BY MUNYARADZI BLESSING DOMA
There’s need to address problems which limit women’s access to social-economic opportunities, so that they realise their full potential; Director for Economic Justice for Women Project (EJWP), Margaret Mutsamvi has said.
Mutsamvi revealed this on Tuesday during her organization’s stakeholder engagement meeting in Harare.
The meeting which was supported by the Southern Africa Trust, also sought to strengthen the voices and agency of young women in advocating for a just energy transition and a gender-responsive Mines and Minerals Policy, as the bill is still at the Attorney General’s Office.
During the meeting, a documentary detailing the stories of young women living in mining communities of Hwange, Chimanimani and Goromonzi was premiered, to identify their key challenges and more importantly amplify their voice in policy and strategy.
“The main objective of the stakeholder engagement meeting was to facilitate a dialoguing platform between critical stakeholders and young women living in mining communities to ensure that the young women directly share their stories and experiences with duty bearers for redress.
“EJWP has walked quite a journey documenting through research papers and stories and experiences of young women in a series of documentaries and as a strategy, has introduced these #SheConnects platforms for a direct engagement between young women affected by mining investments and initiatives and critical duty bearers such as legislature, ministries such as Ministry of Women Affairs, Small and Medium Enterprises and Community Development, Ministry of Youth, Ministry of Mines, the Zimbabwe Gender Commission and respective civil society organizations.
“The aim is ensuring that such platforms map a practical way/steps forward in addressing emerging problems that are limiting the young women’s access to full socio-economic opportunities in respective host communities,” said Mutsamvi.
She also revealed that in 2019, they conducted a research which sought to look at the intersection between the extractivism, tax justice and young women.
“This is still part of documenting young women’s stories so that we can understand them more. Sometimes we feel that we are ready to tackle issues and we know that in mining communities, there are child marriages and all those things but we preferred to continue documenting, to go to the stories, listen to the voices, before we can jump on to say the major challenge is this and how we can deal with this.
“So we are still on the journey of documenting women’s stories and the documentary is part of feeding in and adding onto the research paper that we did.
“So the project that has facilitated the continued documentation of these stories was supported by the Southern Africa Trust,” she added.
EJWP is a young women-focused, non-profit organization dedicated to addressing gender inequalities through strengthening women’s active participation in the economy at all levels.
The key principle underlying EJWP’s work is ‘making economies work for women’ informed by the need to reduce the structural causes of poverty and vulnerabilities among young women.
