Calling all young women’s groups!

Mama Cash is an International Women’s Fund, which supports ambitious feminist and women’s rights organisations and initiatives led by and for women and girls. Mama Cash supports pioneering and innovative women’s initiatives around the world, because she believes that social change starts with women and girls.

As part of our grant making we have dedicated some funds to supporting girl-led initiatives. Therefore, we are calling for Letter of Interest (LOI’s) from girl-led groups that work on the advancement of girl’s and young women’s rights in their communities.

Please note that this call is exclusively open for girl-led groups and programmes (girls under 19).

We are looking for groups/organisation/programmes that are set up and led by girls under the age of 19 and that work at the crossroads of Mama Cash’s Money, Body or Voice Portfolio. Focus issues include: sexual and reproductive health and rights, sexuality and gender norms, (gender based) violence, economic justice, natural resource rights, land/property/inheritance rights, fundamentalism, labour rights, political participation and issues of women in militaristic environments.

For a full description on focus areas and priorities, grant making criteria and more information on the application process, please visit our website at www.mamacash.org or contact Lara van Kouterik, Programme Officer Voice at: l.vankouterik [at] mamacash [dot] nl

How true is this.

Maybe I’m a dreamer, but I wish mental health care were as easy to get as, say, a gun.
- a tweet from Andy Borowitz

I want to hear raucous music, to see faces, to brush against bodies, to drink fiery benedictine. Beautiful women and handsome men arouse fierce desires in me. I want to dance. I want drugs. I want to know perverse people, to be intimate with them. I never look at naive faces. I want to bite into life, and to be torn by it. – Anais Nin

As a young man, Alexander Cockburn, who has died from cancer at the age of 71, had something of the air of the classic Bollinger Bolshevik: elegant, with his blue shades and his Gauloises cigarettes, well-connected and perversely radical politically. In reality he was more interesting and more admirable, a contrarian who despised cant. He had the courage to take on anything and anyone, from the most powerful organisations in the world to his closest friends, and the energy and persistence to follow his own path wherever it took him.

More from the Guardian

Zimbabwe is planning to expand its circumcision campaign to include newly-born babies as part of the country’s fight against the spread of HIV and AIDS, a senior health ministry official has confirmed.

The ministry’s AIDS and TB unit co-ordinator, Getrude Ncube said a pilot project targeting babies between one and 28 days old would be launched before year end with the full programme likely to be rolled out in 2014.

“The project will start in Harare and Bulawayo,” Ncube said adding that, gradually, all maternity sites across the country would be circumcising newly born babies by 2014.

“Although circumcising neonates will not have an immediate an impact, results will show in 20 years’ time. Our sole aim is to try and reduce new HIV infections.”

Read full story here

90% of council public toilets in Harare suburbs are not functioning and have long been closed down and this poses a health hazard.
- Talking Harare