Story by Memory Chamisa
AS the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women enters its final week, Zimbabwe’s delegation continues to engage development partners to enhance women’s participation in economic sectors.
On Thursday, Minister of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development, Senator Monica Mutsvangwa, met with the technical group of the Spotlight Initiative to discuss ongoing efforts to combat gender-based violence.
Spotlight Initiative Technical Advisor, Ms Heran Ayele, acknowledged Zimbabwe’s progress in addressing violence against women and girls since the programme’s launch in 2019.
The discussions focused on strategies to support initiatives aimed at reducing gender-based violence and promoting women’s empowerment.
“Zimbabwe has some of the programme’s most significant achievements, from enacting laws and policies that better protect the rights of women and girls, to mobile one-stop centres serving survivors of gender-based violence in the country’s most remote provinces, to working with civil society organisations to end child marriage,” Ms Ayele said.
“We are going to go all out to support the Ministry and lobby for funding so that the gains recorded are not reversed.”
Minister Mutsvangwa highlighted the significance of the whole-of-society approach in ending violence against women and girls.
“The ‘Spotlight’ initiative was one of the programmes that the European Union and the United Nations funded in Zimbabwe, and it was a success in ensuring cases of GBV were reduced,” she said.
“Over the years of its implementation, mobile one-stop centres were introduced supporting women to access gender-based violence services, no matter where they live. Not only that, the government went a step further to construct safe markets for women to what we now call the 2.0 Spotlight initiative.
“This means they are now value-adding the products they are selling with the hope of upgrading from community level to national and even international so that they can participate in all sectors of the economy and social sphere.
“We have also been onto domestic resource mobilisation as a country so that we are able to fund and sustain our communities and programmes regardless of partnerships or not. However, we look forward to continuing working with UNDP and Spotlight in eliminating GBV.”
The Spotlight Initiative is a global partnership to eliminate all forms of violence against women and girls which is being funded by the European Union and implemented through the United Nations systems.
