Tue, 31/01/2012

The Regional Summit will be held on April 16-18, awards will showcase local level efforts to end gender violence and empower women in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Community based organisations, associations, local councils and activists are invited to make submissions.

The summit is convened by Gender Links, “We have gone to great lengths this year to broaden participation and ownership by starting with country summits in some countries, leading up to the regional summit,” noted GL CEO Colleen Lowe Morna. “We are hoping for a bumper number of entries and robust participation.”

The Regional Summit schedule includes:

16 April- panel discussion about local elections in the SADC region – Lesotho, Zambia and South Africa in the last year; Mauritius, Madagascar, and Zimbabwe this year.

17 April- plenary discussion will focus on Gender and Climate Change

18 April- field visits to some of the local gender initiatives, and the Awards gala dinner.

According to their website, Gender Links (GL) is a Southern African NGO founded in 2001 that is committed to a region in which women and men are able to participate equally in all aspects of public and private life in accordance with the provisions of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Protocol on Gender and Development. With its headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa, and satellite offices in Mauritius and Botswana, and project sites in Lesotho, Madagascar, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe GL locates its mission within the broader framework of strengthening democracy in the region through ensuring the equal and effective participation of all citizens, especially women whose views and voices have been systematically marginalised.”

Click here for more information on award categories, submission deadlines and timelines for entries, country summits and process.

The Southern African Development Community (SADC) has been in existence since 1980, when it was formed as a loose alliance of nine majority-ruled States in Southern Africa known as the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), with the main aim of coordinating development projects in order to lessen economic dependence on the then apartheid South Africa. The founding Member States are: Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Swaziland, United Republic of Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.