Andrew
Gender and Community Editor
A local network of women’s rights activists and organisations, the Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe (WCoZ), has unveiled a new strategic document to enhance women’s participation in electoral processes.
Through the Women’s Election Strategy (2022-2024), WCoZ seeks to enhance women’s participation through heightened awareness campaigns, capacity building, lobbying and advocacy, and crowd funding.
The strategy spotlights how lack of financial resources, political experience, technical know-how and the dual burden and disproportionate share of domestic work are key factors behind low participation in electoral processes.
It also highlights the glaring anomaly where women, who constitute the bulk of registered voters, continue to be under-represented as candidates.
The strategy lays out activities to be pursued, targeted groups, stakeholders concerned, timelines and expected outcomes in implementing the programmes to enhance women’s participation.
Further, negative portrayal of women in media is identified as one of the reasons behind their low participation.
“Coverage of women political players and women’s issues during election period is generally low in both print, broadcast as well as public forums such as rallies and press conferences,” reads the document.
“Generally, women are featured in the media in pictures attending in their thousands political rallies and in rare occasions made headlines in the press.”
The strategy notes that while there were four female Presidential candidates in the 2018 general election, media coverage largely focused on male candidates.
In addition, the document underlines the centrality of women political participation to influence a peaceful environment.
By identifying effective communication tools as key to women’s successful participation in next year’s elections, the women’s coalition also plans to use social media, websites and mainstream media to disseminate messages.
“It is our hope that this strategy will position WCoZ in spearheading the work on enhancing women’s participation in electoral processes in Zimbabwe and inspire the rest of the continent as it transforms itself towards realising the gender agenda in Agenda 2063.
“It is the premise of this strategy to provide an entry point to rethinking women’s political participation in Zimbabwe’s elections and will therefore be an advocacy tool looking at and beyond the 2023 harmonised elections,” Ms Evernice Munando, chairperson of WCOZ, said in the preamble to the document.
Bongani Ndlovu
Online Reporter