Women of Worth is one program within the Zimele project where we seek to provide free unique and exciting monthly empowerment workshops to 10, 000 young women (aged 19-24 years) in the Mitchells Plain & Klipfontein area. These workshops will offer them the life skills, guidance, opportunities and knowledge to propel them successfully into adulthood.
Women of Worth seeks to provide free unique and exciting monthly empowerment workshops to 10,000 young women (aged 19-24 years) that will offer them life skills, guidance, opportunities and knowledge to propel them successfully into adulthood.
The Women of Worth program is a component of the Zimele Project, a multi-dimensional outreach initiative that will, in partnership with the Western Cape Government and funded by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, work to significantly impact on adolescent lives (aged 10-24 years) in the Mitchells Plain/Klipfontein sub-district. Overall this includes the reduction of HIV incidence and unwanted pregnancy, and increasing access to educational and economic opportunities. For more information click here.
Our Women of Worth come from the Mitchells Plain and Klipfontein health sub-district. These vibrant areas are bubbling with hidden talent, art and culture. The Zimele Project will reach out to adolescents of all age groups through local primary schools, secondary schools and clinics; effectively integrating government, community and NGO forces for the first time. We aim to impact on every aspect of this community.
These areas crave an avenue for opportunity and creativity, connecting people and communities with common issues that face women resulting in a higher HIV incidence. Our purpose is to help lessen the impact of HIV on these communities whilst enhancing life’s opportunities; acknowledging that adolescent girls and young women are particularly vulnerable as a result of social and structural drivers, including regressive gender norms, high rates of gender based violence, and scarce economic opportunities.
Young women in South Africa are 4-6 times more likely to be infected with HIV than their male counterparts and a recent study has indicated this population to be the primary origin of new HIV infections (De Olivier et al., 2016). Biomedical HIV prevention and a focus on safe sex practice alone is not sufficient to curb the HIV epidemic in this population. The literature strongly argues for an integrated approach whereby biomedical approaches are combined with social protection interventions, such as empowerment programs (Cluver et al., 2016; Bekker et al., 2015).
Empowerment-based interventions that involved a participatory process and provide comprehensive healthcare knowledge directly addressing gender norms that have shown to significantly impact on reducing HIV incidence and gender inequalities (Abramsky et al., 2014; Jewkes et al., 2008; Pronyk et al., 2006).
Women of Worth will specifically provide monthly energized and educational empowerment workshops to 10,000 vulnerable young women that focus on topics ranging from Business skills to Beauty, Pregnancy to PrEP, CV’s to Contraceptives, and Sex to Self-defense. This is an opportunity for us to bridge the gap between the community and the clinics for our Women of Worth, as we try to impact women of today and the mothers of the next generation.
This intervention project is also a research study that will follow an incentive and care protocol as lead by Professor Linda-Gail Bekker of the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation and with permission from the University of Cape Town’s Human Research Ethics Committee.
A cash incentive will be offered to exactly half of these young women (5,000) conditional on their attendance at these empowerment workshops. The results of this study will be used to evaluate the impact of cash provision on HIV incidence, following on conflicting results found in other African countries (Cluver et al., 2016).
Empowerment workshops can be run on a shoestring. Creative content, funky facilitator, what more do you need? Unfortunately, the more that we need is the financial means to make the workshops irresistible and prevent workshop attendance from falling, competing priorities from interfering, and adolescents from moving on to the next exciting thing. Women of Worth has been designed from scratch to prevent exactly this from happening.
We have props, we have prizes, we have celebratory speakers and karate classes, and we will have women wanting to be part of it. What we don’t have right now, are the full funds to take these workshops from good to great; take them from preaching to the choir to reaching the hard-to-reach women! So each month as a new session roles out, we will be setting up a fund to help us push our workshops to the next level!
Session 1 is the Tree Ceremony where new participants will be introduced to the programme, receive inspiration from a guest speaker, and plant their own tree in the community(in partnership with City Parks); putting down roots not just for the environment but also for themselves as they start this new journey. The following milestones detail what we can additionally provide for all 10’000 participants sitting in 417 separate workshop sessions.
The Basics: If we reach this, this session is a Go! And WOW is it going to be good!
With this we will be able to provide all 10, 000 participants with all their informative handouts and resources for the first session, by covering printing and design costs. Reaching this milestone will also allow us to provide fresh fruit and juice as refreshments.
The Advanced: If we reach this, these empowerment sessions will be GREAT!
Everything here will go into the Power House – a resource and computer centre in the heart of Philippi designed specifically for our women as a safe and creative meeting and study space. What we need here is funding for rent, computer maintenance, internet connection and printer cartridges.
The Phenomenal: If we reach this, these empowerment sessions will be OUT OF THIS WORLD AMAZING!
The cherry on top would be the ability to further develop online application resources that our women can login to, to access extensive online resources, track their progress through the year, and instantly link to new opportunities and external resources. These are all web associated costs.
The empowerment sessions have been approved by the Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation. All funds received will be deposited into an official Desmond Tutu HIV Foundation fund account & monitored by the Foundation’s finance department to ensure appropriate & transparent financial practices are followed.
Our team are a small yet dynamic crew. Our change makers consist of ten sassy facilitators and one funky Social Work Coordinator.
They are experienced in the fields of women’s health, sexual health including HIV/AIDS and STIs, economic upliftment and facilitating youth empowerment sessions to name a few.
What separates our team from the rest is that they have a strong sense of what it means to be a woman in South Africa and know the many struggles that are faced.
They are not shy to confront these issues head on and are the driving force behind using this program to enable our Women of Worth to step towards something better: better education, better self-worth and a better way of life. By having this empowering team lead the Women of Worth pack, there is no doubt that our women will be inspired as the multitude of possibilities are unveiled.
Don’t be mistaken, these Women of Worth leaders will not do everything for our Women of Worth participants. They will simply be there to provide guidance towards new thoughts and actions. By providing the stepping stones, we want to help our women make better and stronger decisions for their present and their future.