MUTARE – Women-led community-based organisations have expressed concern over government bureaucracy frustrating their input in containing gender-based violence in the countryside.
By Bernard Chiketo
Ithemba for Girls Trust (IGT) director, Bethusile Tsunga speaking at the launch of Network of women-led Community-based Organisations (WeCBOs) in Mutare last Friday said their applications for memorandums of understandings (MOUs) to work with schools in Mutare have gone unanswered for years.
Several other organisations also echoed their frustration at the red-tape which they said was limiting their efforts to mold young girls.
The situation for IGT is made worse as their area of operation – Mutasa, is a hotbed of sexual abuse of girls which has the highest rate of school dropouts due to early marriages and teenage pregnancies in Manicaland.
Tsunga said they were now forced to work with girls outside the school system.
“I don’t know how many times we have written to the Ministry of Education to allow us to go into schools and work with those girls in the schools… no one responds.
“We wanted to setup clubs in the schools, train peer-to-peer educators in the schools but we cannot do that without MOUs. So, we are working outside the school system,” Tsunga said.
She said teen pregnancies and child marriages, rampant in her organisation’s area of operation have recently resulted in 69 girls failing to return to school over the past year.
“We are faced with a huge challenge of teenage pregnancies. I know it’s happening in the whole of Zimbabwe but in Mutasa its actually very very serious because right now, during this COVID era, in two schools 69 girls did not go back to school either because they had fallen pregnant or had been married off,” Tsunga said.
She said this was frustrating efforts to build confident and influential women.
“The while we want to work with women, we need to start molding them from the bottom. Once you mold that girl into a girl who knows how to speak, she will be able to speak in adulthood.
“You would have mentored her from a young age. As she grows up, she will be confident, have high self-esteem, have a voice and knows what she wants in life,” Tsunga said.
She bemoaned the problem to ‘scary’ levels of erosion of community values to the growing problem which she said was also being fueled by commonplace illegal gold panning across the country.
“The erosion of social values in Zimbabwe is now actually scary.
“When men look at girls now, they are seeing wives and sexual partners. Little girls – 12-year-olds are falling pregnant from 30 or 40 something year-olds. What happened to our community spirit where we say his child is my child, his daughter is my daughter? That has been destroyed.
“Gold panners are everywhere, they are flushing money. And a girl loses her virginity for a dollar to buy snacks.
“That’s the challenge we have and that’s the problem we’re facing and that is what we are trying to deal with,” Tsunga said.
