On International Women’s Day, IPS news agency talks to Iranian Nobel Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi and new UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova about their efforts to champion women. Both are in New York, with thousands of others, to review what progress women have made since the landmark Beijing Conference on Women, fifteen years ago.

An international team of IPS reporters is in New York where the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women is meeting to review the Beijing Platform of Action, with the IPS global network contributing local voices and viewpoints. Read more »

Almost 80 million smallholder farmers in Africa, supply about 80 percent of its food. In order for Africa to establish a prosperous and sustainable economic future, the voices of its farmers must be amplified.

To enable this, journalists from across the West Africa region attended a media workshop in Accra, Ghana, hosted by Inter Press Service IPS Africa on behalf of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

The workshop aimed to build the capacity of local journalists and editors from West and Central Africa to gain the skills and knowledge they need to report on the food crisis and how it can be solved, particularly with the contribution of smallholder farmers. Read more »

PHNOM PENH – A documentary on Myanmar citizens with Chinese ethnicity who cross the border from Yunnan daily to study in a Chinese school. A photo essay comparing the plight of working elephants in Thailand and neighbouring Laos. A feature taking a look at perceptions of China’s dam-building activities in the Lancang River, as the upstream Mekong River is called.

These are a but a sample of the media work produced by 31 journalist-fellows in the 2008-09 cycle of the Imaging Our Mekong programme — that were debated, argued over and turned inside out at a Mar. 25-28 workshop that brought them together in order to review and critique one another’s submissions. Read more »

It was March 1979 when IPS opened the correspondent bureau in Havana, so this year marks the 30th anniversary of IPS Cuba. A series of commemorative initiatives were organised from 17- 22 March. A visit to a sustainable development project, the focus of one of the many in-depth reports transmitted globally by IPS from Cuba, concluded intensive days of celebrations of the IPS presence in the Caribbean isle. Read more »

IPS is celebrating international women’s day with the launch of a new weekly newsletter, the Gender Wire. This week also sees IPS partnering with Gender Links and GEMSA to contribute features and news stories to the Daily Links @ CSW newspaper publishing at the 53rd session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meeting in New York. Read more »