TGT relishing voter education challenge

Prestige Muntanga

Organisations involved in voter education in Zimbabwe face a myriad of challenges in their attempts to rally young women to participate in electoral processes, a local non-governmental organisation has said.

The Girls Table (TGT), a local organisation involved in voter education in rural areas came face to face with this reality while conducting voter registration education blitzes aimed at  mobilising young girls in Tsholotsho and Plumtree.

“One of the challenges we have faced is that when people see us conducting voter education, they assume we are linked to a certain political party. As an organization, we are nonpartisan. We want young women to take an active part in electoral processes,”  said Sandra Gama, TGT’s Programs Officer as she set the record straight.

Gama added that the  majority of young women in rural areas like Tsholotsho shy away from participating in electoral processes because of cultural norms mainly influenced by a patriarchal society.

“Cultural norms still influence young women’s participation…we  have young women who are not interested in the electoral process because their fathers or spouses have told them to stay away from politics,” she said.

The scarcity and location of voter registration centres has not helped matters as villagers have to travel long distances to register for voting.

“In Tsholotsho, there is only one ZEC office at Tsholotsho Centre that is supposed to cater for all the 22 wards. Some villages such as Samahuru are 100km from the centre.

 Young women are not employed and as such have no disposable income to spend on transport fares to go and register to vote. The state of roads in Tsholotsho is bad which makes some areas inaccessible, for example, Phikelela is 50kms away from the centre but the journey takes 2 hours and costs 100 rands for  one-way.

Another challenge we have faced is the lack of access to mobile phones among rural young women. This makes it difficult for us to reach them and share information on voter registration. The deplorable state of roads affects us because the young women we want to reach stay in hard-to-reach areas. With limited resources, it makes it harder for us to reach them and they are at risk of being left behind on important issues that affect them,” Gama said.

Despite the challenges, TGT has soldiered on, registered remarkable success and is motivated to do more.

” So far we have trained 29 young women in Tsholotsho and 19 in Plumtree for peer-to-peer mobilization in their communities. We will be training more young women. These will be ambassadors in their communities and will mobilize their friends and relatives to go and register to vote,” said an upbeat Gama.

She added; “On the very day of training in Tsholotsho, one young woman mobilized nine of her friends to go and register to vote and in Plumtree, 7 were mobilized by one of the ambassadors. More ambassadors have since mobilized their peers and are currently awaiting transport from The Girls Table to ferry them to the registration centers. For example, one young woman in Tsholotsho has mobilized 22 people to go and register. The Girls Table will this week be shuttling the mobilized people in Tsholotsho and Plumtree to the registration centers.”

She was however quick to say that, due to constrained resources TGT can only do so much. “We are limited in the number of young women we can train and those we can transport to go and register,” she said.

TGT is accredited and is authorized to conduct voter education by ZEC. Gama revealed that her organisation recently had a meeting with ZEC officials where they shared on the challenges faced by  young women in rural areas.

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They promised us that they will take it up with their superiors. We appreciate these engagements with ZEC officials as this makes our work bearable because we are here to complement the work being done by the electoral body,” she said.

As at 10 June 2022, Zimbabwe’s total number of registered voters stood at  5 804 975 of which  53.8% were women. The 2022 preliminary Census results released last week showed that Zimbabwe has a total population of 15 178 978 and the proportion of male to female population is 48% to 52% respectively.