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The index, titled the Empowering African Women: An Agenda for Action, was launched as part of the opening events at the week-long AfDB meetings, in a session called “Gender Equality: Where are we?”

Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, AfDB’s Special Envoy on Gender, said at the index’s unveiling ceremony that it’s expected to provide African governments with a benchmark to evaluate the effectiveness of their policies to advance gender equality.

The index, which covers 52 of Africa’s 54 countries, examines the role of women as producers, in human development, as active citizens and leaders and also provides maps for each area.

Its launch comes at a time when women’s empowerment is on the top of the African agenda with the African Union having declared 2015 the year of Women’s Empowerment and Progress towards Agenda 2063, to optimize resources to the benefit of all Africans.

In a brief comment about the index, AfDB President Donald Kaberuka said the Bank has decided to be at the forefront of gender equality efforts: and for this reason the position of Special Envoy on Gender was created.

“At the time of creating the position, the AfDB was great at so many things, but falling short on many others. By creating the position of Special Envoy on Gender, it was a signal that the subject meant a great deal to the Bank’s business and I hope my successor will continue with this trend,” he said.

The index lauds African countries such as Rwanda, which, with 64 percent female representation in public service, including Parliament, has the best gender representation globally, a feat that the AfDB encourages other African countries to emulate.

During a high-level panel to discuss the new index, Frannie Leautier, CEO of the Mkoba Private Equity Fund in Tanzania, said men and boys have a great role to play in ensuring inclusivity for women and girls.

“Without good gender policies in place, women can still make it, but they would have to grow muscles to navigate in the unlevel playing field and I hope stories of successful women can help inspire other women to make it,” said Leautier.

Also on the panel was Ashish Thakkar, founder of Mara Group and Mara Foundation, who said that there’s a need to celebrate more successful women who have made it in spite of the current challenges in many countries in Africa.

Thakkar said, at Mara, the organization has a gender inclusive approach in choosing which start-up entrepreneurs to work with although he said women applicants are still few.

“Out of the over 500 young entrepreneurs we are currently working with, only about 30 percent of them are women. The figure is low. We still have to do a lot to encourage young women that they can make it,” he said.

Saran Daraba Kaba, Executive Secretary of Mano River Union based in Sierra Leone, said helping women achieve higher success should start with enabling them to attain basic level education to set their foundation for bigger achievements.

Members of the panel agreed that African governments must work towards achieving inclusive growth that leaves no one behind including women.

However, the AfDB’s Special Envoy on Gender, Fraser-Moleketi, also challenged women and girls to stand up and claim their rights and space.

“Women must make an effort to claim the space and fill the space because what men can do, they can do too,” she said.

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In a USA Today column published on Wednesday, Teresa C. Younger, the Ms. Foundation for Women president and CEO, called on the TLC network to partner with sexual abuse activists in order to launch an education campaign addressing the issue “on the same scale as the network’s relentless marketing of the Duggar family.”

“Today’s headlines offer us the chance to refocus public attention on what to do if you know or suspect a child is being abused — even in your own home or family,” wrote Younger, who heads a group that advocates for prioritizing gender equality in public policy at federal and state levels. “We cannot afford to waste that opportunity.”

After reports surfaced that Josh Duggar was investigated by police in 2006 for molesting underage girls, including some of his sisters, when he was a teenager, the family’s oldest son released a statement last week apologizing for “act[ing] inexcusably.”

Many were quick to call out the hypocrisy of the Duggars’ conservative positions on LGBT rights and abortion.

The now-27-year-old, who is currently expecting his fourth child with his wife, Anna, stepped down from his position at anti-gay lobbying group Family Research Council last week. And, last August, family matriarch Michelle Duggar campaigned against trans men and women in Arkansas being allowed to use the public restrooms associated with their gender identity.

“I don’t believe the citizens of Fayetteville would want males with past child predator convictions that claim they are female to have a legal right to enter private areas that are reserved for women and girls,” Michelle Duggar said in a robocall to voters.

In wake of the news, TLC pulled all episodes of “19 Kids and Counting” from the air. But despite advertisers fleeing the show — including General Mills, Walgreens, Jimmy Dean and Ace Hardware — the program has yet to be canceled, TMZ reported.

It doesn’t need to be for meaningful change to happen, though, according to Younger: “Regardless of whether the network cancels the Duggars’ show or not, TLC can and must help empower every person who knows of or suspects child sexual abuse to take action.”

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If you were asked to name countries where women vastly outnumber men in higher education, somewhere in the ultra-traditional Arab world would probably not be your first guess. And yet, in tiny Qatar, the oil-rich peninsula jutting off Saudi Arabia into the Persian Gulf, nearly seven times as many women as men are enrolled in university, one of the highest rates on the planet, according to the most recent figures compiled by the World Bank.

In fact, Maysa Jalbout, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education, calculated recently that across the Arab world, women slightly outnumber men in tertiary education, with a female-to-male enrollment ration of 108 percent.

Surprisingly, it’s not a brand-new trend. Paolo Verme, a World Bank expert on the Middle East and North Africa, tells OZY that women there have made “huge gains” in the last decade or so in obtaining secondary and tertiary education. Fertility rates have also gone down rapidly across the region in the 21st century. And GDP growth has been on the rise. These are all prerequisites for women entering the workplace, at least based on what economists have found from studying other countries that now have high levels of female employment. So if all of this is happening in Arab countries, why are there still so few women working there?

As Jalbout points out, “Three out of four Arab women remain outside the labor force” — the lowest in the world. That’s true whether they’re college graduates or relatively uneducated. In fact, Verme and two colleagues found that in Morocco, the likelihood of women having a job went down with a high school-level education. He thinks there are a couple different factors at play.

The first is economic — the economies in the region may be growing, but not in the sectors most likely to employ women, like services and light manufacturing. And then there are the social norms. Verme has found that women in the region may get jobs early on, but exit the labor force en masse around the age of 25, aka average marriage age, regardless of whether or not they have children then. Family structures, still quite traditional, have a lot to do with it, says Mayyada Abu-Jaber, founder of the Jordan-based education NGO The World of Letters. In her work conducting youth employment-training programs, she found that more than half of female participants would decline the jobs offered upon completion. Deciding to work was a “collective decision of the family,” she found, and most families decide the vocational job opportunities “are not desirable for women.”

And while norms have shifted when it comes to the value of educating girls, they’ve not yet hit the women’s lib end of the spectrum. Education, notes Abu-Jabber, is now “very important for women” in Jordan, but not as a “transition for the workplace as much as it is becoming more desirable for marriage.” That helps explain why women with secondary education are less likely to work — they’re more likely to marry an educated man with a job that can support them both.

Verme cautions against concluding this all goes back to Muslim society. Look at the high female employment in places like Indonesia or Malaysia, which are majority Muslim. She says gender norms and social structure issues are important to the extent that the economy is weak. “I’m convinced if a country like Morocco was really able to compete in light manufacturing globally, all these other constraints would progressively disappear.”

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As The Huffington Post celebrates its 10th anniversary, we’ve decided to reflect upon the remarkable progress achieved in women’s equality since 2005. Here are 10 ways American women’s lives have changed for the better since 2005.

1. More women have access to higher quality health care.

The passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 marked impressive gains in women’s health. Insurers are now required to cover many “preventive services” particularly important to women, including birth control, mammograms, STI screenings and mental health support. The health care law is the first to protect against discrimination based on sex — and more recently — on gender identity. The law even requires most health insurance companies to provide breast pumps for new mothers.

In 2005, women required a prescription from a doctor to purchase emergency contraceptive. In 10 years, availability has progressed from over-the-counter access for women over 18 in 2009 to unrestricted access when the FDA lifted age restrictions in 2013.

2. Women’s representation in Congress is higher than it’s ever been.

On the night of November 5, 2014, North Carolina Rep. Alma Adams became the 100th woman in the 113th Congress — marking the first time in history that the number of women in Congress reached triple digits. The 2014 midterm elections resulted in the highest number of women serving in Congress ever. Utah Senator Mia Love became the first African American woman Republican elected to Congress.

The number of women in the House and Senate rose from 81 in 2005 to 104 in 2015, an increase from 15.1 percent of seats to an all-time high of 19.4 percent. Despite slow growth in Congress, a decade has done a lot for women at the highest levels of government: Condoleeza Rice became the first African American woman appointed to Secretary of State in 2005 (succeeded by Hillary Clinton in 2009), and Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2007. And Hillary Clinton just might become president.

3. The FBI codified a more inclusive definition of rape.

Unchanged since 1927, the definition of rape in 2005 per the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program was “the carnal knowledge of a female, forcibly and against her will.” The narrow, outdated language produced a lack of uniformity among law enforcement and made countless victims reluctant to report their assaults. As of 2013, the definition acknowledges that men can be raped and the possibility that victims can be coerced into sexual behaviour without physical force.

Notably, the new definition recognizes that rape is rape even if the victim doesn’t, or can’t, say no. The FBI’s definition now officially “includes instances in which the victim is incapable of giving consent” for whatever reason.

4. The Supreme Court struck down the Defense Of Marriage Act, same-sex marriage is legal in 37 states, and the constitutional protection of same-sex marriage seems like it could be on the horizon.

In 2005, activists and allies were trying to chip away at a 1996 law enacted to prohibit federal recognition of same-sex marriages. In 2013, it finally came tumbling down: In Windsor v. United States, the Supreme Court declared section 3 of the Defense Of Marriage Act unconstitutional. In states where same-sex marriages are recognized, women who marry women now receive the 1,100 protections of marriage formerly denied to them.

As of 2015, 37 states protect the right of same-sex couples to marry. Last week, the Court began considering whether the Constitution guarantees the right of gay and lesbian Americans to marry. If the Justices rule in favor of same-sex couples — as they are widely expected to — the decision would overturn state bans on same-sex marriage.

5. Women’s equality in the workplace has improved — along with our ability to fight for it.

President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act in 2009, which allows women to file equal pay lawsuits agains their employers up to six months after receiving their last paycheck. Prior to 2007, women had to allege pay discrimination within six months of their first paycheck. By allowing female employers more time to acknowledge sex discrimination, choose to act and build a legal case, the Lilly Ledbetter Act should discourage employers from sneakily underpaying women for the same work.

In 2005, women who were treated poorly by their employer after coming forward about a sexual harassment situation — or supporting a colleague who did so — had little ability to take legal action. Today, that sort of treatment is illegal. A 2006 Supreme Court case affirmed that a woman did not need to be explicitly fired after making a sexual harassment claim to legally accuse her employer of retaliating against her. Now, any “adverse employment decision or treatment” that could dissuade women (and men) from bringing or supporting a sexual harassment claim is grounds for legal action.

In March, Ellen Pao sued her former employer, a venture capital firm, for gender discrimination. The lawsuit was a national story. The jury ruled in favor of Pao’s employer, but the case shed a harsh light on the dark corners of sexism and how it manifests in women’s everyday lives.

6. The entertainment industry finally started to recognize that women are consumers of pop culture, want to see our experiences represented, and are pretty good at telling those stories for ourselves.

In 2011, “Bridesmaids” passed the Bechdel Test with flying colors and also made a ton of money, reminding the movie mogul boy’s club that women want to see really great movies — and can also write them. In 2009, Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win the Best Director category of the Academy Awards. When it comes to the small screen, women have stepped out from sitcom ensembles throughout the past nine years to stand front and center in critically acclaimed series like “30 Rock,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Homeland,” “Girls,” “Orange Is The New Black,” “Scandal,” Veep” “The Minday Project,” “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” “Transparent,” Grey’s Anatomy” and countless others.

7. The military lifted its ban on women serving in direct ground combat roles, allowing more women to pursue more units and allowing for the recognition of those who’d long been engaged in combat.

The U.S. lifted its ban on women serving in combat roles in January of 2013. “The time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service,” wrote Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a letter to Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta. The Department of Defense rescinded the 1994 rule in 2013, providing access to 237,000 positions previously closed to women, who make up 15 percent of the U.S. military.

Between two protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, many women were effectively serving in combat in 2005. Today, they receive the recognition and support they deserve.

8. Young, single women caught up to their male peers in large cities — and then some.

As of 2010, young, urban, childless women in their 20s make on average 8 percent more money than men in the same demographic. In New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego, women’s lead hovers around 15 percent. Analysts attribute the “reverse pay gap” to education: for every three women earning a college or higher degree, only two men have earned the same qualifications. In cities with knowledge-based industries where education is key, women have fared pretty well since 2005.

Women’s influence extends beyond purchasing power — in 2008 and 2012, women made up 53 percent of the voting bloc — effectively choosing the president in 2012.

9. We see more and more women at the top of their fields, actively paving the way for the next generation.

Today, 51 of the world’s top 1000 companies are run by women. The number of female CEOs running a Fortune 1000 company is up from just 29 in 2005. The numbers are rising slowly, but the increased visibility of women in business, tech and media since 2005 had likely made a difference. As Sheryl Sandberg — herself a bellwether in her field — says: “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

In April, Loretta Lynch became the first African American woman to serve as a U.S. attorney general. Marissa Mayer and Sheryl Sandberg lead tech companies with considerable cultural influence. Ruth Bader Ginsburg is the unofficial badass of the Supreme Court. Shonda Rhimes basically owns television and Hillary Clinton might be the most qualified person to run for president in decades, if not ever. There certainly has been movement for the better since 2005.

10. Women’s voices and experiences are better represented in the media — especially online — bringing new weight to the term “lady blog.”

Ten years ago, one would have had to subscribe to an alt-weekly or a feminist print mag like Bust or Bitch to get the type of incisive cultural commentary on women’s issues that now fills our Facebook feeds. Jessica and Vanessa Valenti founded Feministing in 2004 to provide a “bold, snarky voice for young feminists in the media.” Jezebel launched in 2007. And HuffPost Women launched in 2011. As the number of outlets specializing in this coverage area began to grow, so did the appetite for it.

Women’s magazines were never simply the vapid handbooks critics long lamented to them to be, but as new feminist publications drew attention political and cultural issues affecting women — and social media allowed millions to speak to how these issues impact their lives — any publication that claimed “women” as a demographic took on a harder edge, and for the better. In 2014 — after a considerable expansion of its political coverage — Cosmopolitan announced it would endorse candidates for political office based on their support for women. From Elle to Glamour, traditional “lady mags” are meeting demand for content that covers the breadth of what it means to be a woman.

Here at HuffPost Women, we try to do the same — elevating women’s voices and letting them tell their stories in their own words — from wearing bikinis to overcoming addiction.

The amplification of women’s voices in the last 10 years is critical to the battles of the next 10, 20, 50 and and so on. To all the badass women who made the past decade one for the herstory books, we ***bowdown.

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The ONE campaign’s #Strengthie movement, launched on May 13, is encouraging supporters to post a photo of themselves to social media outlets mimicking women’s rights icon, Rosie the Riveter. The movement is part of the group’s larger “Poverty Is Sexist” campaign.

Since the #Strengthie movement launched, there’s been more than 17,000 posts on Facebook and Twitter in support of its message, the campaign told The Huffington Post.

As the initiative’s website points out, women are impoverished around the world at disproportionate rates due to a variety of reasons — girls who are forced into marriage, for example, cannot attend school, and many farmers are prevented from owning the land they maintain because of their gender.

Among the campaign’s supporters are children’s rights activist Malala Yousafzai and Hollywood director and producer Shonda Rhimes.

The campaign — which commenced this week with the launch of a music video, “Strong Girl,” recorded by nine African artists — calls on supporters to sign a petition asking world leaders to fight economic inequality by prioritizing girls’ and women’s rights.

As of Friday afternoon, it had garnered support from more than 148,000 people.

U.N. Women, a United Nations entity established in 2010 to advocate for global gender equality, believes that achieving gender equality would have “enormous socio-economic ramifications.”

According to the group, women are too-often denied an education and adequate health care, suffer from violence and discrimination, and are left without a voice in their communities’ political systems — all factors that can affect their economic potential.

“Empowering women fuels thriving economies, spurring productivity and growth,” U.N. Women’s website reads. “Yet gender inequalities remain deeply entrenched in every society.”

The ONE campaign was also behind a letter released on International Women’s Day this past March that called on global leaders to advocate for women’s rights. The letter was signed by Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and HuffPost founder and Editor-in-Chief Arianna Huffington, among others.

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When South Sudan won independence from Sudan in 2011, girls here were three times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth than to complete their primary school education. After decades of war with the government in Sudan, newly independent South Sudan was left with a barely functioning education system. In 2013, a clash between the country’s new leaders led to a brutal civil war that has frozen the country’s development, including education.

There are only 249 secondary schools in a country of over 11 million people. South Sudan has one of the worst literacy rates in the world — only 27 percent of adults can read and write. Girls’ education has particularly suffered, compounded by a prevalence of child marriage and traditional resistance to female education. Female literacy is estimated at just 16 percent.

Aid groups and the South Sudanese authorities are trying to reverse the trend with various initiatives, including helping improve school facilities and raise awareness of the importance of girls’ organizations. At some schools around the country, girls and their families receive cash and food incentives for female attendance. Most of the female students at Pariang primary school receive a food package each month, supported by humanitarian organization World Vision.

The primary school, located in South Sudan’s northwestern state of Warrap, teaches around 200 girls and 500 boys in makeshift outdoor classrooms, where blackboards are propped against tree trunks and school supplies are scarce.

The WorldPost spoke to some of the girls at the school about their challenges getting an education, and how they hoped to use it in the future.

When I finish school I want to join UNMISS [the United Nations Mission in South Sudan], because they are training people on how to protect the citizens of South Sudan. If I could join UNMISS I would be able to support my own family, and help the whole population of the country in case more war comes.”

My wish is to become the governor of Pariang. When I become governor, the first thing I will do is build more schools in Pariang, for girls and boys. Secondly, I will support the population who are vulnerable, and change the way that people work. My parents cultivate their land by hand, working on their knees. I will change that method of farming. Thirdly, I will bring more people to the community to make sure people are supported and that we have good security. The current governor of the state of Warrap is a woman, so why should we not be the future governors of our communities?”

If I finish here and join secondary school, I will go to university and become a doctor. I want to help people, especially those who are really sick.”

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