. . . but shrinking donor support stifles programmes
She-Hive, a non-profit, non-partisan, and non-governmental organisation, continues to empower victims of Gender-Based Violence (GBV) with psychosocial support, livelihoods, and access to medical and legal services through referral systems. After 13 years in operation, She-Hive Founder and Executive Director, Mamakhethe Phomane, who is also a survivor of GBV, sat down with Lesotho Times reporter Moroke Sekoboto and delved into the organisation’s achievements, challenges, and mission. Ms Phomane highlighted resource mobilisation as a major challenge that hinders them from reaching all the victims and survivors of GBV.
LT: The She-Hive Association is a non-profit NGO that was legally registered in 2012. What would you say are the milestones among your achievements since then in advocating for survivors of GBV? Could you please highlight ONE or TWO landmark cases of survivors of GBV, and how, with the help of your organisation, their families, health, or livelihoods have been restored?
MP: We have a few achievements, first, we have embarked on a new project, where we advocate for the decriminalisation of abortion. We have a very big milestone in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, where there is a committee that is formed to advocate for the decriminalisation of abortion.
Lesotho is the chair of the committee through She-Hive Association because of our immense contribution in fighting GBV. We also have the best practice of including women and girls through our project, where they become part of the decision makers in the communities. We are working with chiefs in this one, and I am proud to say that it is being implemented in five districts (Butha Buthe, Leribe, Berea, Maseru, and Mafeteng).
We have approached many community leaders to include issues affecting women in public gatherings, for them to raise and discuss them. Another achievement is that we have survived, because it is not easy to grow an NGO, and we are now 13 years old where other NGOs are formed and fail to succeed. We are still growing despite facing many challenges, as we are gaining recognition from international donors.
LT: Do you have statistics that you can share with us to gauge the impact of your work to date?
MP: We have helped many victims, we have several cases which have been in the courts of law, and we have judgments, while some are still ongoing. We have helped survivors during such cases by supporting them throughout the case. We give them psychosocial support so that they don’t feel neglected, lost, and alone in court. We have several cases in which we got justice for our members.
I think we have about 15 cases so far that have been to court; others are cases that we solve without going to court. These are cases where we mediate and resolve ourselves because they are not serious enough to go to court. Some women are abused and are afraid to report, and we encourage women to take action against the abuse they face. After they come to us, they report their perpetrators, and we help them with counselling. We have the task groups that are made up of women, which oversee GBV issues that happen in those districts, and refer the clients according to how case management works.
We are now operating in seven districts, but we lack resources to reach the hard-to-reach districts due to lack of resources. We have formed task teams that are ready to tackle issues of GBV in Butha Buthe, Leribe, Berea, Maseru, and Mafeteng. We are yet to form similar teams in Mohale’s Hoek and Quthing.
LT: Among your objectives includes efforts to influence behaviour change in families. Understandably, your focus is on women and children who are almost always the victims of GBV. However, it has since emerged that men can also be victims of emotional, verbal, or even physical abuse in some families, with women as the perpetrators. Do you, therefore, have any special programmes towards male victims of such abuse? If not, do you have any plans like this?
MP: We have a programme that is called ‘Men Engage’ where we engage men to come and take the lead in the fight against GBV. Since it targets men, it encourages men to stop remaining silent when they are being verbally and emotionally abused. It has been realised that men, too, are abused, so they have to take away their pride and speak out when they are abused.
Men become perpetrators because they are abused, they become angry because of emotional abuse, and then they keep their anger until it bursts, and they end up physically abusing their partners. Women talk a lot about things that hurt men, and that is emotional abuse, which men do not address but rather keep silent, and end up physically abusing women.
So, Men Engage is all about helping men to realise that they too are being abused and they should take action and speak out when they experience GBV, which occurs to them and their families. Because in some cases, GBV that is done by men happens as a result of pressure from their parents. Some end up committing suicide because they are under pressure to please their mother and wife.
We have norms and culture that are harmful to our society, so we are trying to advocate for reviewing our cultural norms and traditions as Basotho and take good things instead of using them to accelerate GBV. There is an English idiom that says, ‘matters within the house are known to mice’, but we are saying people should speak out because such silence has killed many women. There should be no privacy in such matters.
LT: Strengthening and capacitating community leaders in championing behavioural change is among the ideals you are striving towards. May you please take us through how you engage community leaders, who, in most cases, are older men? Do you have a stand-alone or specific programme tailormade towards such an intervention?
MP: We engage community leaders to give youths and women a platform to express their opinions on issues affecting them in their communities, and we have succeeded, as when there are public gatherings, they are given such opportunities.
LT: Breaking the chain of silence has been a pillar of your efforts so that victims can speak out and get help. In practice, most women tend to suffer in silence because they depend on the husband’s regular income to survive, yet the same husband could be the abuser. How do you get around this challenge and, for instance, guarantee the safety of a GBV survivor after confiding in you and then going back to the same family to face the same abuser?
MP: We have embarked on a journey to encourage women and children to report abuse. We are advocating for a review of bail law, as to who is given bail. This is because a father can abuse his child, and the mother encourages the child to report the abuse, then the very same day, the father is granted bail. What is going to happen when he comes home?
Where a man has assaulted a woman, we encourage the woman to report the case. Often the man is granted bail and have a chance to murder her, hence we have these alarming statistics of women who are killed by men. It is a challenge that we still have as an organisation, which is also negatively affecting us in doing our work. It is a challenge because, in most cases, men are the providers, and that causes women not to report GBV. We encourage women to be economically independent and avoid dependency on their husbands because they never know when their husbands will abuse them. We also equip survivors with skills to make a living and start afresh if they are not returning to their families. We instil them with confidence and help them realise that their lives matter, not the wealth their husband has.
LT: How does your organisation work with the government and, in particular, with the Ministry of Social Development, whose brief is to manage social problems? Share examples of programmes if possible.
MP: We work closely with the Ministry of Social Development and Gender, as I mentioned. We advocate for the review of laws and are assisting the government in reviewing laws where necessary. We are in partnership with the government to provide safe houses for the survivors of GBV, which gives them safe spaces while we are still resolving their issues.
LT: Would you say you have made significant inroads into hard-to-reach communities where barriers of fear and stigma are more pervasive than in urban and more enlightened communities? If that is the case, please share some details about it.
MP: We have not been able to access hard-to-reach communities like Thaba-Tseka, Mokhotlong, and Qacha’s Nek, but we are planning to do that as long as we get funding. We are a bit challenged to reach them because of a lack of resources, but in the lowlands, we are already making a positive impact with a focus on rural areas where there is a lack of services.
LT: Donor funding has been drying up for many NGOs lately, especially since the COVID-19 outbreak. This has been worsened by the spending cuts effected by US President Donald Trump, with the suspension of USAID interventions in many countries. How has this affected your operations, or do you have different donors?
MP: It negatively impacted us, especially that of President Trump, because he withdrew funding when we were about to start a programme aimed at supporting the victims of GBV, after we found a donor supported by USAID. A donor had asked us to give him the list of survivors for him to support economically.
Immediately after we made the statistics, that is when the funding was withdrawn. It really affected us because we had engaged the survivors that they were going to be strengthened economically. It is tough as donors are now scarce because they used to get funding from the US. It is very difficult; we are struggling with operational costs, and we are even working with volunteers who are seeking to gain experience due to high unemployment.
LT: What have been your hardest challenges over the past 13 years that you have operated in Lesotho? Would you say such challenges are unique to Lesotho, or are they common worldwide?
MP: I am not sure if it is facing Lesotho only, but our biggest challenge has been resource mobilisation, as an organization that does great work, we don’t have the money to be fully functional. It is because of our passion that this organization still exists, but a lack of resources is our big challenge. Some organizations get funding from the government, but we don’t get it, yet they come to us for research and statistics.
LT: Where do you want to see She Hive in another 10 or 20 years in terms of its interventions? Share with us your medium to long-term vision.
MP: We want to have a well-enhanced and strengthened coordination of services aimed at improving the lives of women and children who are survivors of domestic violence.
