By Elah Geoffrey Mbongale
The Luther King Memorial Foundation, LUKMEFCameroon has drawn the curtains on the three-year, EU-sponsored project aimed to make gender-based violence history in the English speaking parts of Cameroon.
This was done during a seminar organised last June 9, 2017 in Limbe to discuss the various lessons learnt during this time and from the various activities carried out by LUKMEF and its partners as well as chart a way forward for further activities that will completely eradicate gender-based violence in our communities.
The seminar held under the watchful eyes and contributions from the representative of the European Union Delegation in Yaounde, Ann-Charlotte Sallmann, LUKMEF Director, Tanyi Christian and CEO of Reach Out Cameroon, Esther Omam.
Amongst the many recommendations arrived at during the Limbe meeting, participants agreed that; stakeholders should establish a coordination and collaborative mechanism at national, regional and community levels to better share knowledge and resources for better results. They also agreed that the unions of traditional rulers and queen mothers be empowered to include ending violence against women and girls. Also, technology should be developed and used in monitoring, reporting and responding to violence against women and girls.
The LUKMEF project dubbed; “Making Gender-Based Violence History in the English speaking parts of Cameroon”, entails raising knowledge level within communities through awareness raising on the issue of violence against women and girls as a human rights violation. It also sought to build community engangement and support by empowering the traditional authorities and specific community committees to monitor, report and prevent violence against women and girls while attempting to mitigate the impact of such violence on the victims through temporal shelter homes and economic empowerment to highly at risk women and girls.
LUKMEF furthered their activism to include creating a platform to investigate and prosecute perpetrators of violence against women and girls by ensuring that victims have legal support as they expose their perpetrators to face justice and for them to have psychological and emotional stability. To this effect, LUKMEF signed and MoU with FIDA and other pro-bono lawyers to provide legal assistance to victims in the North West and South West regions.
It should be noted that, according to a study by the National Institute of Statistics, the Ministry of Economy , Planning and Regional Development, MINEPAT, and the Ministry of Public Health, in 2011, 63% of Cameroonian women aged between 15-49 admitted to haven been subjected to physical and/or sexual violence since the age of 15.
Other studies reveal that a lot of the violence against women and girls occurs in the community and it is well known to members of the community including close family members of the victims. It is on the basis of the above that LUKMEF partnered with the European Union and other local civil society organisations like REACH OUT to take action against gender-based violence in communities and schools.
According to the Director of LUKMEF Cameroon, Tanyi Christian “Based on the outcome of this project, we must move the efforts to the next level by scaling up the project to other regions of Cameroon while developing a more holistic, participative and inclusive approach to eliminating violence against women and girls drawing lessons from the current project. In the next three years therefore, we will scale up the project to six regions of Cameroon viz; North West, South West, Littoral, East and Centre regions.”
The one day seminar to evaluate and mark the close of the project was attended by a cross section of participants including traditional rulers, customary court officials, Queen mothers, lawyers, communicators and victims of gender-based violence.