Sixteen Days of Activism – From peace in the home to peace in the world!

Southern Africa will this year focus the Sixteen Days of Activism against Gender Violence campaign on the theme: From peace in the home to peace in the world; end gender violence by 2015! This is in line with the key provisions of the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development that includes an overarching target of reducing by half current levels of gender based violence by 2015.

During this year’s sixteen days period Southern Africa plays host to the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The event scheduled to take place in Durban brings attention to the critical need to interrogate issues of environmental security, sustainable development and climate justice in the context of gender justice. To bring attention to the climate change discussion happening at our doorsteps the region has also coined the slogan: Peace for our environment is peace for our homes!

Gender activists, governments, development partners, communities and lately the private sector use the period 25 November to 10 December to raise awareness on violence against women through various activities.

For example, Gender Links’ primary focus of this year’s 16 Days of Activism Campaign is to promote local actions to end gender-based violence (GBV). The regional organisation with two satellite offices and eight project sites across 10 SADC countries will be working with local councils and communities that are part of the GL Centres of Excellence for Gender Mainstreaming in Local Government. GL is working with 100 councils in the 10 countries including Botswana, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

GL local government facilitators have been working with local councils to develop a 16 Days plan including cyber dialogues, which are facilitatedreal-time thematic online discussions. IT training to ensure that the councils and community members will be able to participate in the cyber dialogues will precede this.

GL will complement this by working with the media houses and journalists to increase and improve the coverage of GBV through their Media Centres of Excellence in Gender Mainstreaming programme in close to ten countries.

Several partners including members of the Southern Africa Gender Protocol Alliance will join other planned activities that is; I stories, media debates, taking stock of the 16 Days Campaign and 365-Day Action Plans (national and local level), Take Back the Night, seminars on the intersection between women’s safety and security and climate change and mail alerts.

Click here to find out more on the campaign
Click here for calendar of events and related themes