TAWIA Chairerson, Madame Rose Sarwatt and the Secretary General of Tanzania Widows Association, mr. John Shabani
Tuesday June, 23rd 2015, will
be the first United Nations International Widows Day in Tanzania, a day
dedicated to raising awareness about the plight of widows around the world and
taking action to help them. International Widows Day, which are
commemorated every June 23rd, was established by UN
Resolution 65/189, which was sponsored by Gabon and cosponsored by an
additional fifty-six countries, thanks in large part to the extraordinary
leadership of Gabonese First Lady Sylvia Bongo Ondimba. The campaign to
establish International Widows Day was begun some years ago by the Loomba Foundation, an
organization that has in many ways pioneered widows’ rights.
The establishment of International
Widows Day will shed light on the epidemic of widowhood, a humanitarian crisis
that has gone unnoticed for far too long. Widows and their children make up 15%
of the world’s population, making widowhood an epidemic in the truest sense of
the word. According to the Loomber Foundation,Worldwide, there are 259 million
widows, 115 million of whom live in extreme poverty, according to a 2015 study.
They are faced with stigmatization, their relatives often blaming them for
their husbands’ deaths. The collective imagination in many areas of the world
associates them with bad luck and even witchcraft. According to Raj Loomba who
founded the Loomba Foundation in memory of his mother, Hundreds of elderly
women, primarily widows, are killed for practicing witchcraft each year in
Tanzania according to a report submitted to the CEDAW Committee by HelpAge
International in 2008.
In other areas of the world, widows
are subjected to grieving and funeral rites such as forced ‘purification’
through sexual violence, being ‘inherited’ by male relatives of their deceased
husbands, head shaving, loss of freedoms and social status, and spoliation of
their possessions. The incident of widowhood is often the catalyst for extreme
poverty: in many countries, even where the law forbids it, male relatives of a
widow’s deceased husband will chase her out of her house and seize her land,
her possessions, and sometimes even her children. This sudden descent into
poverty often forces widows to resort to begging and entering into dangerous
sex work to support themselves and their families.
The more than 500 million children
of widows worldwide are not only subject to kidnapping by their father’s
relatives, but are deprived of schooling, health care, and proper nutrition
because their mothers cannot afford to provide for them, continuing the cycle
of poverty. 1.5 million of these children will die before their fifth birthday
because their mothers cannot pay for health care. Extreme poverty also makes
these children prime targets for human trafficking, with traffickers often
tricking impoverished parents (frequently widows) into sending their children
away to what they think will be a better life, when in fact these traffickers
force children into sexual slavery, a phenomenon documented in Nicholas Kristof
and Sheryl WuDunn’s excellent book, Half the Sky.
In spite of these disturbing
realities, the International Widows Day celebration in Tanzania will gives us
reason to be hopeful. Among the inspiring speakers at that day will be
Dr. Hellen Kijo Bisimba - Executive Director of Legal and Human Rights Centre,
Director of Tamwa – Tanzania Women Lawyers Association, Angellah Kairuki - a special
seat
Member of
Parliament of Tanzania since 2010 and
Deputy
Minister for Lands, Housing and Human Settlement. Lilian Liundi – Director of
Tanzania Gender Networking Programme-TGNP.
Also we ex
pect to have peolple from RITA –
Registration Insolvency and Trusteeship Agency.
The speakers at Widows day will
share many practical, actionable ideas to help widows around the Tanzania.
Some will emphasize
-
The importance of establishing
property rights for widows as well as rights to employment and self-employment,
and others will emphasize:
-
The importance of teaching widows
how to advocate for their own rights and of strengthening judicial systems so
that laws protecting widows are enforced,
-
The need for widows to have access
to credit. Microcredit has been proven to help lift women out of poverty,
and their families too – as you may know, out that the World Bank found that
women and girls reinvest 90% of
their income in their families, compared to the 30-40% that men reinvest in
their families. Many panelists emphasized the importance of helping
widows pay for their children’s education, which will help break the cycle of
poverty by giving children the knowledge and skills to support themselves financially.
Other seaker will will stresse:
-
The importance of equality in
marriage, so that women are prepared to support themselves financially after
their husbands pass away. All of the panelists emphasized the importance
of bringing awareness to the plight of widowhood, a largely silent humanitarian
crisis – as Purnima Mane eloquently put it, “widows’ rights are human rights.”
HOW WE DO
We provide funding to widows for
urgent basic needs like medical procedures, medication, housing, and
utilities. Through our employment program, we train widows to enter the
workforce, investing in basic literacy, math, and computer skills programs for
them and teaching them marketable skills like sewing, embroidery, beadwork, and
woodworking.
Through our partnerships, we can
offer the widows we serve micro-loans to build businesses out of these
skills. We also create service based jobs for widows like childcare,
elderly/hospice care, and housekeeping. roviding the orphanage with
critically necessary caregivers and teachers at the same time as we provide
widows with jobs and income. We also help widows educate their children,
keeping their children safe in the short term and improving their job prospects
in the long term so that they can break the cycle of poverty. There are
currently over 500 widows in our program. Our work has only just begun.
We met and heard from so many inspiring leaders in widows’ rights; with their
leadership and the international community’s dedication, we can make a
difference in widows’ lives in Tanzania and around the world.
