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International Women's Day message
Youth Forum
March 08, 2012

Today, 8 March, the world over celebrates an important event: the International Women's Day under the theme "Empower Rural Women - End Hunger and Poverty", a befitting theme for us in Zimbabwe.

Women in general and rural women in particular, have always been marginalised and do not enjoy the fundamental rights, freedom and dignity that are their birth right and that will guarantee their well-being. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the country's rural areas. Whilst women and girls in rural areas perform most of the valuable but unpaid agricultural work, it is disheartening to note that they own an insignificant fraction of the arable land they work on.

Positive developments on women issues include the incorporation of gender budgeting in government policies and programmes by the Zimbabwe Government. Zimbabwe's National Budget has been made gender-sensitive through the issuing of a directive by the Ministry of Finance promoting participatory and Results Based Management. Training in gender budgeting has taken place at the national level, but with all such efforts, there are still monitoring challenges when it comes to gender responsive budgeting as no gender budget tracking modality is currently in place to track the gender-responsiveness of government spending.

This situation is in direct contrast to the Zimbabwe People's Charter (Gender Section) which demands that the government hold certain fundamental principles that honour and respect "gender equality as a role for both men and women" - "both on paper and in practice" when decisions are made about "national budget and economy." What the Charter demands is that decisions of empowering women should not be upheld on paper only as is the current situation, but the agreed principles should be implemented and practised.

The Youth Forum believes that equal participation of men and women is vital for any progress the country envisages to make hence its gender-biased programming that aims at incorporating women and girls in all its programming and seeks to empower especially the marginalised rural women to be part of the decision making systems in the country. Young women are an important target in the organization's young voter registration campaign that has seen an increased number of rural young women registering as voters. This should give them the chance to have a say and in the governance of the country hence empowering them.

Visit the Youth Forum fact sheet

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