to countries. 

In his remarks to the panel, WHO Director-General noted that clinical trials are advancing for vaccines and therapeutics specifically to treat Bundibugyo virus.

For the first time, two vaccines designed specifically against Bundibugyo virus have entered human trials; a separate vaccine has shown cross-protection in animal studies and it is being proposed for phase III trial. This is the third of four phases of clinical trials and often precedes approval for a new treatment.

“The response still needs faster data sharing, enhanced surveillance, sustained financing, access and security, and stronger cross-border coordination,” Tedros insisted.

Equally, “we must also remember that Ebola is only one threat the people of DRC face, including maternal mortality, diarrheal disease, pneumonia, malaria, cholera and more”, the WHO chief stressed. “Even as we fight to end this epidemic, we cannot allow the response to disrupt access to other essential health services.”

According to WHO’s attacks on healthcare tracker, there have been 18 incidents – including six where people have died – since 1 January, including 14 on facilities, two on medical transport and 26 on health personnel and patients. 

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of UN News.