THE Women’s Coalition of Zimbabwe (WCoZ) has launched an appeal for the elevation of women empowerment and gender equality under the National Development Strategy (NDS 2).
“Our big point of engagement has been to influence the key issues for women empowerment and for gender equality to ensure that women in their diversity are not left out in the development of this national blueprint,” WCoZ national co-ordinator Mercy Jaravani said during a stakeholder meeting held in Harare.
“Our key issues have been to ensure that we have a particular stand-alone pillar on gender equality and in addition to that, to ensure that gender equality is also integrated in all the other ten thematic pillars of the NDS 2 [National Development Strategy 2] framework.”
The meeting was attended by various stakeholders including the Office of the President and the Cabinet, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, different ministries as well as Parliament.
Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Budget and Finance chairperson Energy Mutodi said lawmakers would push for legislation supporting women empowerment.
“We do monitoring and evaluation of the established mechanisms to track the impact of gender participants’ budgets on gender equality indicators and make adjustments when needed,” he said.
“We are now going towards the mid-year budget review and we will want to see the budget utilisation of the Women Affairs ministry. . .”
In March, the government approved the NDS 2, which will run from January 2026 to December 2030.
- WCoZ pushes for women empowerment
