Published by the government of Zimbabwe
24 August 2007
Harare — THE women parliamentary caucus will this week undergo training in Masvingo that would enable them to tackle various gender-related issues in Parliament.
The five-day seminar sponsored by the United Nations Population Fund begins tomorrow and seeks to empower the women representatives including Members of Parliament and Senators in areas less understood in various other sectors in the country.
Gender experts yesterday said women in Zimbabwe were still lagging in various developmental aspects and therefore, needed informed representatives who were able to articulate issues.
UNFPA gender projects officer, Ms Anna Mumba said for the first time her organisation had initiated training to tackle burning issues that included women's reproductive health, domestic violence, women's rights violations and also unravel the National Gender Policy and Implementation Plan.
"The training will also be a good platform for interaction as we try to see how best we can utilise the training to enable managing various challenges," Ms Mumba said.
The development of gender related issues, though critical, was overtaken by various events in the past five years.
Gender experts said the emerging of HIV and Aids and other socio-economic challenges posed several challenges to the gender dynamics.
They said the situation demanded new gender developmental training to confront the new structure of gender links.
"It was difficult to focus on the emerging issues, which are closely intertwined with gender issues because much of the funding was directed at the emerging sectors such as HIV and Aids. The aspect of gender was trivialised although we understood the link. Gender-related issues occupied a very small component of big projects," gender activist, Mrs Diane Marere said.
She said with the Domestic Violence Act, gender experts were again organising themselves and were optimistic that with adequate resources, more women would be trained to strengthen their capacity.
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