Leadership for girls tackles beliefs and practices that oppress them, by Sibongile Mtungwa

Content warning: this article contains details of gender-based violence, assault and murder.

Sibongile Mtungwa is an Atlantic Fellow for Health Equity in South Africa. She works for the Women’s Leadership and Training Programme, working with grassroots communities to advocate for the rights, dignity and safety of girls, women and youth.

Many girls are exposed to the threats of unwanted early marriages, abduction for early marriage, or incest and rape that goes unreported. I work for the Women’s Leadership and Training Programme which tries to encourage parents to support their daughters in continuing their education throughout high school, with the hope that when they reach Grade 12, they will choose tertiary education and delay marriage, improving their life prospects.

The Women’s Leadership and Training Programme (WLTP) is an NGO promoting the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SGD) 4 and 5: gender and education for girls through transformative leadership for girls (8-13 years, 14-20 years) and young women entering tertiary education. Cohorts each of about 200 girls move through the programme for three years. They then choose to stay for a further three to five years as they become teenagers or young women.

In 2014, two young women from WLTP attended the UN Commission on the Status of Women and alerted WLTP to the UN International Day of the Girl Child. Since then WLTP has celebrated Oct. 11 as an organizational focus for girls who face many problems as they grow up.

In the Harry Gwala District of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, gender-based violence (GBV), menstrual health rights and access to clean water are the key issues for girls. In August 2022, Women’s Month in South Africa, the programme laid to rest one of its main girl activists, Amanda Nqo Zulu, who was brutally murdered alongside her friend. Both schoolgirls were in their final year and had moved closer to their school to attend extra classes. Amanda had been on the programme since she was nine years old. Her mother had hoped that her education would be the key to a better life. She said, “I don’t want her to be like me and marry at the age of 15.” The senseless brutality of her death, the loss of hope for her family, and the loss of Amanda’s leadership haunts her peers within WLTP and has left a pall over the community.

Menstrual health is another huge issue for girls who often miss lessons at school because of the lack of access to sanitary pads. Washable pads have been introduced but a lack of water for personal hygiene reasons poses a challenge in this rural district where girls depend on rivers and springs for washing. 43% of the population has no piped water, which is why WLTP works with girls to advance SDG 13 and 15 because they are focused on access to water.

Girls have to walk longer distances to fetch water when the municipal taps run dry. Some girls report that they sometimes go for weeks or months without piped water to their communal taps. On the way to fetch water, girls frequently experience various forms of gender-based violence. Recently, I met with the girls and one of them said, “It is wise to go in groups to the water sources because if anything happens, there will be witnesses. Most of the time people including our families don’t know what we experience and we don’t report incidents, because older people don’t listen to us children.”

Young girls are also reporting a "new problem" as menstrual blood is being linked to bad or dirty medicine. Women’s menstrual blood has always been taboo in society as it was believed that it could destroy the power of muthi (traditional medicine), especially muthi related to men. However, recently, women’s blood, especially that of girls, is being “hunted” by people using bad/ dirty medicine with rubbish bins and dump sites being raided for used pads. Some girls have reported knowing girls tasked with collecting these pads. Other girls have been forced to remove their underwear and had their pads pulled off them. The biggest fear for girls now is the belief that their purity makes their blood stronger. This is not just about their blood but also related to their body parts. One theory for Amanda and her friend’s deaths is that they were killed because they were young virgins.

These experiences show the magnitude and many layers of problems related to menstrual health and gender equity that need to be tackled. Building girls’ leadership and agency can’t be prioritized enough because they are leaders of today experiencing pain and trauma. They have their own solutions if only these could be prioritized. As an eight-year-old girl told us in our recent meeting, “I wish parents and leaders would listen to us." We thank Tekano, WaterCAN, International Women Rivers Defenders and others who have assisted the girls to do their work. WLTP seeks new partners and support to continue its work to keep girls safe and improve their lives.