The state’s gender equality policies have failed to yield significant change in the lives of women and young girls. The Rise programme seeks to redress this.
The Soul City Institute is a nongovernmental organisation that has focused on social and behaviour change communication for over 20 years. It relaunched in 2016 as a social justice organisation that focusses on young women and girls and the communities they live in.
In South Africa, it is estimated that approximately 200 young women aged 15 to 24 are infected with HIV each day. Research shows that young women carry the heaviest burden in South Africa and are the most vulnerable to gender-based violence and HIV.
The specific challenges for young women and girls
More than 50% of youth are girls and young women aged 15 to 35 years of age.
Women are the poorest in the country, and the least educated and least employed. They have greater child-rearing responsibilities and significant social and structural barriers related to their sexual and reproductive health and rights.
South Africa has the largest number of people living with HIV in the world, and the epidemic is distinctly “feminised”. Young women and girls aged 15-24 years old are at a significant, disproportionate risk of becoming infected. Over 2 300 new HIV infections occur per week in this age group.
HIV prevalence in adolescent girls aged 15-19 is up to eight times higher than in males. Young women aged 20-24 are more than three times more likely to be infected with HIV than their male peers.
Social and economic power imbalances between men and women in South Africa leave young women especially vulnerable and limit their ability to negotiate safer sex and protect themselves from HIV.
They also face barriers in accessing HIV prevention, treatment, care and support services due to limited decision-making power, lack of control over financial resources, restricted mobility and care responsibilities.
Young women and girls also encounter high levels of violence against women — including rape, domestic violence and sexual assault — which stunts opportunities for development, and are recognised as major social drivers of the South African HIV epidemic.
While teenage fertility is declining, absolute rates remain high with 74 083 deliveries annually in women under 18 years. The South African Youth Context report released in 2011 asserts that 9.5% of male and 6% of female high school learners reported having had an abortion or a partner who had had an abortion, and only 48% of these learners reported using legal health services. The report shows that 10% of female learners reported being forced to have sex. More than 45 000 female learners fell pregnant in 2009, with teenage pregnancy representing one of the leading causes of early school dropouts (after economic reasons). Girls and young women are also subjected to cultural practices that are extremely harmful including child and forced marriages; female genital mutilation and virginity testing are still practised in some areas.
Women and girls are not enjoying the freedom or human rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Patriarchy and the gendered power relations between men and women are among the reasons for inequality and the low status of women in South Africa.
South Africa has signed and ratified international human rights instruments and has developed national mechanisms to action and protect them. The state has pursued gender equality policies, set up gender institutions and applied gender mainstreaming and specific actions to address inequalities and discrimination faced by women. However, attempts to make gender equality a central pillar of the transformation process and the country’s development agenda, including national plans for growth and development, have failed to yield significant change in the lives of women and young girls.
Rise programme
Soul City’s current flagship programme, the Rise Young Women and Girls Movement is a club-based programme. The target audience is young women and girls between 15 and 25 years old, predominantly in informal settlements and rural areas, where HIV prevalence is high.
The Rise programme seeks to enable young women and girls to be active participants in their communities by addressing issues of gender discrimination and gender equality, and by being linked to community services such as HIV testing, career counselling and employment opportunities.
The Rise programme supports young women to initiate Rise Clubs in their communities, with a focus on sharing information and discussing sexual and reproductive health and rights issues, as well as personal development and undertaking community projects and interventions.