Selina Black is among hundreds of women who die every year in Malawi as a result of the government's restrictive abortion law, which only permits the procedure in cases where the woman's life is at risk. Obtaining an abortion for any other reason is punishable by seven to 14 years in prison; while people supplying drugs or instruments to procure abortion can face three years in jail.
Most recent stories in #AsEquals: Stories of gender equality from across the world
Masupha is the only child in her family, but Lesotho's laws prohibit women from inheriting the chieftainship. Women can take on the role if their chief husbands die, but afterwards the position can be inherited only by a male heir.
Roughly 1.8 billion people around the world menstruate. Some can't afford sanitary products. Others have nowhere to buy them. And even if price isn't an issue, stigma and taboo still stop many from fully participating in work and school during their periods.
Period poverty -- where girls or women are unable to afford sufficient menstrual products -- is often seen as a problem confined to developing countries. In Tanzania, for example, many girls and women say basic pads are simply unaffordable.
But recent surveys in the UK have exposed startling rates of period poverty in one of the world's richest countries and sparked a national conversation.More than 520 orphaned and disadvantaged teenagers live and study at the Agahozo Shalom Youth Village (ASYV). Structured around the family unit, groups of 16 to 24 children live among each other as "siblings" in a home headed by a "Mama."
Most of the Mamas are widows and have lost at least one child as a direct or indirect result of Rwanda's 1994 genocide.In the five years of South Sudan's civil war, 1.9 million have fled to camps within the country, where the UN provides physical protection as well as food rations amidst an ongoing famine.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, 38% of girls are married before they're 18. Right here in my backyard, child marriages persist in the US because about half of the states have no legal minimum age for girls to be married. It's 2018, and 15 million girls become child brides every year. That's one girl every 2 seconds.
CNN has interviewed an 11 year old girl trying to divorce her 38 year old husband who tied her up and beat her. She is one of many child brides in forced marriages in Sudan.
Sara Elhassan is a 33-year-old Sudanese-American freelance writer and editor based between Phoenix, Arizona and Khartoum, Sudan. Her Instagram story on Noura Hussein helped spark the #JusticeForNoura campaign.
CNN has obtained an exclusive first-hand account from Sudanese teenager Noura Hussein, who is on death row for killing her 35-year-old rapist husband, in a case that has sparked international outrage.