my personal feeling and benefit from the program

2013 VOF Week 4

Octavia Nkosi, South Africa 2013 VOF 4
Question1. What is your personal vision for your life, your community and/or the world?

My personal vision is to “work with women all over the world towards realizing a safe and free society from all forms of patriarchy and societal oppression”.

I grew up in a rural village and have seen not one but many instances where women are denied access to resource, social status and public standing. At least of late, due our nascent democracy and feminization of issues we are seeing at least 21% of parliamentarians are women and job opportunities women are given preference.

To me women include; women of color, domestic and farm workers, disabled women, girl child and people of preferred sexual orientation. I was one of the applicants for the funding to use and promote social network usage by women as a communication tool since I have set myself as part of my ambition to establish a women community voice project. Thus my vision objectives are:

• To work with local women in establishing a community radio, that would be a women voice and social home,
• Provide capacity building programs by using of popular education such as drama, poets, music and others as a tool towards outreaching to various groups.
• Enhance existing medico-legal victim support program which provides assistance to victims of abuse.
• Information sharing and knowledge bases conducted through seminars, flyers, networks and publications o entrepreneurship, education and public space participation,
• Dialogue engagement carried through conduct ongoing public meetings or special meetings with communities so that people listen, learn and discuss to foster an environment of active, inclusive participation.
• Collaboration with the nonprofit making organization, chapter 9 institution (human right bodies) as to bring innovative ideas and solutions, as well as participatory approaches, to solving local problems
• Regional and international collaboration as to realize the Millennium Development Goal’s (MDG’s) goal 3 on Women Empowerment, and United Nations Entity Convention on Women and Girl child,

Question2. Why do you want to be a Voices of Our Correspondent and how will this help you
achieve your vision?

“When women cry, they are able to weep their bosom empty” to the Voice of Our Correspondence without fear and shame, since all women understand each other. For example I have been reading horrible stories but also seeing responses from other women, words of encouragement and support. What can be better than this?. I want to part of the VoC because of personal and organizational reasons:

Organizational reasons:
• our organization wants to establish a community radio station and there have been red-tapes from government and media houses we know, since we are a semi rural area and possibly can expose what surrounding companies are doing in terms of air pollution, mine groundwater discharge and domestic effluent the community is complaining about,
• the media house we want to establish does not have funding to register itself, no funding to do errands, such as attend meetings or make presentation in various avenues,
• there have been poor community mobilization efforts due to lack of active social networks which we can use cheaply,
• our board of directors consist of people who are working and they give little time or make no effort t assisting us as we start,

The organization would like to bring to light the plight of women in relation to:
- A lot of women leave school early due to early pregnancy, unplanned family options, lack of support for further education, early pregnancy, abuse and, thus lack confidence in approaching life challenges,
- Access to education, social grants and health institutions is still a concern,
- literacy levels for women being very low,
- Women and young women still not reaching their goals in education, early marriages or forced marriages still persists, few scholarships and learnership, internship for women is low,
- women get political post or senior based on job quotas and special programs, rather than on merit and qualifications.

Considering the establishment of a community radio as a resource and a development space for dialogue, community and individual upliftment, organization will be able to guide the design, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and reporting. As a key strategy, organization will ensure continuity of the project by promoting these ideals:

• promoting knowledge sharing and learning system amongst and between organization and stakeholders,
• systematically supporting replication of good and fit practices
• use video and other tools to document and disseminate knowledge tools, lessons learned and success stories,
• creating a database that would facilitate a two way communications strategy to increase awareness and understanding of the benefits of participatory governance model in relation to gender equity,
• use of social networks as to facilitate and enable meaningful learning and performance,

With regard to personal reasons, I hope to:
- provide leadership and managerial expertise in line with local women issues and share that with VOC,
- work with VOC as n ambassador of peace, women development and rural women and girl child upliftment,
- promote the women issues in line with progressive realization of socio-economic rights as promoted b our Constitution.