Building Safe Communities for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Zimbabwe A School-Centered Gender Norms Transformative Approach

Abstract

Several interventions aimed at achieving gender equality in Zimbabwe recognize the value of school systems as a critical entry point to stimulate conversations around promoting gender equality within communities. While most stakeholders agree that equality is necessary, they do not always seem to agree on how to utilize the school system to achieve it.  For some, the focus should be on providing access by systematically eliminating identified barriers hindering access to good quality education. Hence, their interventions are framed around providing access to products, such as menstrual health and hygiene products, or dealing with resource issues by providing school fees, books, and other related commodities to those who cannot afford them. 

Others believe that the focus should be on providing skills that are fit for the market through vocational training to improve the economic position of adolescent girls and young women (AGYW). For this reason, their programs are framed around skills-building and entrepreneurship. Both approaches negate the agency of young women and girls to lead their own liberation. They fail to articulate the inequality problem correctly by reducing it to the sum of its parts rather than addressing it as a whole. Most approaches fail to capitalize on the relationship between school systems and communities where targeted interventions prioritize engagement with teachers, parents, and community leaders on issues and policies around equal care and access to education between male and female learners. This is why AGYW in Zimbabwe continue to drop out of school and face downstream problems, such as the increased risk of HIV, teen pregnancy, and unsafe abortion, despite having menstrual health and hygiene knowledge and products or having their fees paid.

Faced with an increasing number of school dropouts and a simultaneously increasing number of HIV infections, teen pregnancies, and unsafe abortions amongst AGYW in Rushinga, The Building Safe Communities for Adolescent Girls and Young Women in Zimbabwe pilot initiative seeks to strengthen the capacity of AGYW to lead their liberation in a gender-transformative environment by leveraging the school system and its relationship with the broader community structures. The pilot programme is built on the belief that young people are capable of using information, tools, and skills to claim space and lead conversations about their education, health, and well-being if the environment around them is supportive enough and they have enough role models to inspire them to liberate themselves from the shackles of patriarchy. Grounded in intersectional feminist theories on equality and using the socio-ecological model, the pilot initiative is built on the belief that transformation needs to happen at the individual level before it manifests as community change to achieve this, the programme will use various strategies to strengthen individuals' capacity to question and challenge harmful cultural norms and social practises in their immediate spheres of influence before gaining the confidence to call on others to do the same in a collective effort to domesticate and jointly implement gender equality policies that are  currently unimplemented. All this is done while leveraging the position and expertise of gender-transformed teachers within a supportive school system and community
environment.