THE Hopley One Stop Centre being run by Musasa Project through support from the UNFPA and the ministry of Women Affairs, Community Development, has served a total 500 women and girls who experienced GBV and other forms of violence over the past 10 months.
By Michael Gwarisa
Hopley has a high incidence of GBV as well as other harmful practices such as Child Marriages and teenage pregnancies which are at 18% respectively while 70% of women in Hopley are mothers by age 24.
Speaking during a visit to centre by the UNFPA East and Sothern Africa Director, Ms Lydia Zigomo, Musasa Project Program Manager, Sharon Matingwina said the One Stop Centre was now receiving GBV clients from farming areas around Harare.
We usually implement once a week in month, we rotate stations but this is the most common one and strategically so because it attracts a lot of women. The entry point can be coming in for clinical services that can be coming in youth empowerment services so it’s very strategic, we get to meet to meet a lot of women and adolescents girls and young women.
She added that majority of survivors coming in to access their services are survivors of physical violence followed economic and sexual violence.
“We work closely with the Victim Friendly Unit (VFU), the Ministry of Health and Child Care (MoHCC) and the Ministry of Women Affairs so that we give a comprehensive package of services. We have our Information hub in case someone just wasn’t to get a flier or just basic information of what we are offering here in Hopley and all the other centres that we are implementing.”
Musasa gets a lot of young women who come through to get services and most of them are young mothers or pregnant teenagers. The young girls and women are given dignity kits to ensure they have access to sanitary wear, toiletries and other hygiene kits.
“We work closely with World Vision, they refer cases through behavior change facilitators. In terms of community mobilization, we rely heavily on them and we also rely on the Ministry of Women affairs, ward coordinators who also pay important role in GBV surveillance but importantly in referring survivors to the mobile One top Centres.
“We have also realized that in the past weeks, some survivors are coming from farming sites such as retreat and Stonridge. We have tried to make sure that our mobile centre is not only stationed here but we go inside Hopley with our One Stop Center just to make sure women from all works of life get comprehensive packages of care,” said Sharon.
