MUTARE– Mutare city is developing a gender responsive multi-sectoral policy to ensure women have equal access to opportunities at the municipality.
By Donald Nyarota
Mutare Mayor Blessing Thandi made these remarks while addressing Women Coalition of Zimbabwe Mutare chapter feedback meeting on service delivery challenges faced by residents.
Thandi said council will enact the policy to ensure a codified standard of ensuring women have equal access to opportunities at the local authority.
“Whenever we are allocating even stands we have always been promoting women and ensuring that they get priority.
“Even without this policy we are always prioritizing women in everything that we do as city council, we are always gender responsive in our budget planning as council.
“Now what we are doing is that we are coming with a policy position to ensure that this becomes binding in every aspect of council activities to ensure that there is sustainability of this and ensure posterity and a legacy of gender responsiveness,” said Thandi.
Thandi said challenges being faced by city council relate to ring fencing of council accounts as well as a dwindling fund base caused by economic challenges.
He said due to this council has had to shift focus on certain areas which had been prioritized for development including a new fire station in Dangamvura.
“Most of council income is ring fenced meaning that water account only works for water, fire levy also addresses fires issues and cannot be diverted to any other expenditure whether recurrent or capital.
“In our budget, we had a new fire station which we wanted to construct in Dangamvura under the same fund that we have for fire, but with the current economic challenges we may not be able to achieve this,” said Thandi.
Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe provincial chairperson for Manicaland Selina Mariwangepo said they create forums where women can interface with their duty bearers to discuss issues on development.
She said women, in instances where there is a disconnect with leadership, lack of accountability and transparency, are the ones who bear the brunt of negative effects.
“Our main objective for these forums is to bring an interface platform for residents and their duty bearers, so that they can identify gaps and challenges in the community to appraise officials, as well as to ensure that such issues are resolved.
“As women, we do this because whenever there is instability or lack of development, women are the ones who feel the pain the most, so we want to ensure that women can air out their grievances.
“It’s also an opportunity to get concrete answers from duty bearers on what issues can be addressed with available resources, for accountable and transparent governance of public resources,” said Mariwangepo.
