Discord cripples women’s projects

DIFFERENCES among women undertaking developmental projects are compromising their sustainability, an official has said.

Speaking at the first quarter gender coordination meeting held in Mutare recently, Plan International 18+ programme coordinator Mrs Precious Babbage said group dynamics were threatening the viability of female-driven projects, with some being terminated, others being suspended and a few being abandoned.

“Incompatibility of group members is threatening the viability of projects, as some group members are failing to get along due to conflicting personalities, perceptions and ideologies.

“As a result, some of the projects have been terminated amidst allegations of witchcraft by group members,” Mrs Babbage said.

The inability to manage conflicting personalities, she said, had resulted in factionalism within groups.

“Negative group dynamics are a barrier to development, as has been witnessed through some groups’ failure to manage conflict, which is common whenever there are people of different personalities. Unresolved conflict has degenerated into passivity, with some of the women abandoning their projects.”

Manicaland provincial development officer Mr Emillo Chihono urged femaledriven groups to abide by constitutions in order to try and manage conflict, as well as enhance the sustainability of projects.

He said a constitution would not only provide a code of conduct, but will outline disciplinary measures as well.

“I urge women conducting projects in groups to abide by their constitution, as a guide to ensure that every group member carries out their roles and responsibilities efficiently and effectively. The constitution will also guide on the disciplinary action to take when group members act outside of the constitution,” he said.

Meanwhile, Government has been urged to enhance the mainstreaming of funds for rural women to enable them to start up, scale up or diversify their projects.

The call comes in the wake of concerns by rural women that the requirements for accessing loans cannot be met by most rural women.

Mr Chihono said: “We commend the Government for coming up with facilities like the women empowerment fund from POSB and Agribank, the cross-border facilities and others, but we have since discovered that some of our rural women are failing to access loans due to the requirements.

“Financial institutions offering loans, for instance, require women to have at least $1 000 for them to access a loan facility of $5 000.To date, and to our knowledge, no women have benefited from these facilities, but more than 10 groups of women have applied.”

He also stressed the need to monitor existing groups to make sure that they continue to operate.

“We should prioritise the scaling up of monitoring and evaluation systems in all our districts to monitor our projects. A lot of information is lost due to our monitoring and evaluation systems, which are inefficient.

“We also need to improve on our reporting so that we are able to easily monitor and evaluate our projects in terms of our goals and targets. Figures alone with no attempt to unpack them are nothing. Lack of monitoring has led to the mismanagement of funds by some of these groups.”