Gender education needs boosting in rural areas

“There is a need for more outreach centres throughout Namibia to facilitate the gender education platform,” said Sarry Xoagus-Eises who facilitated the Sixteen Days of activism campaign against gender violence in Namibia in December 2011.

The Sixteen Days of activism is an international campaign on violence against women and children. It takes place every year from November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, to December 10, which is International Human Rights Day. The period includes the Universal Children’s Day and World AIDS Day.

One of the campaign activities included cyber dialogues, which are facilitated online thematic chats via a chat room that is hosted on Gender Links website. This involved bringing together partners and community women, men, boys and girls from at least 12 SADC countries to share experiences and strategies on addressing gender based violence via the chat room throughout the campaign.

“This is a platform for people in all countries to contribute to what they believe are issues that can help their governments; to help each other; and to enable them to deal with similar problems that others have faced,” said the prominent Namibian gender activist.

The idea that poorer communities can now communicate via the internet on issues that affect their lives thereby defying geographical borders is what some would call a move towards revolutionising the information divide.

Xoagus-Eises believes there needs to be more efforts to facilitate such gender-based dialogues throughout the country. Currently, various factors hamper the process. “There are language options for Zulu, Ndebele, English, Portuguese and Afrikaans and so on, but the problem is that we have participants who are mostly from under-privileged backgrounds. These people are not fluent in English or Afrikaans, and this makes it a problem for them to discuss the issues being addressed,” she lamented.

She indicated that the programme’s designated venue (AIMS Training Centre, in Windhoek) is far from other regions, as Namibia is vast, and hence needs another option to include the less-privileged in rural areas that lack internet access.

“We seriously need a solution because these are only people from Windhoek who are communicating on this platform. These reflect a small proportion of the entire Namibian population.”

Source: Adapted from story by Musa Zimunya, New Era