Betty Makoni, Zimbabwean gender rights activist will be at the Tucson Women’s Commission on December 12 from 3-5 p.m. for an open discussion about her work. The Commission is located at 240 N. Court Avenue, downtown Tucson.
Makoni is a Zimbabwean gender rights activist, speaker and author who founded ‘The Girl Child Network Worldwide’. Since 1999, this non-profit organization has been on a mission to support and promote girls’ rights, empowerment and education. It reaches out to girls wherever they are economically deprived, at risk of abuse, subject to harmful cultural practices, or living in areas of instability and helps them to overcome their circumstances. Beginning in a single school in Zimbabwe, GCNW now operates in primarily rural districts with over 500 clubs serving 70,000 girls. With Betty’s leadership, it has expanded to Kenya, Sierra Leone & Uganda.
In 2011, Newsweek announced Betty Makoni as one of 150 women who shake the world. She is an Ashoka Fellow who has received numerous global humanitarian awards over the past decade for her tireless contributions to the development of girls in Africa. Among these are the 2009 CNN Heroes Award for protecting the powerless, the United Nations Red Ribbon Award for Addressing Gender Inequalities that Fuel the HIV/AIDS Epidemic, the Ginetta Sagan Amnesty International Award, the Unsung Heroes of Compassion Award by the Dalai Lama and a nomination alongside Nelson Mandela for the Decade Child Rights Hero Award.
Makoni calls for activism to start in the home and at the personal level. Her books ignite the spirit of activism by taking the reader through refined personal empowerment process. She is the author of “A woman, Once a Girl: Breaking Silence”, a poetry collection. Her official autobiography “Never again, Not to any woman or girl again” is both inspiring and powerful. Makoni’s words dig deeper into personal issues that many women and girls in Africa and elsewhere dare not speak about. It is a book that breaks taboos in families, work and communities, and is deeply moving.
Makoni embarked on a documentary project to further awareness for her cause: Tapestries of Hope, a feature-length film exposing a widely held virgin cleansing myth that if a man rapes a virgin he will be cured of HIV/AIDS. The documentary focuses on the work of Makoni and the Girl Child Network to protect and re-empower girls who have been victimized through sexual abuse.
Currently living in the UK, Makoni is married to Engineer Irvine Nyamapfene and the couple has three boys.