The first day of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence on 25 November also saw the launch of the first permanent Equality Lounge in Rosebank. The lounge was unveiled at Impact Hub with the support of United Nations Women (UN Women), Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing Next-Gen (Sap) and the Female Quotient (FQ).
African regional director at Sap, Kwena Mabotja said the aim of the lounge was for participants to collaborate and talk about real solutions to gender problems, particularly within entrepreneurial spaces. She said Sap Next-Gen had launched a global gender agenda to drive industry-wide action to make innovation and technology work better for young women and girls.
“You are not here to solve entrepreneurial problems on your own. There are communities you can lean on to help you,” said Mabotja.
CEO of Impact Hub Johannesburg Thandi Dyani said the lounge started with small conversations about roles of women and manifested into the current equality platform. Dyani related her story about growing up in the male-dominated industry of deejaying and the close-to-sexual assault she experienced at the hands of a mentor.
“Through the experience, I learnt that assault can be within professional spaces and not just in a hijacking or robbery situation,” Dyani said.
She said that later on, she taught other women to deejay within a safe space while they found role models. “We need to back each other up. I want us as men and women to come together and come up with solutions to the gender issues we are faced with. I hope to see many more people participating.”
Panel discussion: Seeking solutions to gender-based violence
Thobela Gceya from UN Women moderated the Equality Lounge launch panel discussion. UN Women is the global champion for gender equality working to develop and uphold standards and create an environment in which every woman and girl can exercise her right and live up to her full potential.
Gceya said both voices of men and women need to be heard in conversations about gender equality to understand why the lobbied safe spaces are not safe. Lindelwe Nxumalo from Action Aid said they did a study last year on people within formal and informal types of work to look into advocacy issues they could tackle to help the women in those spaces access justice. Nxumalo said the issue that came out the most in both work environments was sexual harassment.
Nomonde Gxilishe from Myers Attorneys said they work with a lot of companies to assist them to structure their policies. “People don’t often know who to talk to and they often don’t know about these policies [about sexual harassment]. So, depending on where your case occurs, for instance, if it happens within the company then they have an obligation to follow policy recommendations,” said Gxilishe.
She added that if it happens outside the company, then her organisation would focus on the court procedure where one could get a restraining order.
Artificial intelligence can be used to assist those in abusive or unhealthy relationships as proved by rAInbow. According to Joanne van der Walt from Sage and rAInbow, the latter is not a real person but a companion which uses AI to assist people in domestic violence and more. “When we launched rAInbow, we wanted to understand issues women face and three things came out of our research – stigma, fear and lack of trust in the system. So, we thought if we could replace human intervention with non-human intervention then people would reach out better,” explained Van Der Walt.
She added that the process is anonymous where people can go into the app and complete an online quiz related to abuse scenarios. The rAInbow bot can then direct the participant to the right organisation in relation to the outcome of the results.
Details: Impact Hub 011 048 2542.
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