Mbire district in, Mashonaland Central Province in Zimbabwe is a marginalised community characterised by high cases of child marriage, gender based violence generally low literacy levels, especially among girls and women. Katswe Sistahood with support from UN Women Zimbabwe, is implementing a project in ward 2 and 3 in Mbire, with the aim of reducing violence against women. Katswe is implementing SASA model which sought, through community mobilisation activities, to challenge and transform inequitable gender norms. SASA takes a structured and phased approach. It learns a lot on the Ecological model – layering of interventions; i.e. 4 SASA! Phases.

Start
Awareness
Support
Action (plus Advocacy at local, National, and Regional).

SASA! Engages WHOLE communities including Men and Boys: Building from the individual to the Family to the community (religious, traditional, elected leaders, service providers, duty bearers) and society as a whole. SASA offers real and sustainable solutions for addressing sexual and gender based violence which includes date rape. Through this project Katswe Sistahood holds Pachoto meetings, which are community dialogues to discuss issues affecting the area particularly GBV and sexual violence. One of the objectives of the project is to train community activists who in turn lead grassroots initiatives through creating platforms to engage young people, men and women to initiate dialogues at community level. In the initial phases of this project the team realised that women were reluctant to participate in the community dialogues preferring instead to take notes quietly. The young women were a bit withdrawn and would not participate when issues of violence against women were asked or explained by the facilitator.

The facilitators then encouraged the participants to form art groups and come up with drama, music and poems to highlight issues of GBV. The participants then became more expressive and started to engage more in the Pachoto meetings. They composed songs that highlighted emotional, physical, economic and sexual abuse that women experience in their communities. The songs also contained messages that encouraged young women and girls to speak out against violence and for men to change their violent behaviour. The dramas highlighted issues of rape of vulnerable girls such as orphans, by male relatives such as fathers and uncles. They showed that girls would be reluctant to report such cases and would not tell anyone for fear of being killed or chased out of home by their relatives. The other drama was of economic abuse which occurs during the cotton marketing season where women are subjected to GBV for demanding money after the sale of cotton. The drama highlighted that women are deprived of money that they would have worked for together with their husbands as the money take money from cotton sales for themselves leaving out the women. The group also had a third drama which highlighted how and where survivors of GBV could get assistance (referral pathway).In total at least six drama groups, four music and dance groups and sixteen netball and footballs team were created in the two wards during the outreach meetings and Pachoto groups.

“Drama is an effective tool when teaching adults in that it is a non-traditional way to exemplify new principles and illuminate particular points of practice.” (Fortiono, A 2012)

For the people to have a better understanding violence against women community activists and drama groups will use creative art to reaching out to the communities so that they will have a better understanding of issues that affect women and the community at large.