Violence Against Women
FIRST Lady Christine Kaseba says gender-based violence (GBV) is a human rights issue that calls for economic empowerment of women to be eradicated.
Dr Kaseba said economic empowerment could only be sustainable if women and girls were equipped with knowledge through education.
She said the biggest cause of GBV in developing nations was poverty among women, which made them wholly dependent on men.
She said many African women looked like beggars as they depended on their spouses for survival, a situation she described as undignifying to the women.
Dr Kaseba said although women in Zambia were being empowered by the Government through programmes such as the social cash transfer to eradicate poverty, it was imperative that they got education empowerment.
She said knowledge was the biggest weapon against GBV and other forms of human rights violations.
She said it was for this reason that the Zambian Government had reintroduced free education from Grade One to Grade Seven and embarked on construction of more schools while training and recruiting more teachers.
The Government, she said, had engaged traditional leaders in the campaign against early marriages so that the girl-child could go to school and attain education that was required to fight poverty.
"Early marriages have resulted in fatal and non-fatal implications. If the young girl does not face maternal death, she would still suffer mentally, socially and economically forever because of the early marriage which would get her out of school and plunge her into everlasting poverty," she said.
Dr Kaseba praised civil society organisations for partnering with the Government in ensuring that the girl-child accessed education.
She paid tribute to the media in Zambia for exposing GBV issues, saying without the media, many issues against women would go unnoticed as victims and their relatives shied away from reporting the vice.
The First Lady is in New York for the 57th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) being held at the United Nations headquarters where she was invited as the World Health Organisation's Goodwill Ambassador on GBV.