"Now after Genet and Abosie, young men and women are really listening. There has been an amazing ripple effect... It has opened doors of courage."

When Genet Girma and Addisie Abosie got married in Kembatta, Ethiopia, they did the unthinkable in their community. Genet wore a placard saying "I am not circumcised, learn from me" and her groom wore a matching one that said "I am very happy to be marrying an uncircumcised woman."

She [Hirut Gedlu] has just finished a 2,500 kilometre journey across her country, on her bike, which took her to 280 places where she preached her anti-Aids message.

More girls living on the streets of Addis are being raped. According to some of the street children the number of victims is on the rise.

Through her own stubborn determination and the sacrifices of her mother, who took on her household chores, Bogaletch Gebre became the first girl in her village, Zato, to be educated beyond the fourth grade...later she became the first woman invited to join the science faculty at Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa University. But years earlier, as a Fulbright scholar at the University of Massachusetts, Gebre awakened from her physical and emotional numbness, and she experienced rage and horror over what was done to her as a child.

More Ethiopian women die in hospital from illegal abortion complications than for almost any other medical reason, the World Health Organisation (WHO) told IRIN on Monday.

Mass unemployment in Ethiopia is leading to an alarming rise in the illegal trafficking of women, according to the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs.

Illegal trafficking from Ethiopia has become a lucrative business. Traffickers who prey on girls in Ethiopia expect to earn around seven thousand Ethiopian Birr (More than US $800) for each person they send overseas. Thousands of teenage girls are shipped out of the country each year to the Middle East, with the Lebanon as the most popular destination. The Ethiopian authorities were forced to open a consulate in the Lebanon just to deal with the problem.

Ethiopia's government is helping launch a campaign to warn women about possible dangers of taking jobs outside the country. The campaign is run by the International Organization for Migration in conjunction with Ethiopia's Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and the Women's Affairs Office.

According to a recent study, some 72 percent of school-age children have no access to formal education. The difference between the enrolment of boys and girls in schools is still vast, despite the fact that the federal government spends 15 per cent of the national budget on education. Dropout rates from primary schools are more than 25 percent.

A third of all women canvassed at three ante-natal clinics in a study in Soweto, South Africa, admitted to having had “transactional sex” in return for food, clothing, transportation, school fees, cash or gifts for their children - and were HIV positive.

The Amhara Development Association (ADA) has provided 45,000 birr to support girl students in two high schools in Debre-Markos town.

In Borena Zone [], in the southernmost region of the country, bordering on Kenya, only five percent of girls ever make it into any schools. This percentage is alarming even in overall terms for Ethiopia, which has one of the poorest enrolment rates for girls in the world: around 40 percent of seven million school-age children. The appalling lack of education in rural areas of Ethiopia is typified in Borena, and even more so in the Teltele and Yabelo areas, the two most inaccessible parts of the zone, inhabited by nomadic pastoralists and agro-pastoralists

The Adaba woreda court in Bale zone, Oromia State has sentenced a man for 12 years rigorous imprisonment for raping a five-year old girl.

According to the report, mentor programs, opportunities to network with practicing female engineers, and clubs like the Society for Women Engineers -- which has branches and arranges activities and schedules speakers at numerous engineering schools – are the types of efforts that make women feel confident and valuable to the field, thus increasing the likelihood that they will stick with engineering.

A private university for women -- a first for East Africa -- has been established in Kenya and will soon start admitting students for undergraduate and graduate programs.