Daniel Chirundu – Kadoma City Council COE

My two daughters are the source of my inspiration

I am the Director of Health and Environmental Health Services at Kadoma City Council in Zimbabwe. The catchment population of my department is 96 116 people. Women constitute 52% of the catchment population. We provide HIV and AIDS services, primary health care services, child health services and reproductive health services. We also have a section within the department that overlooks health protection issues including waste management.

The main area on which I focus is building capacity for my organisation on gender issues. Our main goal is to ensure that gender issues are mainstreamed in all our activities. Personally, I am particularly interested in gender-based violence (GBV), HIV and AIDS as well as climate change. I have witnessed gender mainstreaming taking centre stage at Kadoma City, our policies are gender-aware, in programming we are using transformative methodologies to empower women, and equal opportunity to advance in education is being encouraged. In short we audit all our projects for GESI compliance. I have facilitated our team to do online courses on gender and monitoring and evaluation, gender and health programming and gender and sexual and reproductive health.

My initial exposure to gender issues was through my basic training, but I viewed it as another academic excursion. Our council was then enrolled for the Centres of Excellence programme under Gender Links. I was given formal training and I became a gender activist. I am proud to say this shaped my perception of gender to a large extent and the fact that I have two daughters has reinforced my calling.

Gender Links has been an unfailing partner; it opened our organisational eyes and provided capacity building. We have reached a point where we require all our cooperating partners to incorporate gender and GESI in all projects. We have capacitated GBV victims and we have gone further to establish a community of gender practice in Kadoma named the Kadoma Gender Forum. Any organisation that is doing work that has an impact on GBV is free to join. We document best practices and share them with the public.

It is my hope that going forward the council will have realistic budgets and projects for gender mainstreaming. We need more action and we need to take stock of our gains in the gender sphere. We need to establish more alliances to take the gender agenda to every door-step in the city. Our cooperation and our activities should be felt at the household level.