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Weekly activity update
National Youth Development Trust
May 09, 2012

Bulawayo

Young women's study circle

Young women from Luveve high density suburb met at the Luveve Youth Centre to interrogate the reasons for poor participation of young women in national and local developmental and political processes. The young women highlighted parental consent as a major challenge to their effective participation, saying that they needed to explain to their parents how such programmes are of benefit to them before being allowed to attend, if at all they are allowed. This, they said does not usually apply to their male counterparts. Some young women sited lack of confidence resulting from both lack of exposure and lower levels of education as reasons why they choose to remain quiet in some activities they attend.

With regards to elections, the young women highlighted that their lives are mainly confined to the private sphere and as such, national processes such as elections have not been a priority to them. A number of them showed lack of understanding on the relevance of taking part in elections to their day to day lives. However, after the discussions, the young women indicated that they now understood the importance of actively participating in making decisions that affect their lives. They also expressed interest in registering to exercise their right to vote.

This meeting was held as part of the Young Women study circles, an initiative by NYDT which seek to increase young women's participation through creating safe spaces from them to interact without intimidation from their male counterparts.

Focus group meeting

Youths from Methodist Village (located in peri-urban Bulawayo) have blamed their lack of interest in the Voting process on the lack of accountability and consultation by their elected leaders. The young people said that the last time they saw both their councilor and MP was during the campaign stages of the 2008 elections. Despite being the poorer parts of the constituency, they claimed that the MP even failed to allocate a portion of the Constituency Development Fund but rather concentrated the fund in the urban side of his constituency.

They blamed the delimitation process for joining together their area (peri-urban) with an urban area to form one ward as a major contributor to their being marginalized when it comes to developmental processes. They instead called for the separation of Peri-urban Pumula from the urban side of Pumula. This was seen as the best way of ensuring that they will be adequately represented.

The challenge of inadequate representation was also cited as the reason why most young people have chose to stay away from voting. However at the end of the meeting it was agreed that more young people from the area should register to vote as this will oil their campaign for the designation of their area as a separate constituency. They also requested that there be representative specifically for their community in the Bulawayo Youth Council, who is not necessarily the ward 17 youth councilor.

Focus group meeting

Youths in Pumula have showed lack of interest in participating in electoral processes citing violence, intimidation and lack of credibility of the electoral system as reasons. Despite the fact that there is a voter registration centre within their ward, a number of young people in Pumula are not registered voters. Some of them highlighted that they were not inspired to register to vote because politicians only use them to gain power but later forget about the promises they would have made to the electorate. High unemployment and a seeming lack of interest to address the challenge was said to be a typical example of how elected leaders easily forget about their constituencies. The topic of discussion was: "The importance of youth participation in electoral processes."

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