Dear all,

As we have come to the end of the 16 Days SMS campaign against violence against women, I'd like to thank all that participated. We had over 170 participants drawn from 13 countries on 5 continents (Brazil, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, South Africa, Sweden, The Netherlands, Uganda, UK, USA, Zimbabwe).

The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence was international campaign. For 2007, the global theme for the 16 Days of Activism is "Demanding Implementation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence Against Women".

The 16 Days Campaign has been used as an organizing strategy by individuals and groups around the world to call for the elimination of all forms of violence against women.

Consequences of Violence Against Women affect every member of society and yet Violence Against Women continues with impunity globally in general, and in Africa in particular, despite the coming into force of the African protocol on Rights of women, which was adopted by the African heads of State and Government on July 11th 2003.

The regional theme for 2007 was "I commit to preventing violence against women! What about You? Speak out, reach out, stand out!" Organisations held marches, conferences, rallies, dramas, talk shows, community outreaches, video shows, median events and other activities to encourage every individual to add their voice and efforts and commit to preventing Violence Against Women in their personal relationships, extended families, communities and nations as a whole.

We had strong support from the participants with more SMS provided than we could actually send out without overloading your mobile phone in-box. However, no message was disregarded and all have been posted on the internet on a blog set up for this purpose. Please visit http://www.takebackthetech.net/blogathon/wougnet to read all the messages and add any further comments you'd like to make.

I'd like to apologise to MTN subscribers in Uganda. Due to a configuration problem between MTN-Uganda and the Dutch Telecom KPN, SMSs were not delivered to MTN subscribers, however Celtel and UTL worked fine. I'd therefore encourage you to visit the blog to read all the messages.

WOUGNET in collaboration with Womensnet & APC-Africa-Women thank you for participating in the SMS campaign. We also thank Hivos (http://www.hivos.nl) for their generous support that made this SMS campaign possible using the BulkSMS tool hosted by KPN.

Regards,

Milton Aineruhanga
Program Officer
WOUGNET

For more information and/or to participate in the campaign, visit http://www.wougnet.org/Alerts/speakoutgenderviolence.html

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