By Binta Jaiteh
Deputy Executive Director of the Directorate of Gender Equality and Women Empowerment under the Ministry of Gender and Children has called for concerted effort to eradicate gender-based violence and female genital mutilation in the communities, describing it as a societal disaster.
Neneh Touray made this call at five-day capacity training forum for community structures (MDFFTS, TAC, CCPC and VDCs on magnet theatre, stepping stone and positive deviance approaches. The training was funded by UNICEF.
She said they want them to be fully equipped so that violence against women’s and girls can be eliminated totally.
“We want the community leaders to have an understanding of these modules so that they can implement it in their various communities. Last year we started with URR and trained the same structures and this time is CRR and we will be proceeding to other regions as well,” she disclosed.
“We are here to trained community leaders on approaches gear towards eliminating all forms of violence against women’s and girls at community because currently, all the things that have been done have been done by government institutions or some civil societies organisation. However, as part of our sustainability mechanism is to ensure that communities take ownership of the fight against GBV, FGM/C among others,” she echoed.
She went on that those interventions would one day stop because most of them are funded by donors, noting that there is donor fatigue.
However, funding is diminishing but how do we get the communities to take ownership of these initiatives and work with their community members in order to eliminate all these forms of violence in the community is key, a reason that the communities are trained.