By Julia Kallas
UNITED NATIONS, Dec 1 2012 (IPS)

When Shorai Chitongo founded Ray of Hope, a support group for female survivors of domestic violence in 2005, she discovered that three-quarters of the survivors in the group were HIV-positive.

Shorai Chitongo, founder of Ray of Hope, a support group for survivors of domestic violence, and a national leader of the Groots Zimbabwe Home-Based Care Alliance. Photo courtesy of Ms. Chitongo

“Women’s assertiveness and high self-esteem are important ingredients to fight HIV/AIDS,” Chitongo, a grassroots leader who fights to empower and protect communities in Zimbabwe and is a national leader of the Groots Zimbabwe Home-Based Care Alliance, told IPS. Domestic violence directly increases chances of sexually transmitted infections that expose women to HIV.

“If women are assertive enough, they are able to negotiate safe sex as equal partners and not as subordinates,” Chitongo explained.

IPS correspondent Julia Kallas spoke with Chitongo about the links between sexual violence and HIV/AIDS and how women’s grassroots efforts can promote HIV care and support.

Q: In 2005, your domestic violence case captured national media attention and sympathy. What spurred you to found Ray of Hope? What kind of program does Ray of Hope have to support HIV-positive women?

A: The formation of Ray of Hope dates back to 2005, when l saw a documentary on a local TV program and learned that the organisation Girl Child Network was offering loans to women under its Community Empowerment and Development Program.

Perceiving this as my only opportunity to disentangle myself from the jaws of domestic violence, which l thought was a result of economic dependency on my husband, l decided to approach GCN. The staff there referred me to a woman named Betty Makoni, as they felt that my case was too dangerous for them, since my husband was violent and lawless.

Betty was greatly touched by my story and that of my three children, who ended up on the streets while l was in hiding for one and a half years in neighbouring Botswana. Previously, I had unsuccessfully approached various women’s organisations and law enforcers but had lost hope. Not even my close relatives were afraid to shelter me in their homes. But Betty offered me sanctuary in rural Mutasa.

While I was living there, a local woman was brutally murdered by her husband in full view of their three children. This incident made me realise that l was not the only survivor of domestic violence; there were other cases out there that went unreported. With Betty’s support, l gained the courage to mobilise other women survivors of domestic violence to form a support group, which provided the space to talk about their concerns away from their male-dominated homes.

The result was an influx of women with shocking stories of abuse. Women travelled more than 30 kilometres bare-footed just to pour out what had burdened them for years. Most disturbing about these desperate women was that they did not bear domestic violence alone but with their children. Sadly, their children were the major reason for their silently enduring abusive and life-threatening relationships.

These meetings transformed the women. They went from being silent victims to a group that was determined to change their lives.

During one of our meetings, we discovered that three-quarters of the women in our group, which had over 100 members, were HIV-positive and that almost all members of the group were in primary and secondary community care work. We then agreed that every program that we were going to implement should mainstream HIV/AIDS.

Q: As a representative of caregivers as a leader of the Groots Zimbabwe Home-Based Care Alliance, what do you believe is needed to improve women and girls’ access to HIV prevention information, technologies, and services by 2015?

A: What is required is the formulation of deliberate policies at national level to provide women with access to information technology relevant for the dissemination of HIV/AIDS information. Creating information centres in rural and peri-urban rural areas would help to give women this access. People should also organise themselves into groups and seek access to computers and other IT facilities.

HIV/AIDS information should cross all women’s groups: political, social, religious, economic and cultural. Education in our country should focus on promoting knowledge of relevant information to deal with HIV/ AIDS, especially in rural areas where literacy rates are lower.

(Click here to watch a video of Chitongo and other members of the Home-based Care Alliance sharing personal stories about the work they do.)

Q: What message would you like to pass to the international community on World AIDS day?

A: While the world accepts and appreciates that HIV/AIDS is a universal problem, it also has to recognise that some social groups are predisposed to catching it due to social, economic and cultural conditions. The more disempowered one is culturally, socially and economically, the more one is exposed to infection.

The world’s attention should now focus on addressing social inequalities on the basis of gender, religion and economics so everybody has equal access to the means through which HIV/AIDS can be combated.

Q: Is there a close link between HIV/AIDS and domestic violence in Zimbabwe?

A: Yes. HIV-positive women are at great risk of all forms of domestic violence. The situation becomes even more complex when they fall chronically ill because their husbands neglect them or send them back to relatives to be cared for or to die, but in most cases their relatives will not accept them.

In addition, women are blamed for bringing HIV home, so they are constantly shunned, stigmatised, violently divorced and in some cases sent away. HIV-positive women also encounter violence when negotiating with their partners for safe and protected sex.

Dietary requirements for HIV positive women also normally result in conflict and misunderstanding, which then lead to violence, and their decision to cease childbearing leads to domestic violence as well.

Q: What needs to be done to help women make safe sex choices and breaki the norm of constantly submitting to men’s sexual whims?

A: Knowledge creates power, assertiveness and high self-esteem. It is necessary to deliberately focus on female empowerment through education so that women approach problems with confidence. If women become more aware of their rights, they will approach the problem of submitting to men’s whims with more vigour to resolve it.

In addition, enacting policies giving equal opportunity in social and economic life regardless of gender will build women’s assertiveness. Men have the advantage of power behind them, but give women equal access to that power and they will not submit to men’s whims.

Excerpt:

Bulawayo only has a 20-month supply of water left if the seasonal rains do not come. Credit: Busani Bafana/IPS

By Ignatius Banda
PLUMTREE, Mar 2 2012 (IPS)

Beauty Moyo’s desire for access to water has finally been met. The rains that fell in the past week after a long dry patch have awakened this small-holder farmer deep in rural Plumtree, Zimbabwe on the border with Botswana to the reality of sparse rainfall, climate change and how she and her fellow villagers can respond.

Plumtree, like most parts of southwestern Zimbabwe, is notorious for low rainfall. But millions of farmers in the country rely on rain-fed agriculture and food they grow themselves, which presents villagers like Moyo with tough choices.

“The rains that fell this week have been able to bring back hope as we had sunk our own reservoir to trap the water,” Moyo said.

She says she teamed up with other neighbours during the course of the year, and they invested their energies in digging what looks like a miniature golf-course waterway.

“This idea came after people realised we have been complaining each year about poor rainfall and harvests,” Moyo told IPS.

This reservoir water is used in farming activities where the subsistence farmers say instead of spraying the whole field with water, they now water individual plants.

“It’s a lot of work, but it helps conserve our water,” said Susan Mathebula, another villager working on the project with Moyo.

“We had heavy rains that we had not seen in a long time, with ice falling, and we were able to trap the water in this small catchment we set up ourselves,” Mathebula told IPS in mid-February.

While drinking water is available from such sources as boreholes, Mathebula says their major concern is water for irrigation purposes, as they plant their own food and cannot rely on rainfall alone for the maize and groundnuts they grow in their small fields.

Plumtree is one of the areas lying on the southwestern belt that experienced localised heavy downpours in the last week of February, with the Zimbabwe Meteorological Service Department announcing that the nation should expect more rainfall in the next two months.

Hope is returning that the water they have will ensure adequate household food security at a time when humanitarian agencies such as the Famine Early Warning System – Network (FEWS-NET) announced early this year that millions of Zimbabweans will require food aid.

Climate change and water shortages are among the issues being debated at a two-week session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) Feb. 25 through Mar. 7 at U.N. headquarters in New York, which is focusing on the empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication and sustainable development.

Aid agencies have tied food insecurity to climate change that has pushed rains in Zimbabwe far into the new year, when many farmers had prepared the land for the planting season in the last quarter of last year.

The rains began to fall in February, and the meteorological department announced that farmers can expect more rains in the next two months.

According the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), women remain in the vanguard of farming in rural areas, which are home to 70 percent of Zimbabweans, and community-based initiatives such as the creation of reservoirs by Moyo, Mathebula and other villagers only highlight the dire circumstances these women find themselves in, with little assistance from government and nongovernmental organisations.

Josephine Conjwayo, an agricultural field officer from the Ministry of Agriculture who works with small-holder farmers, said harnessing water for agriculture by rural communities in response to climate change challenges has been limited by the absence of experts in rural areas.

“Every area (in Matebeleland) we have visited to assess farming activities, the issue of low rainfall and suffering crops is typical. Trapping rainwater is one of the measures we have encouraged for these women, but this water tends to be exhausted quickly as people use it for purposes other than farming,” Conjwayo said.

What has exacerbated the challenges faced by small-holders such as Mathebula is the inability by government and farming organisations to set up strategies for small-holders to respond to climate change, resulting in villagers coming up with their own initiatives.

The Zimbabwe Commercial Farmers Union says rural small-holder farmers are providing the bulk of maize consumed in urban areas, as these farmers do not sell their produce at the Grain Marketing Board, and laments the lack of government support for farmers.

Last year, the Climate and Development Knowledge Network partnered with the Zimbabwean government to map climate change policy, and according to preliminary research, changing rainfall patterns are expected, as well as temperature increases and extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.

It is these circumstances villagers in Plumtree are experiencing, and Mathebula, Moyo and many others respond the only way they know how: thinking on their feet.

“There is very little we can do here,” Moyo told IPS. “But we hope the water we trap will last us long enough to see our crops grow,” she said as she tended the small maize crop that is beginning to sprout after the recent downpours. (END)