Rwanda and Namibia are the best African countries for women

The World Economic Forum's annual Global Gender Gap report has been released.
It features the top 10 best countries for women.
Only Rwanda and Namibia made the top 10 list.

The World Economic Forum has released its annual Global Gender Gap report.

In 2006, the no-profit organisation started ranking countries based on their progress or lack of on gender equality in order to figure out the best places for women.

Four factors are considered during this ranking. They are Economic Participation, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment.

Since 2006, the overall gender gap has reduced by 3.6 %. However, this year, only a 0.03% reduction has been recorded as the Global Gender Gap now stands at 68%.

This shows an "extremely slow progress" as it has been estimated that it will now take 108 years to close the gap, at this current slow rate.

"Although progress continues to proceed at a very slow pace… the fact that most countries are moving toward greater gender parity is encouraging and rewards the efforts of all policy-makers and practitioners across the world that work to achieve the UN's fifth Sustainable Development Goal: Gender equality," the report states.

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Gender equality in Africa

Rwanda and Namibia have been featured on this year's top 10 best countries to be a woman.

The East African nation was ranked first in Africa and sixth in the entire world with a score of 0.804.

Namibia made it on the list for the first time scoring 0.789 and holding the 10th place. Last year, it held the 13th position and ranked 38th in the first Gender Gap index in 2006.

So far, this South African nation has improved by over 10% by managing to close over 79% of its overall gender gap. This was achieved with the increase in the number of women in parliament which made the country rank fifth for Political Empowerment.

As for the rest of the continent, more African countries have joined the fight against gender inequality. They are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sierra Leone, and Togo.

Across the world, 89 out of 144 countries have slightly closed their gender gap while 55 have relapsed.