Gender Based Violence Conference Meeting

Yesterday morning I attended a meeting in King Williams Town about the upcoming Gender Based Violence Conference. The meeting was at the office of Eastern Cape Social Development and Special Programs. This was one of the most beautiful offices I have ever seen! I snapped some quick pictures to share.

I loved the trees painted on this wall

A staircase in the office

Part of the outside of the building - it was huge!

We arrived a bit late to the meeting, but were able to listen to the last few items. I quickly caught up and learned that there would be a large two-day conference put on at the end August to close Women's Month. This conference is a result of a growing trend of gender based violence in the Eastern Cape. The hope is that by drawing attention to this issue and speaking up about change these statistics will start to decline. 

This conference will have presenters speaking about some different areas of gender based violence. The CGE will be speaking regarding the role of men and women to fight gender based violence. This issue is in the mandate of the CGE and so this is the perfect topic. They will also be contributing brochures to the conference so people attending will have access to their great resources. 

I also learned about a great resource for women who are victims of gender based violence. In the Eastern Cape there are centres which are called White Door Centres of Hope. These are places where women can go to seek refuge from violence at any time. Once they arrive they are immediately set up with a counsellor and later with a social worker. From these centres they can also be directed to safe houses, and set up with many other resources such as legal advice. There is hope that there will be up to 30 of these centres set up in the Eastern Cape. At the meeting the stakeholders were discussing the design of the doors at these buildings. I was not able to snap a picture of the sample of the door but I will hopefully be able to post one soon.  

I learned a lot of other stuff during this meeting as well. After the formal meeting was over the woman who is heading up the planning for the conference sat down with me and Nokuthula (the provincial administrator of our office) to catch us up on anything else we missed. She told us about problems there were having with planning the event. Unfortunately there is no funding set aside for this event. This has created problems with venue, promotional materials and transportation. As a solution the conference planners are looking for sponsors for the event as well as using creative solutions to problem solve. For example, as they cannot afford to provide transportation for those coming from out of the area they are arranging carpooling. Employees from the provincial office will be picking people up on the way to the conference so that they are still able to attend. I thought this was a brilliant money saving tip and so great for the environment too! 

I will be blogging more about this conference as I continue to follow the planning as well as the CGE's role. Also, as a side note I wanted to share pictures of something I found while at the bathroom of the conference.

Yes! Those are condoms. In the bathroom there were containers fixed to the wall full of free packs of condoms. It looked like there were about twelve condoms in each pack. For anyone who doesn't know the red ribbon represents HIV/AIDS. What a great initiative to stop the spread!