Court Acquits Former Roma Girls Teacher

The acquital of the former Roma Girls teacher makes sad reading. Passing judgment in a case where Humphrey Kayela and his brother Roy Chilingwa Kazembe were charged with two counts of defilement, margistrate Lameck Ng'ambia after analyzing evidence said he found the duo not guilty and accordingly acquitted them.

The coalition has responded by making contacts with other stakeholders including Member of Parliament for Mandevu Constituency in Lusaka, Hon. Jean Kapata to strategize on next steps.

Picture below from right- Honorable Jean Kapata,  Nelson Banda of the Boys network and 2 KBF lawyers who are part of the coalition.

"Safe Spaces Cluster" - Population Council at Work in the Coalition

A "safe space" is a safe place where girls will regularly meet in a group, so that they are able to build friendships with other girls in the group. These safe spaces will also help the girls build trusting friendships with their mentors and will be able to turn to the mentors when they have a problem. Safe space meetings will also help girls reduce their vulnerability to sexual harassment and violence.

One critical piece of preventing gender based violence among adolescent girls is create and support safes spaces for girls, within the school setting, where they can build social, human, and economic assets – learning basic health and financial education, as well as an understanding of their rights and an increase in their self-esteem. The Population Council is helping to support, monitor, and evaluate the Safe Spaces cluster within the TAAAC Coalition. This cluster, also including CAMFED, FAWEZA, YWCA, and PPAZ, will work in six Lusaka schools to implement these programs for girls, as well as involving mentors, teachers, and parents. The core of this program will involve girls meeting weekly in groups, facilitated by a mentor. Mentors running safe spaces will have a better understanding of girls’ rights and issues and will be able to address their concerns, provide appropriate referrals, and implement strategies to build girls’ assets;

Population Council collected data on teachers and students according to their sex in the Safe Space schools. These schools include: Munali Girls High School, Chazanga Basic School, Kamwala High School, Chongwe Basic School and Kamulanga High School.

Next Population council guided the safe spaces on how to recruit most vulnerable girls in the safe space program by using a checklist questionnaire, which includes questions on age, grade, living situation, if their parents are alive, if they have ever being absent from school and why , and if their community is violent or not. Organizations used this information to select the most vulnerable girls at each school to participate in the program.

During the recruitment of the girls the safe space cluster also organized sensitization meetings with the teachers and community members to share with them about the program. The Safe Space program was very welcomed and they pledged their support.

Population Council, in consultation with the safe spaces cluster, compiled a curriculum with topics on human rights, reproductive health and contraceptives, relationships, life skills, HIV/AIDS and STIs, gender and gender based violence, financial education, and substance abuse. This curriculum will be used both to train the group mentors and for use during the weekly sessions with the girls in the 5 schools.

Adolescent Girls Capacity Building and Program Design Workshop

From March 1st – 4th, the Population Council hosted a workshop on Adolescent Girls Capacity Building and Program Design. The purpose of the workshop was to help Zambian NGOs and CBOs to understand the best practices of adolescent girls programs and work with them to develop high quality program plans to reach vulnerable adolescent girls within their own programs. Some groups already had girl-only programming and were looking to strengthen or expand their work; some groups were developing a girl-only program component for the first time. The workshop included sessions on asset building, savings and financial education, working with parents/communities, recruitment, monitoring and evaluation, fundraising, and more.

Among the 15 organizations who participated were the four organizations from the Safe Spaces Cluster – YWCA Lusaka, CAMFED, PPAZ, and FAWEZA. These four organizations used the opportunity to work closely with girls programming experts to develop their program design for the safe spaces program that will be carried out under the TAAAC activities.

Upcoming event: 2nd week of September 2010 - training of mentors in the 5 schools where the safe spaces program is being implemented.

TAAAC's Inception

In 2006, a girl aged 13 was sexually abused by her teacher at a known school in Lusaka, Zambia. The minor and her guardian sued the teacher, along with the school and the Zambian Ministry of Education. This case attracted public attention and was followed closely by many people both locally and outside the country. On June 30th, 2008, the presiding Judge, Philip Musonda delivered a judgment in the High Court of Zambia in which the victim was awarded K45 million Kwacha (about $13 000) as compensation.

Justice Musonda made the following telling observation:

“The government is responsible for all school going children in the care of its agents — such as teachers, school authorities and any other person in it’s employment during the time the schools are in session,”

This case became one of the few that have held government accountable for its obligations to the African Union’s Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa to which Zambia is a signatory. The case has been hailed as a landmark judgement for the bold step taken by the Judge who held the Government liable for the violation of the girl Child in school and the state was asked to award damages.

The plight of this girl child was followed with keen interest by Equality Now, an organisation that works with national human rights organizations and individual activists to documents violence and discrimination against women and mobilizes international action to support their efforts to stop these human rights abuses. Equality Now saw this case as an appropriate advocacy tool for effecting the necessary change in Zambia and convened and strategised with various civil society organisations in Zambia to develop a program to address violence against girls by teachers.

After a few consultative meetings with Equality Now, some Zambian civil society organisations saw the need to form a coalition. In the formative stages of this coalition, Sara Longwe, (see picture below)

a renowned Human Rights Activist played a critical role, offering her wealth of experience in conjunction with the NGOCC that hosted most of the coalition meetings.

Since its inception, the coalition has developed a multi-faceted approach to fight violence against girls, under the banner of “Our girls, our future: building synergy to end violence against girls in Zambia,” using funds from the UN Trust Fund. This intiative is focused on securing justice for girls who experience sexual abuse and strengthen the national legal framework to address violence against women and girls.


In January, 2010 Equality Now hired a Consultant (TAAAC Coordinator), Shupe Makashinyi to coordinate the activities of the coalition. The coalition was officially launched on February 18th, 2010, at a colourful and well attended cocktail held at the Southern Sun Hotel in Lusaka.

The launch was preceded by the coalition building workshop which was attended by all implementing partners, and three members of staff from the lead implementing agency, Equality Now: Yasmeen Hassan, Director of Programmes (New York office); Faiza Mohamed, Director of Programmes (Nairobi office), and Muthoni Muriithi, Programme Officer (Nairobi office). The Country Director of Population Council, Dr. Jill Keesbury (see picture below), also attended the workshop to explain Population Council's responsibility of monitoring and evaluating the coalition's activities.


Among the people who attended the official launch were Hon. Richard Taima, Deputy Minister of Education, Hon. Lucy Changwe, Deputy Minister for Gender, her Lordship Deputy Chief Justice, Irene Mambilima, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Services, Mr. Ngosa Chisupa, NGO Directors, senior officials from the Ministry of Health and the Zambia Police Service, and other valuable stakeholders. (The three Equality Now Staff members, from left to right Muthoni, Yasmeen and Faiza)


Although the problem of sexual abuse of adolescent girls in Zambia has been growing at a very fireghtening rate, it is gratifying to note that there has also been a growing recognition of the need to safeguard the rights of adolescent girls and to ensure that interventions are centred on the concerns of these girls. This is what the coalition is seeking to do for the girl child in Zambia.