Alex NPO seeks partnerships to enhance work on unrelenting gender-based violence
ALEXANDRA – Adapt's new strategy on gender-based violence and abuse.
Alex NPO Agisanang Domestic Abuse Prevention and Training (Adapt) seeks partnerships to enhance its work on unrelenting gender-based violence.
The multisectoral partnerships are for a proactive programme to mitigate against the abuse on women, girls and children by men, including those who expect to be loved, cared for and protected by them. According to their strategic document, Strengthening Local Governance to Improve Gender-Based Violence Response, the abuse is a global problem as African women experience some of the worst forms of physical and intimate sexual partner violence. “Forty-five per cent of them experience the abuse in their lifetime compared to 35 per cent globally and, the country has the highest scale on rape globally.”
“This has prompted many marches of anger and outrage, social media rants, hashtags like #noexcuse, #menaretrash which seemingly are ineffective, raise limited awareness and offer no real solutions.”
The programme was unveiled to partners at a workshop to enable them to integrate it into their work planning processes for the year. Among others, the baseline study for the programme found out that reactive intervention processes alone were unsatisfactory. Among others, they resulted in, “Clients dissatisfied with referrals returning to the organisation to share their frustrations, suffered from secondary victimisation through further referrals resulting in loss of trust, many victims of abuse are still ignorant of service providers and resources are wasted through duplication of work.”
Spokesperson for Adapt, Nomalanga Ngwenya, said the partnership will help make the initiative a proactive community centred approach of families, key government agencies (health, police, legal services) and NPOs and, be supported by further research to strengthen the work. Ngwenya added that the intervention will hopefully, improve coordinated local governance capacity, service delivery and accountability, strengthen the community’s management of and response in preventing and mitigating gender-based abuse and violence and, improve access to justice by the victims.
Sidwell Sehoana, also from Adapt, said the initiative will be supported by legislation already in place and the partners’ specialised services will make the initiative a community coordination network which will be piloted in Ward 105 and rolled out later to other wards.
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