If we treat GBV as a standalone issue, we will continue to fund the symptoms.
In March, the Gender and Justice Unit (GJU) joined the Southern Africa Trust regional convening in Pretoria on Confronting GBV at the Intersections of Economic and Climate Justice, bringing together policymakers, activists, traditional and religious leaders, media and youth from across Southern Africa. The convening surfaced a regional reality many of us already sense in our work: gender-based violence remains one of the most persistent human rights violations and it is bound up with economic injustice, climate vulnerability and exclusion from decision-making.
What stood out most was the honesty in the room, alongside the shared analysis. Across countries and sectors, the same patterns surfaced: violence sustained by structural inequality, harmful norms, weak accountability and systems that look stronger on paper than they feel in women’s lives. As GJU Executive Director Sarai Chisala-Tempelhoff noted in the opening session, we are surrounded by laws, policies and action plans and survivors still face systems that fail at the point where protection should begin.
Spaces like this matter because they create a different kind of accountability. They take us beyond broad commitments and into harder questions about what justice requires, especially when the gap between policy and lived reality is so stark. Violence thrives in silence, so bringing it into a collective space turns it into a public concern and reduces the private shame carried by survivors, which is when communities can ask difficult questions, institutions can be called to account and more honest pathways to change can begin to emerge. The convening also reaffirmed what our own work keeps showing us: response is necessary and it is not sufficient. Violence is tied to whether women have economic choices, whether care is valued, whether climate pressures are deepening vulnerability and whether young women are shaping the agenda rather than being spoken for. These are reinforcing systems, and serious solutions need to be just as interconnected.
I was especially encouraged by the diversity of voices in the room. Traditional leaders, youth activists, women in mining, public officials and community advocates brought practical insight into how violence is reproduced and how it can be challenged, including what gets missed when work stays at the national level only. No policy framework alone can reach every household, every norm or every silence, and collective leadership can begin to shift what communities accept as normal. Furthermore, Malawi was strongly represented at the convening, with the Ministry of Gender, the Head of the Malawi Police Service Victim Support Unit, and the Chief Executive Officer of the Malawi Human Rights Commission, which also serves as a gender commission, among the critical policy-holders joining this regional table!
For GJU, this was an important moment of regional alignment. It affirmed the need for practical, accountable and deeply connected work across borders and sectors. We left Pretoria reminded that justice cannot remain theoretical, and that it must be lived, enforceable and shaped by the realities of the women and girls whose lives are on the line.
Lynda Ndovie-Jere
Chair, GJU Oversight Committee
