Source: SABC News
Human Rights Activist, Graca Machel, has again highlighted the plight of Africa's most vulnerable women and children. She was speaking in Durban after receiving the prestigious Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Peace and Reconciliation, on behalf of conflict management institution, Accord.

Accord Chairperson, Graca Machel has also accepted an award for her personal contribution internationally. (SABC)
Machel, who’s the chairperson of the institution, has also accepted an award for her personal contribution internationally. As a renowned advocate for women and children's rights, the plight of the abducted Nigerian schoolgirls remains close to her heart.

Machel says: “These girls are being used as shields of religious intolerance and much more than that. It's not only in Nigeria … in our own boarders; in our own sub-region; here, we have thousands of girls who are being trafficked; thousands of girls with no face, not even statistics because we don't know how many they are"

Machel recently returned from Tanzania and was seemingly perturbed by what she learnt there.

“Girls are being given for marriage at the age of 7, 8, 10, 15 years and even the laws allow a girl to get married at the age of 14. And as you know, Tanzania is our sanctuary as a liberation movement. All of us received a huge solidarity from Tanzania and I had to go and say, ‘yes, we are free politically, but while we have our children being treated like this what can we do together to give a real chance to a child to be a child’.”

The Gandhi Development Trust also acknowledged other liberation struggle stalwarts with the Mahatma Gandhi Satyagraha Award.