Tinokunda Shumba– 3rd Cohort Fellow

Shumba Tinokunda Moses is a third cohort fellow who is working in Binga District. As a fellow who is working in one of the most marginalized communities, he discovered that the girl child is quite disadvantaged, this being based on lack of knowledge ignorance and partly cultural values which put more attention to the boy child letting the girls suffer in silence. This results in the girl child dropping out of school, early marriage (child marriage), which makes a rise in illiteracy level of my community. This tradition reflected its results at Sinamsanga Secondary when out of eighteen (18) enrolled form one students, only three were girls, the rest had dropped out after writing their grade seven examinations. Moses and his co-TFZ  fellow (Makuvire P) decided the do a campaign on bringing back the girl child to the classroom , which they gave the motto “IN THE CLASSROOM I BELONG, I AM NOT YET A MOTHER”. The idea was a successful because they partnered with other organizations like AKASHINGA formerly IAPF , and CAMFED CAMA learner guides , the first call for the campaign was a mass lecture to the girl child where the girls were being taught the good of education and effects of early child marriages . The second phase was a community engagement meeting where Chief Sinamsanga was invited and issues to do with the empowerment of the girl child were discussed. During the meeting they emphasized that learners who had dropped out of school should come for form 1 , to continue their education , the guest of the meeting (Chief), during his speech appreciated the move that we had raised , and emphasized the issue of early marriages as illegal, he then promised to take further steps to end the practice of marrying the minors , the board agreed that learners should be brought back to school and those had married minors to report to the chief following a given date . The meeting barred fruitful results because after 2 weeks the form one class enrolled up to 30 learners with 13 being girls. Currently all the newly enrolled learners are performing very well and we still have hope that their performance will continue raising none of them had dropped out so far ,  special thanks to the following organization for their participation towards educational equity and empowerment of the girl child in the marginalised areas ,Teach For Zimbabwe and Teach for all, AKASHINGA and CAMFED.

Add Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

I accept the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy