The National Co-ordinator of the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Women and Land in Zimbabwe (WLZ) Chidavarume knows that land is an enduring resource. Its preciousness is not only due to its inheritability across multiple generations, it is also a treasured agricultural input. One that enables the rural women who plough it to grow food for their own nourishment as well as that of their children.

“A woman is the one that is responsible for making sure that the children and family are well fed,” Chidavarume explains. “If children have malnutrition, it is the woman that is blamed for not taking good care of the child or children.”

In the Makoni region of eastern Zimbabwe, Chidavarume sits together with the rural women that her organisation stands in solidarity with. They discuss the forthcoming planting season and their plans to prepare their fields in good time for the imminent rains.

“Her Voice Fund (HVF) gives women dignity. It builds and restores their sense of worthiness,” Chidavarume explains of the flexible feminist funding mechanism created by Womankind Worldwide in 2021.

Collective Feminist Agency and Power

Since its establishment, HVF has supported forty-six (46) feminist and women’s rights groups with grants in five countries across the world. Twenty-two of them are informal or unregistered collectives of women. WLZ is one of 11 women’s rights groups in Zimbabwe that have received funding over the last four years.

“When women grow groundnuts, they know that they will have good nutrition. They can make peanut butter for the children. Or Bambara groundnuts and beans, so that the family is well fed. This gives them the sense of being a full woman. It removes the idea of children not having food, which makes any woman feel worthless,” Chidavarume explains. “Instead of children going to school with junk foods, now a child can go with potatoes or sweet potatoes coming from seeds from traditional foods.”

Through WLZ, Chidavarume organises the women she works together with into cluster groups that are affiliated with the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA), a rural women’s group whose membership runs into about 5000 women.

“For rural women, the issue of advocacy through numbers works. If you go to the Chief alone and advocate, the Chief doesn’t really pay attention to your issue. But if you go as a group, it will work. So, for us we believe in our model of advocacy through numbers. That’s why we mobilise,” says Chidavarume.

With the resources from the HVF, WLZ has hosted rural women’s dialogue sessions. The organisation has also conducted feminist transformational leadership training programmes and advocacy training workshops for rural women, whose remote locations mean they are often far away from being within easy reach of duty bearers located in mostly urban government offices.

The Sounds of Feminist Freedom

“We can use different tools to advocate. We use songs. We sing.  As RWA, we know that there are some people who we can’t approach. So, we sing to that person to give our message. When we speak of advocacy, we know sometimes it can be harmful. Especially looking at African politics. If you go against what is wanted by the ruling government you will be labelled as revolutionaries who want to bring about change but we will be affected by the land issues and seed policies. In our advocacy, we sing targeting influencing policies, the allocation of resources, climate change,” Chidavarume explains.

In their rural women’s dialogue spaces, women discuss the quantity and quality of each other’s seed stocks. They share knowledge and information about how to multiply their seed reserves so that each one of them has enough for her household.

“Nowadays, the agriculture sector is largely focused on commercialisation. There is no support in terms of traditional seeds. There are laws that are suppressing them. So, with the HVF, we are lobbying for better recognition for women’s seeds, which are traditional seeds. We want women to own their land and for their traditional seeds to be recognised and protected,” says Chidavarume.

Rural Women’s Transformative Feminist Leadership

Land ownership gives women additional power over their own lives. It enables them to whether the storms of economic instability and expand their opportunities. With support from HVF, WLZ’s meetings enable rural women to discuss how they can secure positions of leadership and decision-making in their communities to ensure that they have a voice and that their needs are represented.

“You see, in rural areas, women constitute the bulk of our population numbers, but in terms of participation in decision-making, they are few. Which means women are being used to put men into power. But we can take advantage of our numbers and advocate so we can put ourselves into power as rural women,” Chidavarume says.

As the world grapples to find sustainable solutions to the dire impacts of climate injustice, leaders such as Chidavarume and the women she stands together with, show that very often the answers to difficult challenges lie in replicable models of rural collective  feminist transformative leadership.

About Her Voice Fund (HVF)

HVF provides flexible funding flexible funding to women’s rights and feminist organisations and activists in the Global South with an intersectional focus, supporting them in their advocacy efforts to influence policy at the local, national, regional and international levels.

Rungano Muchetu is a young African feminist researcher from Zimbabwe interested in how public policy can secure women’s land, property and agrarian rights. She thrives when designing feminist participatory research methodologies and conducting interviews in excluded and marginalised communities. She has led research for Dialogue on Shelter on poor women’s housing rights in Zimbabwean townships, supported land rights research at the Sam Moyo Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMIAS). Her then six-month-old daughter Tamara was the youngest and most active participant at the 2024 Awid forum in Bangkok, Thailand.

Bella Matambanadzo is an African feminist activist, organiser and strategist from Zimbabwe. Her scholarship, analysis, writing, research and convening skills are highly sought after globally. She researched and wrote A Room of Her Own for Dreilinden focussing on the liberatory effects of property ownership for Zimbabwean LBQ groups. Together with Professor Rudo Gaidzanwa, she researched, co-wrote and edited A Beautiful Strength, A Journal of 80 Years of Women’s Rights Activism in Zimbabwe since 1936.  She is  published by Margaret Busby in the second edition of the opus New Daughters of Africa; by Weaver Press; by Dr Patricia McFadden in the Southern African Feminist Review, SAFERE; by Dr Sylvia Tamale in African Sexualities, and elsewhere.

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Global women’s rights organisation to provide flexible funding to women’s rights organisations in Africa and Asia

[2^nd September 2020: London, UK] Global women’s rights organisation Womankind Worldwide launches a £1.25 million fund to support its partners in Africa and Asia to adapt to the challenges of the COVID-19 crisis.

From increased violence and economic instability to reports of state-sanctioned violence and a lack of meaningful engagement in official responses to the pandemic, the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated many of the issues that women and girls face around the world. In times of crisis, violence against women and girls increases. The United Nations estimate that for every three months of lockdown, 15 million more women and girls will face domestic violence. An additional 2 million girls will be forced to endure Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a result of COVID-19 pausing prevention programmes around the world.

Women are disproportionately impacted by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 crisis. As schools and childcare facilities close and health systems are overloaded, care for children and sick relatives largely falls to women who already perform over three quarters of unpaid care and domestic work. Women are also more likely to be in precarious and low paid work, providing critical services with no secure income or social protections, such as street vendors or domestic workers. For example, 80% of women across Uganda rely on day-to-day informal labour to support their families. Lockdown measures and lasting economic downturn threaten not just the income and livelihoods of these women but the survival of whole communities.

Womankind partners have reported a greater need for their services during the pandemic, for example partners in Ethiopia, Nepal and Zimbabwe have seen a higher demand for their safe houses and shelters for women survivors of violence. Yet they face a lack of core, flexible funding that would allow them to sustain their organisations, finance new and increased services, and advocate for a gender responsive approach to the COVID-19 crisis.

The Womankind COVID-19 Resilience Fund provides flexible, unrestricted grants to 42 women’s rights organisations in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nepal, Uganda and Zimbabwe. The grants will be used where most needed, from paying rent on offices or safe houses and adapting programmes to the challenges of COVID-19, to providing emergency food relief to the most marginalised women and girls, and influencing and holding governments to account on addressing the needs and priorities of women in their responses to COVID-19.

Caroline Haworth, Womankind CEO, said: “Together with our partners we recognise that existing challenges to women’s rights and wellbeing are compounded by the COVID-19 crisis and that flexible, core funding is more vital than ever. Across our policy and programmes we continue to be led by the needs of our partners and to respond directly to how the crisis is affecting them and the communities they serve. The fund will support our partners to continue their work and, in some cases, enable their organisations’ very survival. The Womankind Worldwide COVID-19 Resilience Fund is a way for us to recognise the importance of continuation of our partners’ inspiring and courageous defence of women’s rights in these unprecedented times and to express our heartfelt solidarity with them.”

The fund aims to reach the most marginalised women due to caste, age, ethnicity, indigenous status, and geographical location. Grants have already been made to Womankind partners including those supporting women with disabilities or LBTQI+ women. Activities and services made possible through the grants include mental health support for LBTQI+ women, and the development of accessible communications on COVID-19 for women with disabilities.

Agness Chindimba, Founder and Executive Director, Deaf Women Included in Zimbabwe explains: “The resilience grant will enable us to make information more accessible for our beneficiaries in a language that they understand. It will also help us to raise more awareness on the needs of women and girls as we are using some of the funds to run 13 episodes on the national television on COVID-19. The resilience grant has made a difference not only to DWI but to our communities at large.”

Speaking from the Kibera informal settlement in Kenya, Jane Anyango, Director and Founder, Polycom Development Project, said: “We will use Womankind funding to get leaflets made, specifically aimed at girls about COVID-19 and the precautions they must take as for now they look at it as an adult issue. We also want to give the poorest 1,000 households hand sanitisers and soap along with sanitary products for girls during this tough time and ensure our staff and the girls who champion our talking boxes have masks so they can stay safe.”

“As a marginalised and underprivileged community, LBT women have been experiencing extreme hardships at this difficult phase of a global pandemic. Many LBT people will lose their source of income after the lockdown is lifted putting them in a vulnerable position long after the government relief packages are available. With this grant from the Womankind COVID-19 Resilience Fund we plan to promote small businesses, as well as train LBT people in skills that will help them generate income so that can be financially independent in the long term.” added Laxmi Ghalan, President, Mitini Nepal.

Womankind continues to fundraise to continue resourcing the Womankind COVID-19 Resilience Fund and to reach as many partners and the women they support as possible. Donations can be made on the Womankind website at https://staging-womankind-org-uk.eyesdown.digital/support-us/donate.

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About Womankind Worldwide

Womankind Worldwide is a global women’s rights organisation working in solidarity and equal partnership with women’s rights organisations and movements to transform the lives of women. Our vision is of a just world where the rights of all women are respected, valued and realised. Womankind supports women’s movements to strengthen and grow by providing a range of tools, including technical support, communications, connectivity and shared learning, joint advocacy and fundraising.

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