Grundtvig 2012-2014Partnership

ECDI“Everyone Can Do It!”

Accentuate (North-East) LimitedUnited Kingdom

Inspirational women chosen by the learners

Malala, who now attends Edgbaston high school for girls in Birmingham, said it was the happiest moment of her life in a video played at the Women in the World summit in New York.

She spent hours undergoing major surgery at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham where surgeons tried to repair the damage caused by a bullet that grazed her brain.

The grant of US$45,000 (£29,500) will be given to an unnamed organisation in the Swat Valley in Pakistan to support the education of 40 girls aged five to 12 who would otherwise be forced into domestic labour.

The organisation, which was not named for security reasons, will offer a safe place for the girls to study as well as financial support for their families.

In a video played to an audience of thousands Malala said: "Announcing the first grant of the Malala Fund is the happiest moment in my life.

"I invite all of you to support the Malala Fund and let us turn the education of 40 girls into 40 million girls."

Malala Yousafzai foundation makes first grant

Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl brought to England after being shot in the head by the Taliban, has announced the first donation from her new education charity with the support of Hollywood actor Angelina Jolie.

The 15-year-old set up the Malala Fund after the Taliban tried to assassinate her in October 2012 for asserting her right to go to school in her home country.

Inez McCormack Human rights activist and trade unionist who became

involved in the Northern Ireland civil rights movement in the 1960s

• She first became involved in the trade union movement when she was suspended from her job as a social worker in west Belfast for challenging the way desperately poor people were being treated. She began campaigning to organise and revalue the work and contribution of "forgotten" workers, most of them women in low-paid jobs.

• Inez helped to found and was an active member of the Vital Voices global advisory network, which gives support to women challenging gender-based violence and social and economic exclusion. The network has led important campaigns to outlaw and challenge the trafficking of women.

• Inez’s life and work have been portrayed in New York by Meryl Streep in the play SEVEN. The internationally acclaimed work depicts the lives of seven remarkable women leaders, as they triumph over huge obstacles to create major changes to human rights in their home countries. The triple - Oscar winning actress described herself as 'honoured to read Inez’s role’.

• Another of Hill's concerns was the availability of open spaces for poor people. She campaigned against development on existing suburban woodlands, and helped to save London's Hampstead Heath from being built on. She was one of the three founders of the National Trust, set up to preserve places of historic interest or natural beauty for the enjoyment of the British public.

• She was a founder member of the charity Family Action which organised charitable grants and pioneered a home-visiting service that formed the basis for modern social work.

• She was also the founder of the Army Cadet Force, giving boys from poor backgrounds an opportunity for informal learning, based on the core values of Self-Reliance, Cleanliness, Order and Discipline. 152 Years later the ACF still holds these values at the heart of its work.

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• Octavia Hill. • 1838 –1912

• She was an English social reformer, whose main concern was the welfare of the inhabitants of cities, especially London, in the second half of the nineteenth century. At age 14 she was working for the welfare of working-class people.

• Hill was a moving force behind the development of social housing. She believed in self-reliance, and made it a key part of her housing system that she and her assistants knew their tenants personally and encouraged them to better themselves.

• Her time as Northern Ireland Secretary saw the signing of the historic Good Friday Agreement, a major political development in the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s.

• The present constitutional status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, and Northern Ireland's devolved system of government are based on the Agreement. The Agreement also created a number of institutions between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom.

• Her personal charisma, reputation for plain speaking and her fight against a brain tumour led her to be perceived by many as one of the most popular "New Labour" politicians in the UK.

Mo Mowlam was a British Labour Party politician.

She was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Redcar from 1987 to 2001 and served in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Chancellor of the Dutchy of Lancaster

The power list – the 100 most influential women in the UK

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qlvb/features/power-list-100

The Queen, Home Secretary Theresa May and Santander bank boss Ana Botin have been declared the UK's top three most powerful women in a BBC survey.A panel of judges compiled a list of the country's 100 most influential females for Radio 4's Woman's Hour.Further down were author JK Rowling at seventh and Scottish Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at 20th.One judge, journalist Eve Pollard, said the list highlighted the sectors where women were still under-represented.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qlvb/features/power-list-100

The Queen, Home Secretary Theresa May and Santander bank boss Ana Botin have been declared the UK's top three most powerful women in a BBC survey.A panel of judges compiled a list of the country's 100 most influential females for Radio 4's Woman's Hour.Further down were author JK Rowling at seventh and Scottish Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at 20th.One judge, journalist Eve Pollard, said the list highlighted the sectors where women were still under-represented.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007qlvb/features/power-list-100

The Queen, Home Secretary Theresa May and Santander bank boss Ana Botin have been declared the UK's top three most powerful women in a BBC survey.A panel of judges compiled a list of the country's 100 most influential females for Radio 4's Woman's Hour.Further down were author JK Rowling at seventh and Scottish Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon at 20th.One judge, journalist Eve Pollard, said the list highlighted the sectors where women were still under-represented.

In the beginning - Suffragettes employed the hunger-strike as a method of protest while they served time in British prisons against the government that imprisoned and mistreated them. Hunger striking, as Jane Marcus points out, was a way for the British woman to refuse her role of mother and nurturer of the country.

Authorities responded to their protest with force-feeding, an invasive and painful procedure performed within the confines of their cells. The resistance of the suffragettes to this procedure caused such encounters to be extremely violent and painful in nature – prisoners were held down while their mouths were pried open and instrumentation for force-feeding was shoved into their throats by male doctors. Looking to the firsthand accounts of the force-feedings, as evident in June Purvis' work,

The Prison Experiences of the Suffragettes, one can easily start to see where this form of response took on a quality of rape. So great was the trauma of such an experience, that several women were permanently scarred – mentally and/or physically.[

Olympic suffragettes regroup for women's rights march on parliament

London 2012 opening ceremony inspires performers to become modern-day activists and join UK Feminista in rights rally. "The time is right for

this. There is anger, injustice and potential, and that all comes together in 2012," said Chakrabarti.

• Britain is witnessing a resurgence of feminist activism as hard-won rights come under threat, said Kat Banyard, the founder of UK Feminista.