{"id":468261,"date":"2010-03-24T13:37:57","date_gmt":"2010-03-24T17:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oxfam.org.uk\/applications\/blogs\/pressoffice\/?p=11673"},"modified":"2010-03-24T13:37:57","modified_gmt":"2010-03-24T17:37:57","slug":"women-in-manchester-get-a-taste-for-what-life-is-like-for-their-sisters-in-zimbabwe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/468261","title":{"rendered":"Women in Manchester get a taste for what life is like for their sisters in Zimbabwe"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sheila Kapungu, Oxfam’s Gender Programme Officer for Zimbabwe, gave a talk on Tuesday evening about what life is like for women living in Zimbabwe. Not only did she describe how Zimbabwe’s political and economic history has shaped the experiences and struggles of women today, she also went to some length to depict how tightly interlaced and overlapping the problems faced by the country are. She touched on the way in which the position of women in African society is hinderin<\/p>\n

\n\t\"Oxfam's<\/a><\/p>\n
Oxfam’s Programme Officer from Zimbabwe visited Manchester in March 2010<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

g the progress that needs to be made at this crucial time, as well as how the legal rights of women are being compromised by corrupt officials and unimplemented laws. Sheila did not only talk about the heartbreaking and frustrating though, she also shed some light on the small but significant rays of hope that blink through the cracks in Zimbabwe’s parched earth. She told us about the work she does with Oxfam: the repairs to neglected and essential public resources; the promotion of women’s rights and attempts to change negative attitudes about and towards women; the agricultural support and education that precipitates growth both for food and for sales; and the resurrection of a belief that Zimbabwe can progress and develop, lifting itself out of the horrendous spiral of poverty it has been subjected to since the takeover post-independence.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

What really enabled me to grasp the breadth and deeprootedness of Zimbabwe’s problems, feel the depth of frustration behind the crescendo of violence, deception, and fraud, and begin to understand the enormity of the wall that women are forced to climb daily, was Sheila herself. Her rhetoric was warm yet powerful: her delivery of horrific figures such as unemployment levels (95%), inflation rates (3000%) and the disjunction between gender population (52% women) and gender representation in government were edged with a calm equanimity. Sheila wants to see change, yet it seems that talking to groups of women that know only too well the kinds of hardship and adversity that gender can bring to bear on life experience is one of the relatively easy tasks of her job. They don’t disagree that change must be made, nor that it should be made in favour of an increase in women’s social power, it is only the question of how it is to be undertaken that poses a question. Saying this, Sheila made it clear that it is not simply men that are holding women, or the country, back: it is an unfortunate discord of knock-on and knock-back forces such as weather\/climate; economic collapse; societal fragmentation; governmental inadequacy and corruption; historical change; and finally a lack of the basic resources that provide women with the kinds of opportunities they need to support their families, their communities, and of course, themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sheila Kapungu, Oxfam’s Gender Programme Officer for Zimbabwe, gave a talk on Tuesday evening about what life is like for women living in Zimbabwe. Not only did she describe how Zimbabwe’s political and economic history has shaped the experiences and struggles of women today, she also went to some length to depict how tightly interlaced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6358,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-468261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6358"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=468261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/468261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=468261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=468261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=468261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}