Take a look at national parliaments and corporate boardrooms across much of the G20 and the male-to-female ratio doesn’t get much better – and in some cases it’s a lot worse.

Yes, women’s rights have come far in past decades but the statistics show we still live in a man’s world.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in countries like India, where females are killed at birth and burned alive in dowry-related disputes, or in Saudi Arabia, where women are banned from driving and virtually every aspect of their lives is controlled by men.

The widespread practices of infanticide, child marriage and gender-based violence were the main reasons why experts ranked India the worst place in the G20 for women in a perceptions poll published today by TrustLaw, a legal news service run by Thomson Reuters Foundation.

In Saudi Arabia, which ranked second-worst, women only earned the right to vote in 2011, while Indonesia, which followed Saudi Arabia in the ranking, faces similar challenges to India in terms of child marriage, sexual trafficking, violence and exploitation.

At the other end of the scale, Canada ranked the best place to be a woman thanks to policies that promote women’s freedoms and good access to education and healthcare, but experts noted that Canada still has a long way to go, particularly in terms of narrowing the gender pay gap that stands around 30 percent.

The lack of free healthcare in the United States kept it out of the top five best countries. It was also penalised by a number of experts for the mounting restrictions on abortion and other reproductive services being adopted at state level. The U.S. was ranked sixth by the 370 gender experts polled.

The survey paints a sobering picture but, unfortunately, not one that will get much attention at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Baja California, on June 18-19, where the eurozone crisis is set to take centre stage.

Granted, there are other forums to discuss women’s rights. But as someone who’s reported on a few G20 meetings in the past, the stark contrast between the sumptuous resort hotel hosting the gathering and the dire conditions endured by women in some of these countries feels a little uncomfortable.

It feels more uncomfortable because I’ve spent the past few months helping to compile the G20 women’s poll. As a journalist who’s lived in, reported on or travelled to most of these countries, I already knew a lot of the facts. But speaking to gender experts about wife-burning or child marriage in India, trafficking in Russia or rape and HIV/Aids in South Africa has brought the grim reality home.

In G20 host Mexico, which polled 15th out of 19 countries of the G20 (excluding the European Union grouping), a culture of male chauvinism pervades and high levels of violence against women have been exacerbated by the drugs war. And, as I recall from living there between 1995 and 2000, there are pockets of extreme poverty that are a world apart from the capital’s skyscrapers and aren’t reflected in national indicators on health and education.

The murders of hundreds of women in the border town of Ciudad Juarez and stories – related by activists – of women taking contraception before passing immigration to guard against expected rape are particularly disturbing. Mexico, like a number of G20 countries, has a stark divide between the rich and poor and women are often on the losing end of that wealth gap.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who’ll host the G20 summit, had said he wanted development to feature highly on the G20 summit agenda and sustainable growth is up for discussion.

This is a start, as it’s clear there can be no effective development without women’s rights and freedoms – a point made by journalist and author Nicholas Kristof who commented on the poll. India and Saudi Arabia, he said, “are trying to develop with one hand tied behind their backs”.

What’s also clear from the survey results is that neither wealth nor democracy guarantee women’s rights and that what’s written on paper – in the form of laws and international conventions – rarely reflects the reality on the ground. Laws are worth little without effective enforcement – the violence against women plaguing Mexico is a case in point – and without education and national buy-in.

The poll also shows the impact a female head of state can have on a country’s global image. Germany was rated the second-best place to be a woman although its gender pay gap is higher than the United Kingdom and France, while it came last out of 11 developed and developing countries in terms of female corporate executives in a 2010 McKinsey study.

Similarly, Brazil has a female president but women occupy only 9 percent of seats in its parliament’s lower house.

I spent nearly three years living in Brazil and five in Mexico but I’ve now been back in the UK for nearly a decade. Living here, it’s become easy to take for granted my rights as a woman, even if Britain has its own challenges – the UK came third in the poll. But the research I’ve done on this survey in past months reminds me why it’s important we all fight for those women who don’t have it so good.

Katherine Baldwin freelances for Thomson Reuters Foundation and helped compile the women’s poll. Follow her on Twitter: www.twitter.com/From40WithLove

Picture Credit: Women and children gather around municipal corporation water taps as they wait to fill their empty containers with drinking water in the western Indian city of Ahmedabad May 8, 2012.  REUTERS/Amit Dave

The 230,000 people killed in Africa and Asia by the 2004 tsunami received no formal warning of the approaching waves.

Since then, millions of dollars have gone into building a vast network of seismic and tsunami information centers, setting up sea and coastal instruments and erecting warning towers.

But studies show that the closer the warning gets to those it is designed to help, the more it fades out, and much more needs to be done to connect the technology to the people.

“The weakest link remains at the interface between the early warning system and the public, and in ensuring there’s enough preparedness at the local level to react appropriately,” said Bhupinder Tomar, senior officer for disaster preparedness at the International Federation for the Red Cross (IFRC) in Geneva.

In terms of technology, the region has made great strides since December 26, 2004, and is much better prepared, experts say.

Warning centers in Japan and Hawaii receive seismological and tidal data and send out alerts to national agencies in Indian Ocean countries. These agencies then warn the population, via SMS, radio, television, watch towers and loud speakers.

By 2010, regional centers in Australia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are set to take over primary responsibility from Hawaii and Japan for issuing the warnings.

START WITH COMMUNITIES

Many relief workers, however, believe the system’s design is too top-down and that local communities should be the starting point, not the end point, in any early warning network.

Local people should be the ‘first mile’ in early warning, rather than the ‘last mile’ as they are often called, the workers say.

“You need to start with the people and move outwards,” said Ilan Kelman, a senior research fellow at CICERO, the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo.

In a June 2009 report, the Global Network of Civil Society Organisations for Disaster Reduction found community participation in the decision-making process was insufficient.

It said the emphasis must shift from international and national policy-making to policy execution on the ground.

Similarly, Oxfam found in a recent report, “Collaboration in Crises,” that disaster-affected communities wanted the chance to play a more decisive role in programs designed to help them.

Evacuation routes and drills need to be integrated into communities’ day-to-day activities, experts say.

“In a heavily vegetated area, people need paths to get from the coast to inland … and there’s no reason why those paths should be different from an evacuation route,” said Kelman.

“Having a development project to create more paths and maintain them is actually useful for the communities every day, as well as every decade when there’s a tsunami warning.”

Other community-based measures that need to be developed further include the teaching in some schools of “Shake, Drop, Run” — when the earth shakes, drop everything and run.

Teachers and children must be taught what most fishermen know, that when the sea recedes you should run, said Kelman.

Thailand has put tsunami education on its national curriculum and more countries should do this, the experts say.

MULTI-HAZARD APPROACH

Communities must also design their own warning messages.

“We don’t want to see panic, we don’t want to see people taking the wrong action. So getting the words right, getting the message right and getting it delivered are key components,” said Al Panico, head of the tsunami unit at the IFRC.

In order to maintain the tsunami early warning system, at the community, national and international level, it is vital to extend it to other hazards like cyclones and storm surges.

“Any warning system you don’t notice is a dormant system, and treasuries don’t like anything that they cannot justify,” said Peter Koltermann, head of the Tsunami Coordination Unit for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), which began coordinating the Indian Ocean system in 2005.

The best approach to saving lives, however, is better urban and coastal planning to move people away from high risk areas. But experts agree this is the hardest thing to accomplish when communities and livelihoods are established.

“That is by far the best approach,” said Panico. But “it’s the individual who decides where to live.”

(Additional reporting by Thin Lei Win in Bangkok; Editing by Jerry Norton)

The combination of a shortfall in donations, exchange rate pressures, erratic inflation levels overseas and reduced income from interest on reserves has put the squeeze on the aid sector.

Even as markets rebound and the world economy shows signs of recovery, relief groups are braced for tougher times.

Unemployment could rise further and economic growth will bring higher interest rates, cutting donors’ disposable income.

“The decline in donations lags behind the worst of the recession,” said John Low of the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), a UK charity that helps other charities manage money.

“History suggests there might be more pain to come.”

Charitable giving in Britain fell 11 percent in 2008-9 in inflation-adjusted terms, according to UK Giving, a report by CAF and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.

In the United States, donations fell by 5.7 percent in real terms, according to Giving USA’s 2008 report – the largest drop since the group began tracking U.S. donations fifty years ago.

InterAction, a U.S. coalition of more than 150 humanitarian groups, says funding could fall further, particularly by foundations, whose assets have been hit hard.

“We know some foundations have either frozen what they’re doing or are cutting back,” said Barbara Wallace, InterAction’s vice president for membership and standards. “I don’t know if we’ve seen the worst either.”

Some areas of giving, certain charities and some regions of the world more immune to the crisis have bucked the trend.

Low said giving through payroll in Britain is rising, for example. Agencies with child-sponsorship models, such as Plan International, are faring better as are some faith-based groups.

Donations have fallen but those who monitor the sector say giving has not collapsed. Many existing supporters are staying loyal to their causes – the problem is recruiting new donors.

It is the combination of less giving with other aspects of the economic crisis that is causing charities so much pain.

TIME TO MERGE?

UK groups have been hit by a weak pound. Their overseas work is largely priced in dollars so their money buys less.

In addition, British charity Cafod said it had lost 1 million pounds off its reserves because of lower interest rates.

“Some programs have had to be scaled back,” said Tom O’Connor, Cafod’s director of communities and supporters. “If things got worse, if the economy got worse and our income dropped, we’d have to pull out of particular countries.”

Cafod is facing a 10 percent budget shortfall next year and is making about 12 posts redundant in the UK and abroad. Oxfam and World Vision have also cut staff.

At Christian Aid, there may be up to 90 redundancies as the charity faces a 7 million pound deficit for 2010-11.

Afghan Aid, a UK-registered charity that works solely in Afghanistan, has had to lay off almost 150 staff over the last 18 months, close to a third of its work force.

“Come March next year, I know we’ll have to make more painful decisions on staff layoffs,” said managing director Farhana Faruqi Stocker.

The crisis is forcing charities to manage money more effectively, target new donors and think more strategically.

“We’ve had to revise our project fundraising strategy to focus more on local sources,” said Ridwan Gustiana, founder and director of Indonesian aid group, IBU Foundation.

For many, the last option is to merge. Earlier this year, Interact Worldwide, a small British sexual health charity, merged with Plan after struggling to raise funding to match European Union grants it had received.

Britain’s Charity Commission is urging members to consider merging while InterAction is helping members find ways to pool staff and resources and to identify the right time to merge.

(additional reporting by Thin Lei Win in Bangkok and Anastasia Moloney in Bogota; Editing by Matthew Jones)