15 Acts Of Women's Activism That Are Changing The World

The Network was founded in 1995, the same year the Taliban rose to power. The Taliban eventually stripped women of many basic rights they'd enjoyed in Afghanitan. Today, the Afghan Women's Network --and other active women's groups like Equality for Peace and Development -- is on the front lines of the fight to improve the status of women. Its members, all civil society groups, have helped enact a law to eliminate violence against women, overturn a legal provision threatening impunity for domestic violence, and tamp down a move to bring back stoning.

In Jarkarta, Yulianus Rettoblaut — warmly known locally as Mummy Yuli — is building a home for the aging transgender community in Indonesia, which has has an estimated three million trans citizens. Traditionally, elderly Indonesians are taking in by their own families, but trans people are often shunned and reduced to begging. Right now, Mummy Yuli's old folks' home has a wait list 800 deep.

The Center for Health, Human Rights and Development catalyzed a movement for maternal health in Uganda with a lawsuit alleging that the country's poor maternal health statistics amounted to a violation of the constitutionally guaranteed right to life. The case was thrown out in its initial stages, but the group appealed in September.

From 1964-1973, in a "secret war," America dropped more bombs in Laos than have been dropped in any other country in the world. Many of them were cluster bombs that didn't explode, and in the generations since, Laotian men, women and children have lost limbs -- and life -- when they stumble across the old weapons. Since 2008, Laos has fielded teams of all-female de-miners to help clear the countryside. Why women? Because they think to clear paths to water wells and schools, not just the fields. And, you know, because women can. (Bonus: Help clear Laos by buying back the bombs from a group that makes unearthed weapons into bracelets.)

When Chouchou Namegabe started broadcasting the stories of rape survivors in her hometown of Bukavu in 2003, she didn't imagine she was starting a radio revolution. More than 10 years later, the Association of Women in Media-South Kivu, or AFEM, uses the airwaves to unite women across parts of inaccessible and unstable eastern Democrat Republic of Congo. The group airs a weekly program about women's issues, informed by rural women themselves, who send their news to producers in the provincial capital of Bukavu. AFEM also visits villages and trains women on their rights, including political participation.

When Angelique Mukankubana signed on for a training program with Women for Women International, she couldn't have imagined what she'd gotten into. Her country, Rwanda, had been through a genocide, and Angelique had become a widowed mother of two, struggling to survive. The international organization taught her how to make bricks -- traditionally an all-male vocation -- and Angelique took her lessons to the next level, advocating for a Womne's Opportunity Center in her rural town. Together with other women in her cooperative, she literally made the building blocks for the new building, which will offer training, hold a market, and host conferences and other events, all geared to bring market opportunities to local women. (Check out the women making the bricks in this video.)

To be a woman in Juarez is to be in danger. Since 1993, an estimated 1,000 women have been murdered there (though activists say that number is conservative and too low). One of them was Norma Andrade's daughter. In response, Andrade founded Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa (May Our Daughters Return Home), and she demanded justice for the femicide happening in her town. In 2011, she was shot multiple times; in 2012, her face was slashed by a male assailant. That doesn't intimate her: this past Christmas, her organization decorated Christmas trees with the faces of missing women.

Despite raising headlines around the world, and getting a conviction in 2011, the man who raped Millicent Gaika to "show her she was a woman" nearly went free after he escaped on bail. But the lesbian advocacy association Free Gender and Funeka Soldaat, who coordinates the group in Khayelitsha, a township in Cape Town, South Africa, kept up the pressure. Last November, Gaika's rapist was found and sentenced -- to 22 years in prison. Free Gender has emerged as a clear and important voice in a country where many women are sometimes killed just for their sexual orientation.