Empower. Educate. Represent.

I recently begun a six month stint volunteering in Arusha, Tanzania with an NGO called Inherit Your Rights.

This placement is funded through the Australian Government's Australian Volunteers program, which each year sends 800 skilled volunteers overseas to assist NGOs whose purposes align with Australian Aid priorities. This includes gender empowerment and education.

This is precisely the area Inherit Your Rights focuses on. Inherit Your Rights traditionally began working with widows but now has expanded to work with vulnerable women and children to educate them on their human rights, most notably around access to land and property.

In rural Tanzania, widows are extremely vulnerable to abuse: under customary law, when a man dies, his wife inherits nothing. The man’s children are his rightful heirs. However, if the children are too young to assert their rights, the man’s family often takes advantage of the situation, and expels the widow and her children from the family land. These women, alone and with no means of supporting themselves or their children, need both legal representation and practical assistance.

By providing training to communities so women are aware of their rights, and if needed can be equipped with the tools to provide self representation for themselves in court, plays a critical role in empowering women through education.

This feeds into United Nation's Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender Equality and Goal 4, Quality Education.

So why is this all so important? Well, ending all forms of discrimination against women and girls is not only a basic human right, but it also crucial to accelerating sustainable development. It has been proven time and again, that empowering women and girls has a multiplier effect, and helps drive up economic growth and development across the board. When you empower women, in effect you are empowering an entire community. Women and girls are a powerful and pivotal force for change.

At my first training session with Inherit Your Rights this week, it was truly inspiring to see a group of engaged and passionate women so eagerly wanting to learn about their rights. They were asking questions, initiating discussion and fiercely writing notes. The training is part of a 16 week curriculum which covers everything from land and property rights to inheritance, domestic abuse, divorce and more. Although there are circumstances that sometimes impact the women's ability to attend sessions such as work and family commitments and weather conditions (rainy season in Arusha turns dirt roads into a sea of mud within a matter of minutes), these women cross flooded fields, bring their young children and manage to find the time to attend and participate. And most importantly, once they have this valuable knowledge, they can pass this onto other women into the community so they too can become empowered and aware of their rights. 

Although worldwide we are still a long way from gender equality, it is inspiring to see grassroots movements like these that are making a real impact at a local level, one woman at a time.