Amy Coen, President of Population Action International, who nominated Gebre for the Jonathan Mann Award, attended a 2006 community-initiated rally in southern Ethiopia to celebrate the end of female genital mutilation. "Close to 20000 people from some 20 villages poured into an open field, most of them walking for miles to participate in the festivities. Elders, usually the keepers of traditions, spoke out against the practice. It was a transforming experience to see what a small group of women can do to spare their daughters and sisters extreme misery. It renewed my faith and my hope for the future of us all." Gebre believes gender discrimination is as pervasive and destructive as racial apartheid once was. "Just as whites in racial apartheid, males are considered to be intellectually superior, biologically superior, and physically superior to women. My dream for African women? That the world realises that women's suppression is no good for business, for the economy, nor for human development. Africa, in particular, cannot develop unless it uses all its people. This is what I want to see-a global coalition against gender apartheid."

A House appropriations subcommittee on Tuesday approved legislation that Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.) said would allow the federal government to give contraceptives but not money to international groups that have been barred from receiving U.S. aid due to their abortion policies, the AP/San Diego Union-Tribune reports (Abrams, AP/San Diego Union-Tribune, 6/5).

A measure approved by a House of Representatives panel would "basically gut" the U.S. policy of banning foreign aid to groups that provide or promote abortions, a conservative analyst charged on Wednesday. A liberal group called the bill "a much-needed dose of common sense" in the battle against HIV/AIDS.

She lives the tragedy of being an African aid failure -- and perhaps reflects Canada's AIDS apathy as well. Juliet Awuor lost her virginity and went HIV-positive the same night in a Kenyan slum.

International family planning groups cut off from U.S. aid because they provide or promote abortion could gain access to U.S.-donated contraceptives under legislation approved by a panel of the U.S. House of Representatives.

Bush's announcement last week to double the funding for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) to $30 billion was nothing less than political brilliance on his part. I mean that genuinely. It was a preemptive strike to once again claim empathetic superiority in an area once reserved for well-meaning progressives. Yes, it was also timed to provide cover for Bush's anti-environmentalism in advance of the G8 Summit, but here at home, it had the added utility of once again using an abundance of funding to disguise underlying policy flaws-deliberate and favored-that are hampering a good program from being a great one.

George Bush announced yesterday that the US plans to spend $30bn (£15bn) over five years in Africa and elsewhere to combat HIV/Aids.

While the developed world deals with a 'birth dearth,' populations are exploding in developing nations. What the first world should do to help.

Few aid programmes have been as controversial among activists and public health experts as the George W. Bush administration's abstinence-based HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention initiative, called the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). Rosemarie Muganda-Onyando serves as the director of the Centre for the Study of Adolescence in Nairobi, Kenya and appears in a new nine-minute documentary by the Washington-based group Population Action International titled "Abstaining From Reality".

Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Congo have all suffered horrors brought on by disastrous governance and violent conflict. But they, and many of Africa's poorest countries, have something else in common: very young populations.