Meet Beatrice, the woman that is fighting gender based violence one law at a time
Beatrice grew up in Bindura, a farming and mining community 86 chilometers from Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. “I grew up in a poor family and I had to pan for gold or do street vending after school, to help my parents with mine and my three siblings upbring and school fees. I grew up seeing my 14-15 years old friends being forcibly married, due to poverty.
Bindura is a rich farming and mining town, and there are a lot of resources in terms of gold and farming land. Truth is that the wealth is in the hands of a few and the rest of the families lives in poverty, and this lead young girls to dangerous path just to provide an income. Some of my friends got into transational sex, with old men that would pay as little as $1 in exchange of sex. Some of my friends got infected with HIV, some of them dropped out of school at a very young age”.
But Beatrice knew that there was more for her and she realised soon enough that because she was coming from a poor household she needed an education to making it in life, to ensure a better future for herlself. Little she knew that after some years the young bright student would have helped thousand of young people in her hometown to pursue and fight for a better future, being a trailblazer and an example for women and girls. That example she, and many of her friends, grew up without. She went from becoming a member of the Junior Parliament, to study for college in Harare, to then deciding to go back to Bindura and help her community.
“While growing up I have noticed how my parents would treat differently my brother (the only one, among three girls), how they would give him privileges that we didn’t have – continue Beatrice. They would tell him it was ok to beat us up if we were coming home late from school or if we done something wrong (in theirs and his eyes). My parents would pay first for his school fees and, if there was something left, was for our education. Back then I didn’t have the right words for it, that this was inequality, but there was something inside me that would say “No, this is not ok!”. I believe this is when I have started unconsciously, to be an activist”.
Like many other girls and women from poor backgrounds, when Beatrice had her first menstruation, her mum taught her how to use an old cloth. “This was the knowledge that has been passed down to her, she could not afford alternative methods and sanitary pads. At college there were no sanitary towels disposal bins in the bathrooms on campus, we had to carry dirty pads with us all day, because there was not a place where we could dispose of them. Water shortage was another problem. It’s here that I joined the organization SAYWHAT (Students and Youth Working on Sexual and Reproductive Health Action Team) and started advocating to end period poverty, have sanitary towel disposal bins, increase water supplies and raise awareness around sexual harrasment”.
While working at SAYWHAT Beatrice started a campaign to promote readily accessible and affordable sanitary towels for young women in Zimbabwe. The campaign was dubbed The Deliver Delayed Dignity campaign. Her advocacy work with parliamentarians led the government of Zimbabwe to suspend the 15% tax charged on raw materials for sanitary towels.
“I have joined several other organizations after SAYWHAT, that were promoting gender equality, sexual reproductive health, gender budgeting, but something within me was not fullfilled – said Beatrice. They were good jobs but I kept thinking that when I was growing up I didn’t have any role models within my community, and that is why a lot of girls thought it was ok to simply get married, because that is all they could see happening within their community. So I said “I want to go back to Bindoura, the town I came from, and give back to my community, to make the journey of other girls, half as difficult as was mine”. Here she started mentorship programs and launched Real Open Opportunities for Transformation Support (ROOTS) in 2014, working on gender equality, gender based violence and sexual reproductive health for adolescences and young people, but especially for women and girls”.
Like for any other organizations that works on the ground, COVID-19 had an incredible impact on the support provided by ROOTS and they had to adapt to the new circumnstances, and fill up the gap left by the government. “During the lockdow hospitals and clinics were not accepting other patients out of the one affected by the virus, or that had life-threatening conditions. Women had a very difficult access to contraception, so we decided to create a mobile clinic to provide this service. Because of the virus, the already exsisting shelter houses and programs for GBV victims could not take any new cases. We had to open a new shelter house and we successfully managed to support 71 women, some of them HIV positive, some of them pregnant. We launched also a shuttle service to pick up victims from their homes and take them to the shelter, because during the lockdown they could not use public transportation. We also struggled with the justice system, that was being affected by the chaos generated by COVID-19. The police would not take to jail more perpetrators to avoid spreading the virus. Women suffering GBV that could get the right support they could not access justice due to the unpreparedness of the government. Support for GBV was not even considered an essential service during the first lockdown, even if we were receiving hundrends calls per day”.
Thanks to Beatrice and ROOTS tireless advocacy work and “Not Ripe for Marriage” campaign, Zimbabwe banned Child Marriage on January 20th, 2016. Unfortunately this practice is still practiced by some communties “We raise funds, we get grants and we interact with families to raise awareness on the topic. Parents would say “Ok, we will stop marrying off our children”, but when the government does not offer any funding to increase and support girls education, parents will decide to marry them to come out of poverty. The budget allocated by the government for women issues represents the 8%, while women represents 52% of Zimbabwe’s population.
We have come a long way in terms of women and girls rights – concluded Beatrice. Zimbabwe is signatory of many international treaty like the Maputo Protocol. Laws to protect women includes the Domestic Abuse Act, the Public Health Act, including the groundbreaking act we brought to court on Child Marriage. All good policies, but in terms of implementation we are far behind. Currently we are working on an abortion act, a legal battle we have been fighting for the past five years. The law still have to be reviewed.
Zimbabwe has a lot of women in the Parliament, but it is mainly due to the quota system, so they are just there to make number, they do not have any role or task, and there are no women in the cabinet.
The road is still long for women rights in Zimbabwe, but we will keep fighting”.
