The title of Betty Makoni´s autobiography is also her rallying cry: ‘Never Again: not to any woman or girl’. It’s a heartfelt pledge to millions of women and girls in the developing world, who each year die needlessly from poverty, disease and violence, and whose suffering goes largely unacknowledged.
Archive for the ‘Empowering Women’ Category
The Shingirirai women who have answered "the Call to Care"
It’s a landmark moment for the women leaders of the Shingirirai Trust based near Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
Strategies For Hope (SFH), an organisation dedicated to helping communities live positively with HIV/AIDS, has asked Cecilia Masekereya and her team to facilitate a two-day workshop for 10 community leaders. It’s the first time the Trust has been approached by an outside organisation to deliver this type of training, and reflects growing confidence in Shingirirai’s abilities to get important messages across effectively.
This great little (2-minute) clip by US-based women’s empowerment nonprofit CARE explains in clear and energetic language, what International Women’s Day is all about – empowering women to end poverty and hunger.
At the Shingirirai Trust, this is the language we think, speak and live, and we start early. From the age of five, we take girls into our Early Child Development program, to learn basic psychosocial and practical skills right alongside the boys.
These vibrant Valentine’s Day cards are from a series of designs created by our team of young women in Shingirirai’s Skills Development program. By selling these and other items, they go another step towards supporting themselves and their families – in ways that don’t exploit or endanger them.
Necessity might go some way to explaining the exuberance of the designs. But I’m still amazed at how the girls and their tutors find the skill, energy and sheer ‘shingirirai‘ (that’s ‘perseverance’ in the native Shona language) to put their bold bright hearts into each new initiative.
Whether you live in Africa, India, or elsewhere in the developing world, if you’re a woman living in poverty, you have a lot in common with your sisters. Millions of women battle man-made disadvantages including:
- being barred from owning land (although 43% of women in these countries farm the land, only 1% own any of it).
- not being able to get credit or insurance
- not having access to quality seed, fertilizer, tools or equipment
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The women of the Shingirirai Trust know firsthand about the power of community and the sisterhood of other women for daily survival and support. Still, the urgent need remains for better medical care. In sub-Saharan Africa there are more HIV infections and less doctors to treat them than anywhere else in the world. Since 2001, Cape Town doctor Mitchell Besser’s ‘mothers2mothers’ program has turned a dire situation into part of the solution.
