By External Source
KABUL, Sep 8 2025 – In recent weeks, the walls of the Afghan capital have been plastered with slogans about women’s hijab: “Unveiling is a sign of ignorance”; “Hijab is a father’s honour and the pride of Muslims”.

They are messages from the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, created to enforce the Taliban’s strict interpretation of Islamic rule on Afghanistan. Women, once again, are at the sharp end of it all.

Presented as efforts to uphold public morality, the slogans have instead weighed heavily on the mental and emotional well-being of women.

Walls That Echo Fear, Not Faith

Many women complain that the constant messaging makes them feel anxious and unsafe. Even those who are fully dressed up in hijab in accordance with the law have become fearful of stepping outside the house, not because of what they are wearing, but because the atmosphere has become so tense and judgmental. When they see slogans staring down at them from the walls, they “echo fear not faith”.

Women are not allowed to wear perfume; laugh out loud or speak openly in front of men. They must not interact with men who are either non-relatives or non-Muslims and are required to always walk with a male guardian in public

Parwin, a young woman traveling on a city bus with her mother, recalls a time when the walls of Kabul were covered with colorful murals promoting women’s rights, peace, freedom, and equality. She said, “Sadly, the Taliban have wiped those away and replaced them with messages that put limits on women”, she complains.

“What women need more than ever is more education not slogans that only scare them”, says Parwin.

Instead, after four years of living under Taliban rule women continue to live with fear, deprivation, and many restrictions.

Maliha, another Kabul resident, raised her concerns over a steady increase in the number of restrictions women now face: women are not allowed to wear perfume; laugh out loud or speak openly in front of men. They must not interact with men who are either non-relatives or non-Muslims and are required to always walk with a male guardian in public.

She said, “Women are born free and should not be cut off from the rest of society. These restrictions do not protect us. Rather, they push us out and exclude us from community life”.

The Taliban came with promises of ‘preserving Islamic values,’ but instead of respecting women’s dignity as recognized in Islam, they have subjected them to repression and exclusion.

Islam recognizes the dignity of women and grants them the right to work, participate in society and to have an education. Using religious values as a tool to suppress women only presents a harsh and unjust image of the faith.

Instead of focusing on dress codes and restrictions, the government should be helping women who have no home. They should be supporting widows and women with nowhere to turn to—by providing them shelter, jobs, and a way to live with dignity.

Restrictions That Have Paralized Life

Four years after the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan, life has only gotten harder for Afghan women. From the beginning, strict rules were put in place to limit their freedom and instead of easing up, those restrictions have only grown tighter.

Girls are banned from attending school after six grade or university. Women are no longer allowed to work outside their homes. In effect, half the population has been pushed out of public life.

In response to these criticisms, the spokesperson for the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice told the media that these slogans are a way to promote Islamic morals.

But in reality a law passed last year with 35 articles severely restrict women’s personal freedoms.

Afghan women today are living without basic rights, and in an unsafe and deeply stressful environment.

If the Taliban continue with the policies of shutting women off women from the rest of society, it not only threatens the future of an entire generation of women, it also holds back progress and development of the whole country.

Excerpt:

The author is an Afghanistan-based female journalist, trained with Finnish support before the Taliban take-over. Her identity is withheld for security reasons

By Sania Farooqui
BENGALURU, India, Sep 8 2025 – This year marks half a century since the start of Lebanon’s civil war in 1975 – a conflict that lasted 15 years, killed over 150,000 lives, and resulted in as many as 17,000 missing. Decades later, the legacy of that war is still everywhere: in the silence of classrooms without history books, in families who never knew what happened to their missing loved ones, and in violence made mundane in all parts of society.

Lina Abou-Habib

For Lina Abou-Habib, Director of the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon’s failure to reconcile with its history has lefts wounds festering. In an interview by IPS Inter Press News, she discusses memory, impunity, and the need for a feminist, justice-oriented peace building process. “When the war started in 1975, I was 13 years old. When it ended in 1990, I was 28,” Lina recalls. “I believe we may be the last generation that truly holds this first hand memory of those 15 years of war.”

And yet, today, much of Lebanon’s younger generation has no real knowledge of what happened. There is no state history book of the civil war in the nation, leaving a void in collective memory.

“One of the most striking moments I’ve had with my students at AUB was when I asked them, ‘What is the Taif Agreement?’” Lina says, referring to the Saudi-brokered accord that formally ended the war. “Most of them didn’t know. When they searched for visuals, their first observation was this: there were no women in the room. Not a single one.”

And that absence matters. Women’s experiences of the war, and their understanding of peace were excluded from the official record. After the war, Lebanon’s parliament passed a general amnesty law, which granted immunity to political parties and leaders for wartime practices and absolved individual and group militia members for sexual violence, murder, torture and forced disappearance. “After the war, there was a general amnesty law, which basically told everyone to ‘turn the page’ and move on – without justice, without accountability, and without healing,” Lina explains. “This amnesty institutionalized impunity.”

The consequences, she says, are far-reaching. “If men who committed heinous crimes during the war walked away free, then why wouldn’t impunity extend into other spheres? If someone can get away with mass murder, then femicide or gender-based violence becomes ‘no big deal.’”

This normalisation of violence permeates everyday life, from the political sphere to domestic. It teaches citizens, particularly women, that accountability is not something they can expect. Impunity has been succeeded by a culture of silence – a wilful forgetting that allows the wounds of war to remain unhealed. “Impunity doesn’t just happen politically, it’s also personal,” Lina reflects. “To normalize it at the national level, you need to go through a kind of intentional amnesia. But of course, you can’t truly forget. You internalize trauma, and when you don’t heal it, you pass it on.”

Without truth, without accountability, trauma is passed down generations. Families whose relatives disappeared still do not know where they were buried, or whether they survived. Entire communities grow up with questions that remain unanswered.

It was in this silence that the women in Lebanon got together to become guardians of memory, collectively forming the Committee of the Families of the Disappeared, a movement led primarily by mothers, sisters, and wives of those who went missing during the war.

“Of the 17,000–18,000 people still missing in Lebanon, 94% are men,” Lina notes. “But it’s women who have led the search for truth. And that truth-seeking is not about revenge. It’s about recognition. It’s about the right to know.” For these women, truth is not a weapon but its dignity. They echo similar struggles in Latin America, the Balkans, and Africa, where women have been at the forefront of truth-telling and reconciliation movements. Even years after the war, Lebanon remains highly militarized. Weapons are common, often associated with masculinity and control.

“Peace and carrying arms cannot coexist,” Lina says bluntly. “They are fundamentally incompatible – it’s an oxymoron.”

She emphasizes that weapons are never neutral. “Who carries weapons? Who decides who should be protected and who is a threat? Guns are not neutral – they are tools of power, of dominance.” For women, patriarchy contributes to militarization. Violence against women in war is often dismissed as private, hidden, or silenced – and war only makes it worse. “War doesn’t stop gender-based violence. It amplifies it. Bombings don’t stop rape. Displacement doesn’t stop domestic violence. On the contrary, it exacerbates it.”

This reality is not an exception in Lebanon. Everywhere, from Sudan to Libya, women are still subjected to rape, sexual slavery, and femicide as instruments of war. And too many times, their suffering goes unnoticed. Other countries that endured mass violence – from Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia to Latin America – have built transitional justice processes around one central truth: you cannot rebuild without memory.

“You cannot move forward without truth,” Lina stresses. “You didn’t get to write a new constitution or form a new government without first addressing what had happened – without naming the pain, the crimes, and the people who suffered.” But the truth does not come easily. Power, she warns, is patient. “The powers that be will always try to wait you out. That’s exactly what has happened in Lebanon. They’ve just been waiting for the families of the disappeared to die – to literally disappear, one after another.”

The lesson, then, is perseverance: truth-telling must outlast systems of denial.

Despite Lebanon’s collapse in recent years, economic crisis, political stagnation, and social disillusionment, Lina sees a moment of possibility in recent political change. “If any real change is to happen, this is our window. And I fear we won’t get another one,” she says. The change requires bold steps, “Disarming unlawfully militarised groups; dismantling corruption; building a just and inclusive legal system; and strengthening independent civil society”. “These are not small asks,” Lina admits. “But this is what real peace looks like. Not just the absence of conflict, but the presence of justice.”

Ultimately, Lina’s hope lies in Lebanon’s resilient civil society, a multi-generational network of activists, academics, feminists, and everyday citizens who refuse to give up. “The true actors of peace – the real builders of peace – are elsewhere,” she says. “Peace simply won’t happen if everyone isn’t included – especially not if women’s voices are excluded.”

Sania Farooqui is an independent journalist and host of The Sania Farooqui Show. She is soon launching her new podcast, The Peace Brief, a platform dedicated to amplifying women’s voices in peacebuilding and human rights.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Mandeep Dhaliwal and Osamu Kunii
UNITED NATIONS, Sep 8 2025 – At a time of great transformation for global health, solidarity is more important than ever. As other countries have retreated from their commitments, Japan has instead continued its steadfast investment in a shared future that prioritizes human dignity and security.

Japan is reaffirming its commitment to this vision at the Ninth Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) —a forum that champions African-led development—by placing youth employment and digital transformation at the heart of its agenda.

In line with these priorities, the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) announced US$160 million in bonds to support infrastructure, education and innovation across Africa. Significantly, the initiative invites Japanese companies and financial institutions to partner with and invest in African countries for mutual benefit.

Japan’s leadership on global health has long been underpinned by a strong sense of shared responsibility and solidarity. Wealthy countries should follow Japan’s lead, by building partnerships, scaling up proven innovations and fostering sustainable growth in Africa.

This approach could be particularly transformative for local manufacturing, digital health innovations and climate-resilient health systems—areas where African-led solutions are already gaining ground.

The Accra compact, adopted by the Africa Health Sovereignty Summit convened by Ghanaian President John Mahama, asserts the leadership and sovereignty of African countries in determining the health of their people.

For over a decade, Japan has supported both the Access and Delivery Partnership (ADP) and the Global Health Innovative Technology Fund (GHIT Fund) to develop and deliver health technologies to the people who need them most.

This innovative partnership between the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the GHIT supports the journey of medical innovations, including vaccines, medicines and diagnostics, from lab to bedside. GHIT stimulates research and development, while ADP—led by UNDP—works with countries and communities to introduce and scale up the finished products.

For over a decade, Japan has supported the Access and Delivery Partnership, led by UNDP, to deploy health technologies on the continent. Credit: UNDP Ghana

One recent success is the development and rollout of a new paediatric treatment option for schistosomiasis, an infection caused by a parasitic worm that affects 50 million preschool-aged children. Schistosomiasis, which is found primarily in tropical regions, causes anaemia, stunted growth and impaired cognitive development.

Children aged 6 years and under can now take a small pill for treatment. The GHIT Fund and the Pediatric Praziquantel Consortium—led by German pharmaceutical company Merck—worked together to develop the medicine and transfer the technology to Kenyan pharmaceutical manufacturer Universal Corporation Limited (UCL). Thanks to this collaboration, UCL is now producing medicine locally in Kenya, ensuring sustainable access to treatment for affected communities.

This shift toward local manufacturing is gaining momentum across Africa. Countries from Senegal to Rwanda and beyond are rapidly becoming regional manufacturing hubs for diagnostics, vaccine and medicine production.

In 2024, the Institut Pasteur de Dakar (IPD) inaugurated a new diagnostic manufacturing site, while in 2023, Rwanda collaborated with BioNTech to open what could become Africa’s first mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility. At the same time, digital technologies and AI are reshaping the future of African health care systems.

In June, 50 African Union Member States endorsed a digital micro-planning tool co-created by the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and other partners, to accelerate the elimination of neglected tropical diseases like onchocerciasis and dengue.

Scaling up homegrown tools will strengthen epidemic preparedness, and when disaster strikes, they can mean the difference between containment and catastrophe.

The rise of these innovations underscores Africa’s position as an emerging hub for digital transformation. With Africa’s digital economy projected to grow to $712 billion by 2035, investors have a strong incentive to support the digital infrastructure boom

Japan is already ahead of the curve. Over the past few years, Japan has partnered with Ghana to establish mobile laboratories at the country’s four main points of entry to strengthen pandemic preparedness.

Earlier this year, Japan and Cote d’Ivoire jointly committed to supporting UNDP’s timbuktoo initiative, which promotes entrepreneurship opportunities for startups led by young Africans, including a health tech accelerator focused on amplifying innovation across the health sector in Africa.

Finally, innovation and investment are especially urgent in countries disproportionately affected by climate extremes. African nations are pioneering approaches to climate-resilient health systems that other countries can learn from.

The continent’s leading initiative—the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Programme—has already mobilized more than $15 billion to protect countries against climate shocks. Joint initiatives like Solar for Health and Smart Health Systems, a collaboration between UNDP, governments and other partners, has brought reliable power to 1,000 health facilities across 14 countries, ensuring medicines and vaccines stay cool and lights stay on.

As the impact of climate change on health systems accelerates, programmes like these must be scaled sustainably to protect health systems from current and future threats.

Investment priorities must align accordingly. As Japan leads the way, other countries should follow by funding sustainable, equitable, inclusive and mutually beneficial interventions. This is more than sound policy—it is an imperative for our shared future.

This article was originally published in Nikkei Asia.

Source: UNDP

Mandeep Dhaliwal is Director of the HIV and Health Group, UNDP; Osamu Kunii is CEO and Executive Director, Global Health Innovative Technology Fund

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