Bombani Shelter empower its women to celebrate Women’s Month
Bombani Shelter for Abused Women and Children in partnership with ENSAfrica organises a Women's Month Event at the shelter to inspire, educate, and empower women.
In a collaborative effort to celebrate women, Bombani Shelter for Abused Women and Children and ENSafrica held a Women’s Month Event to inspire, educate, and empower women by fostering a meaningful exchange of information.
Bringing together women from diverse backgrounds, inspiring speakers from organisations such as Legal Aid, Adapt, and Financial Independence, and lawyers from ENSafrica into engaging discussions, the event contributed to the efforts to achieve gender equality and break down barriers that hinder women’s progress.
“The purpose of today was to empower women and educate them about mental health and raise awareness on Gender-Based Violence. Since it’s Women’s Month some of the challenges that women still face even today, I would say it’s GBV and domestic violence because most of our women are being oppressed and abused in their homes and some of the causes of such violence would be being dependent on their alleged perpetrator/s and their financial struggles. Unemployment and lack of skills are still an issue when it comes to women empowering themselves,” said a social worker at Bombani Shelter Shamaine Padima.
“We have to empower our women and try to make them independent because we only provide temporary shelter. It’s sometimes very difficult for them to leave the shelter because we discover that they have nowhere to go from here as they are still unemployed. You will find them returning back to their perpetrators so they can get shelter and food. So, I believe we need more facilities like Bombani and skills that will accommodate all women of different ages,” Padima said.
“We have come here to Bombani to celebrate Women’s Month by having different stakeholders share information on issues that affect women. The main challenge that women still face is abuse: physical, emotional, verbal, financial and psychological. All these types of abuse still affect women. Victims can go report to get the police to get help as there are domestic violence and harassment acts, women are protected by,” Phumlile Chala from Legal Aid said.
Chala also reflected on the progress made and the work that still lies ahead in the shared pursuit to fight GBV and other abuses.
“There is definitely still a long way to go but there is progress, there are programmes like Legal Aid that are trying to push a mandate that tries and protects women in regard to dealing with the scourge called domestic violence,” Chala said.
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