MIMMY GONDWE: Equipping women with higher education an urgent need in our fight against GBV

Women’s Month in South Africa carries a duality. It is a commemoration of the women’s march against injustice in 1956.

For that reason, we cannot simply celebrate the day without asking ourselves in what way we are contributing to social justice today, especially insofar as it relates to women.

Secondly, Women’s Month is a reminder of the strides made as a country in elevating the status of women. We must recognise that while we are not where we would like to be – and indeed have regressed in some cases – South Africa is far from what it was in the heyday of apartheid, where racism and sexism were written into the law of the land.

But we have unfortunately lost ground in some areas. For example, in this administration, 43% of the parliamentary seats are occupied by women. This number has decreased by three percentage points, from 46% in the previous administration.

In another downward trend, women received 44% of the ministerial posts, down from 50% in 2019. This is despite 55% of those who went to the polls on May 29 being women.

However, this is not just a numbers game. For democracy to be meaningful, it must include those who represent most voters in the corridors of power and decision-making.

Women’s voices are critical in articulating their experiences in every sphere of South African life. No sustainable solution to any of our nation’s challenges can be addressed without the participation or the buy-in of women.

In South Africa, our primary challenges are articulated in the National Development Plan 2030 as being poverty, inequality, and unemployment.

For South African women, we must add the ever-present threat of gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF), in addition to women finding themselves on the wrong side of unemployment, inequality, and poverty.

Earlier this month, Statistics SA released their second quarter unemployment figures. It does not make for happy reading.

One in three (33%) South Africans are jobless. That is 8.5 million South Africans without jobs. Of these, 3.6 million (out of a total of 10.3 million) young people aged between 15 and 24 years are not in employment, education or training.

The same report showed that women’s unemployment rate had increased from 35.2% to 35.8%, making youth and women’s unemployment higher than the national average.

As the Deputy Minister of Higher Education and Training, it is clear to me that access to higher education can play an important role in improving the quality of life of women, especially young women, in South Africa.

Agencies such as Global Partnership for Education have researched and given us what we intuitively and anecdotally know: “Education is a powerful agent of change and improves health and livelihoods, contributes to social stability, and drives long-term economic growth”.

We know this from our own experiences in our communities, and it is backed by research, that education promotes gender equality, reduces the chances of a girl being married off at a young age, and increases the life chances of the educated person.

Research in South Africa also shows that the lack of economic independence among women is a key driver of GBV. The research has found that it is hard for women who are economically dependent on their male partners to leave such abusive relationships, meaning poverty significantly enables violence against women.

The less dependent a woman is on her abusive partner, the greater the chances of her leaving the relationship.

Acknowledging that there are various factors to GBV, and formal higher education is one of them, current literature on the subject suggests that the more educated a woman is, the greater the chances of her expanding her personal resources base, cognitive abilities and employment chances, making her less likely to stay in a space where she is abused.

Researchers tell us this is also true for men. The more the education, the better the chances of men learning skills to cope with negative emotions in a non-violent way.

However, with all this said, it will be a grave error to assume that educated women are safe from GBV, or that only men with low or no education perpetrate violence against women.

These things point to higher education and training being more than about educating men and women for job opportunities or self-employment.

The sector carries an inherent answer to the two interlinked social ills of our time – gender-based violence, and the marginalisation of women.

The more women access higher education, the greater the chances of them being economically independent, which helps us by meeting the goals of eliminating poverty, unemployment and inequality by 2030.

We are now less than five and a half years from that deadline. Time is ticking. We need to act with utmost urgency. More critically, the very lives of women lie in our ability to act swiftly and decisively in their best interests.

It behoves those of us in the higher education and training sector to do everything possible to ensure that as many women as possible are able to access the right skills needed by the economy. It also means that we ensure that women, whether as students, faculty or support staff, feel safe in every space in the higher education and training sector.

This urgent task before us requires everyone, including men, to lend their shoulder to the wheel.

Ultimately, though, this movement must be led by women, and prioritise their experiences to find solutions.

Any solution that improves the plight of women, is by implication for the good of all of society because women hold more than half the sky. They hold all of the sky.