Nobel Peace Prize, Women | featured news

The past 12 months have seen a series of notable successes for African women - with two Nobel Peace prizes, a second president and the first female head of the African Union Commission. For the BBC's Africa Debate programme, Malawian women's rights campaigner Jessie Kabwila asks if Africa's women are on the rise.

Three women who fought injustice, dictatorship and sexual violence in Liberia and Yemen have received the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in the Norwegian capital.

Africa's first democratically elected female president, a Liberian campaigner against rape and a woman who stood up to Yemen's autocratic regime won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of the importance of women's rights in the spread of global peace. The Norwegian Nobel Committee split the prize between Tawakkul Karman, a leader of anti-government protests in Yemen; Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman to win a free presidential election in Africa; and Leymah Gbowee of Liberia, who campaigned against the use of rape as a weapon in her country's brutal civil war.