In Zimbabwe, our Programme Coordinator Onward is on a 16 days of activism campaign! As you’ll see in this series of images taken from Onward protesting over the last two weeks, he protests against sustained gender-based violence, violence within marriage, revenge porn and emotional abuse.
In our work helping activists like Onward to protest, educate young people and create strong civil society links on a local level, we prioritise grassroots activism and find ways to facilitate such action through Danish and European development funding.
In the project Girls Choose, which we run with Onward and My Age Zimbabwe, we aim to increase young people’s awareness of sexual and reproductive health and their access to services in Masvingo, Zimbabwe. Like all of our projects at Civil Connections, the project Girls Choose aims to capacitate grassroots communities. This project’s overall objective is to create a conducive environment for adolescents and young people in their diversity—with specific emphasis on girls and young women in Zimbabwe—to access Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights/services (SRHRs) and HIV related information freely and safely.
Through this project, we hope to build a model for Sexual Reproductive Health Rights and services, focusing specifically on HIV. With My Age Zimbabwe (MAZ), we want to provide access to local grassroots communities, starting with Masvingo province. We aim to improve the futures of young people, especially girls and young women, in a challenging context.
We refuse to accept that young people’s destinies should be jeopardized by a lack of something as basic as access to reproductive and sexual rights and services—we want to do something about this. We support Onward in all of the brilliant work he is doing in Zimbabwe—keep going!