Civic Education Programme Activities
The CRD’s civic education program is conducted through rural and urban workshops, public meetings, community exchange programs and seminars where communities are educated and trained on the following 5 thematic areas;

V. Gender mainstreaming and women issues
Zimbabwe is largely a patriarchal and masculine society. As a result there is the oppression of women by men due to cultural, religious and other social constructs. One mechanism to promote the rights of women is to empower them through women centred community development.CRD is working with CBOs in the communities to capacitate women to be actively involved in the management of their resources in order to derive benefits. This empowerment exercise will see women forming organisations that work with developmental partners in sustainable joint ventures that promote women’s economic independence. CRD tries to address this problem by mainstreaming gender during its civic education and research activities. Gender is viewed as a set of social and cultural practices that influences the lives of women. A culture which is an informal education system in societies sets attributes, roles, characteristics and values considered appropriate for men and women. This culture shapes structures of society such as media, education, healthy, security, economic, legal and governance systems that formulates and implement policies that sideline, oppress and discriminate women. Against such a background the CRD discovered that the starting point in addressing gender based violence (GBV) or violence against women (VAW) is to transform the culture. There is need to change the mindset of the community through civic education. There is need to identify the custodians of cultural principles, identify the violent cultural principles and devise ways of transforming it with the involvement of every community member. Traditional leaders, women and men are engaged in focus group discussions to find ways of emancipating women from cultural and social bondage. The CRD through the civic education projects it advocates for women to get ownership, control and access of resources as well as occupying decision making positions in their communities. The CRD also ensures that women are represented in the peace boards so as to empower them.



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