From feeding schoolchildren to recycling tyres, these entrepreneurs are challenging stereotypes while solving social and environmental problems

Africa is thought to have a higher proportion of female entrepreneurs than any other continent and yet many still struggle to access financing. Four business leaders from Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and Malawi tell us about the inspiration behind their success – and the challenges women still face.

As climate breakdown pushes families to starvation, many feel forced to ‘sacrifice’ daughters to save siblings. Photographer Elise Blanchard travelled the country speaking to girls as young as eight, 10 and 14 who have been engaged or married to repay debts or pay for food

‘I’m not happy about this,” says 11-year-old Khatira, who was sold into marriage to repay debts, sitting in her home in Qala-e-Naw, capital of Badghis province in north-west Afghanistan. “She was healthy before her engagement, now she is worried and cries a lot,” says her 40-year-old mother, Noor Bibi.

When her 20-year-old husband-to-be comes to her home, Khatira runs away. Since her engagement, she has stopped going outside because she “is ashamed of having a husband in front of the other girls”, says her mother.

Shepherds watch over their sheep in the hills of Bala-Murghab, Badghis province, north-west Afghanistan. By March, the pasture was already too dry for the season

I was sentenced to three years in jail for insulting government institutions. Now I am free, I will carry on fighting for the women I met in prison

‘Why don’t you just drive your tuk-tuk and do your work?” the judge asked me after videos from my social media accounts were shown during my court hearing. I had spoken on TikTok and Facebook about issues in Somalia that concerned me: forced evictions in the capital, Mogadishu, high fuel prices and nepotism in government.

I had described how, when I applied for work in hospitals and government departments, I was told on three occasions that I’d have to give a sexual favour in return.

Congolese photographer Pamela Tulizo uses costume and vivid scenery to celebrate women’s strength and give a new perspective on slavery

Pamela Tulizo’s latest series of photographs started with a question. “I asked myself, why are women in my community in particular, and African women in general, so strong?” says Tulizo, an artist and photographer from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. “Where does this strength come from?”

Growing up in Goma in eastern DRC, Tulizo was informed and inspired by the women she was surrounded by, including her mother, her sisters, her mother’s friends and her neighbours.

Women are placed at the centre of the series of 23 staged photographs

Women ‘set back by 50 years’ as Bolivia, Chile, Argentina and Peru debate tougher penalties for false reports of sexual assaults, despite such cases being rare

The Chilean senator Vanessa Kaiser is on a mission. In her view, men are under attack and need to be protected from the wrongs that feminism has brought about, including a barrage of false accusations of gender-based and sexual violence. “I want to be the first minister in the history of the west to defend men,” she says.

“I want to defend you against the idea that, simply for being born male, you are guilty,” she said in July, speaking about a proposed bill that would create sanctions for falsely reporting domestic violence and sexual assaults. “Because now, on top of all the burdens we already had, thanks to those horrible ideologies called feminism and the gender perspective, we have to defend our men.”

Investigation revealed thousands of voyeuristic videos taken on Munich beer festival’s Teufelsrad, or Devil’s Wheel

Women have been given free cycling shorts to prevent upskirting on a famous amusement ride at the Oktoberfest in Munich, after an investigation revealed tens of thousands of voyeuristic videos circulating online.

The Teufelsrad, or Devil’s Wheel, which rapidly spins around while people try to sit on it for as long as they can, is one of the beer festival’s oldest rides. But many of the videos discovered by German journalists focus on women whose traditional dirndl dresses have ridden up, often showing their underwear.

Suzannah Mirghani’s first feature contains a powerful performance by Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud as a village’s elder woman and tackles the long shadow of British imperialism and women’s rights

‘I decide my past,” says a village matriarch in this intriguingly political and poetic drama from Suzannah Mirghani, making her feature debut – and with it becoming the first Sudanese woman to direct a feature. (She was forced to cancel the original shoot in Sudan when war broke out in 2023, moving production to Egypt.) It’s a film with things to say about the long shadow of the British empire, neocolonialism, women’s rights and female genital mutilation. But it mostly says it all without undermining its sense of mystery and shivers of magic realism.

We’re in present day Sudan, where village elder Al-Sit (Rabha Mohamed Mahmoud) is an iron-willed woman not to be messed with. Everyone knows the story of how as a young girl she ran the British out of town; small children in the village gleefully tell the story of how she slaughtered every single last one of them. Can it possibly be true? The trauma of her past is at the centre of the film, and Mahmoud’s witchy performance, fierce and powerful, is utterly compelling.

Kalpana Nepali was seven months pregnant when the flash floods hit last month, while Pooja Pariyal spent three days on a hospital roof waiting to be rescued. Now, they are living precariously in temporary shelters

For three days, Pooja Pariyal waited on the roof of Trishuli hospital with her three-month-old daughter, Ridhika. On the ground below and around the building, most of her town had been destroyed and churned into a sea of mud in the catastrophic flash floods that surged through the Himayalan border region of Nepal and Tibet in August.

“Those three days were living hell for me, with no food, no working toilet and no one to help with the baby,” she says. “I had nothing to clean my baby’s soiled clothes. My milk supply had reduced because I was hungry and this poor little thing would cry her lungs out.

Taraneh and Romina Rahimi were charged with ‘waging war against God’ after joining protests against Tehran regime

The family of 21-year-old twins who have been sentenced respectively to death and decades in jail for protesting against the Iranian regime have appealed to the United Nations for help.

A formal “submission of information” relating to the case of Taraneh and Romina Rahimi has been submitted by British human right lawyers on their family’s behalf.

Modi’s bid to ‘purify’ voter lists has affected a third of the city’s residents. In the GB Road red light district, those who lack permanent homes and documents are among the hardest hit

Rows of hardware and car-part shops line Garstin Bastion Road, with faded signs crammed together above their shutters. By day, the street is one of Old Delhi’s busiest commercial thoroughfares. But as dusk falls, GB Road, as it is known locally, transforms into one of the city’s most notorious red-light districts.

An estimated 2,800 sex workers live and work in brothels that occupy the upper floors of the dilapidated buildings, their entrances tucked behind narrow stairways and unmarked doors. Women sit on plastic stools beneath the stairways, calling out to men passing on the street, while others watch from windows above, their eyes following the movement below before customers are directed upstairs.

Militant feminist led campaigns to legalise abortion and divorce and went on to become foreign minister

Emma Bonino, the radical Italian politician who led campaigns to legalise abortion and divorce against the objections of the Vatican, has died aged 78.

“Today we lose not only our leader but also one of the most clear-sighted, courageous and free figures in the political history of our country,” the small party she founded, More Europe, said on Facebook on Friday.

Her Horizon Fund seeks $100m to stop practice harming 230m women and girls globally

Frontline activists and leaders in the fight against female genital mutilation, which has affected more than 230 million women and girls worldwide, have welcomed an unprecedented $15.5m (£11.4m) fund aimed at creating “unstoppable momentum” to finally end the practice.

The launch of the fund comes as women’s rights are increasingly under attack and donor funding is in sharp decline, particularly for work led by FGM survivors in local communities. It is thought to be the largest single philanthropic contribution to ending the practice of FGM.

Shallah, Fatimah and Maahi are among hundreds of thousands of Afghan women and girls deported from Iran and Pakistan in the past year to a life of severe restrictions

It was a warm summer afternoon on 15 August 2021 when the Taliban entered Kabul and changed the lives of millions. Shallah*, then 16, watched the news at home on the Afghan TV channel Tolo news. She ran crying to the garden, to tell her mother that Afghanistan had fallen.

Her younger sister, Fatimah*, then 11, was at her cousin’s house, where her aunt told her the news. At the time, she says, she did not understand what a takeover meant, or who the Taliban were. Her elder sister, Maahi*, then 22, was well aware of the consequences and remembers her hands shaking at work as she read the news on her phone, on Facebook pages of Afghan news.

They fled a brutal civil war to reach safety in Egypt, but now many Sudanese women and girls are falling prey to sexual exploitation

Sudanese women who fled to Egypt to escape the war in their country are facing increasing levels of sexual exploitation, with the Guardian told of single mothers forced to sell their bodies to survive and feed their children.

Many of the women have not previously worked in Sudan, where conservative social norms dictate that men are usually responsible for financial support. Without established trades or professions, and with their husbands and other family members dead or missing, many female refugees are struggling to pay for food, medical care and rent.

I was told to keep my diagnosis private but I am determined to show the reality of breast cancer and reject the stigma that prevents women seeking treatment

‘Madam, this looks like breast cancer, and if it is, we will chop off your breast.” That was how the doctor welcomed me into the chaotic world of cancer in 2017 when I was 32 years old. He had his back to me, but kept on talking, peering into the specimen bottle.

For a moment, I could no longer hear him. I thought of my three children, the university degree I had just bagged and the future I had envisaged. If I was going to die, what was the point of it all? I had invested everything I had to obtain that degree, subjecting my children to days of absence while I spent my nights in the university library.

Sexual and reproductive services face an uncertain future as the country’s second-largest donor halts support worth hundreds of millions of pounds

The Swedish flag is still flying above the pale blue building overlooking the Atlantic in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, but the doors of the embassy are now closed to visitors. On 31 August, the Swedish embassy in Liberia ends a presence in the country that dates back to 1961.

The billions of kronor of aid that Sweden pipes into the west African country will end on the same day, as sweeping cuts to Swedish development funding come into effect.

There’s growing agreement that under-18s need to be protected – but international turmoil is pushing many towards wedlock

Every minute, 23 girls around the world wed, according to the Girls Not Brides campaign, a coalition of more than 1,000 organisations across 100 countries. No child should be married. But girls are far more likely to be affected than boys, accounting for nine in 10 of those wed before 18, and their spouses are often much older men. The consequences, beyond the immediate threat of sexual violence, include the shortening of their education, increased risks of poverty and domestic abuse, and poor health, including high rates of maternal mortality. In spring, the Center for Global Development thinktank estimated that child marriage costs $175bn annually in lost productivity and increased health risks.

The good news is that the last decade has seen a drop in rates; last year alone, Grenada, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Kuwait and Portugal introduced bans. But there are disturbing signs of regression elsewhere. In May, the Taliban issued a new judicial code enabling child marriage below the previous minimum age of 16, and preventing wives from ending marriages they entered as children if their husbands object. Previous protections were inadequate and often poorly enforced; now even those have been swept away. Activists say forced and early marriages have soared since the Taliban returned to power in 2021, thanks to the ban on secondary education and the state of the economy.

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Five years on, the regime’s chokehold has left Afghan women with almost nothing, but many are still bravely fighting for their freedom

The Taliban did not just ban women from schools, impose the burqa and outlaw smartphones. The Taliban built a system that enslaves nearly half the country’s population, or according to outdated statistics: 21,701,532 women and girls.

In general, the Taliban’s system runs on laws that get changed, forgotten or scrapped as needed to oppress women, such as the abolition of the minimum marriage-age law, which made the only “legitimate” criterion for a girl’s marriage that she has reached puberty or in other words, that she is “fit for consummation”.

Since civil war first reached her village in 2003, Samira has been displaced seven times, enduring devastating losses and injuries along the way

Every morning, she spreads small piles of rice and spices on an aluminium tray in the market of Korsi refugee camp. Some of it comes from her monthly food ration, already meagre, distributed by the UN’s World Food Programme; some she buys when she can and resells for a small profit.

Samira crouches quietly behind her modest display, greeting customers as they pass. Her loose red toub cloth frames her thin face and falls across one side of it, hiding her injured right eye. Every so often she adjusts the long cloth to cover the empty sleeve where her right arm would have been. It is a habit the 33-year-old has developed since the war, but her injuries are only part of the terrible damage it has inflicted.

With less than a third of cycling journeys taken by women, Colombia’s capital, Bogotá, is installing bike lanes, teaching cycling and making sure ‘stereotypes are left behind’

Eliana González has a busy morning ahead of her, dropping off her son at school and picking up groceries. Her trusted vehicle to get around in Bogotá is a colourful cargo bike, adapted to carry her two children and occasionally her dog.

“For me, my cargo bike is a way to carry my children safely and comfortably without polluting the environment,” she says.