Girl Power Programme Reloaded

12 Aug 2025

We are in our second year of the Girl Power Project in collaboration with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund and we are excited to see the project develop further into this second year.

Violence against AGYW is a deep-rooted issue in SA, linked to social, economic & cultural factors. ASSITEJ SA has partnered with the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund (NMCF) on the GIRL POWER project since January 2024, and this work will now extend to March 2026.

Our goal is to address GBV through an experiential, arts-based approach, using theatre as a powerful tool to bring awareness to communities and children. The project roll-out includes:

Professional productions contextualised for communities
Child-led productions created with learners
Workshops enabling reflection, dialogue, and learning

This year comes with a few new additions to our offering:

The involvement of the voices and participation of males and young boys.
Economic empowerment for some of our female artists in the programme.

Gender-based Violence is a very urgent topic in our country and there has been national mobilisation and advocacy to declare it a national disaster. In 2020, President Cyril Ramaphosa called it a second pandemic, running parallel to the very hard-hitting COVID Pandemic. This scourge directly affects the lives of many adolescent girls and young women, and in year 1 of the project, they were our primary focus. Yet GBV is a very nuanced issue which affects many varied groups, including the LGBTQI community, children and males from different walks of life. Children of any gender are often victims of this dilemma.

In the second year of the project, we are including the voices of males, boys and men as allies, survivors, protectors and advocates for action against GBV. In the child-led performances, we would like more male children to be part of telling stories around GBV, as they too are affected by this scourge. We cannot hold the conversation in a vacuum. This pandemic needs all of us to be educated and to participate in making meaningful change happen.

In August 2025, we are conducting workshops designed to educate and bring awareness to teachers, community members, and the artist facilitators who will be working with the children and local Community Policing and Child Protection forms regarding GBV – using an experiential arts-based approach to bring this information and some of these big concepts to life.

At the end of year 1, we created a manual using GBV knowledge and arts-based methodology as a tool in these workshops. These were designed with/for community members and learners as well. The locations included in the project are: KwaZulu Natal (Newlands, Umlazi, Inanda, Ntuzuma and KwaMashu), Free State (Heidedal, Bloemfontein), Eastern Cape (Makhanda, Mthatha, East London), Western Cape (Delft) and Limpopo (Thouyondou).

We have also started online workshops geared at 25 female artists from all 5 provinces, addressing professional and personal economic empowerment and education. Having an independent socio-economic stance as individuals is one of the biggest challenges for women regarding their agency and impacts on their capacity to respond to GBV when it occurs. We hope that through these workshops, we can help this chosen group of women gain agency, autonomy and make more educated choices and decisions about their financial life – which may, in turn, ripple on to other areas of their lives.

We remain committed and dedicated to the fight against GBV and to ending this struggle faced by many members of our society. We believe that art is one of our most powerful educational tools in the schools and communities of South Africa.

– Tsholofelo Shounyane, Education Coordinator, ASSITEJ South Africa