Zimbabwe still wakes up to sundry reports of gender-based violence. One girl raped. A wife beaten to death. Another child blamed for the violence committed against her.
Nearly 1 in 3 women aged 15–49 reports having experienced physical violence, and about 1 in 4 has experienced sexual violence since age 15. As of 2022, 16.2% were married before age 18.
Tatenda Wachenuka, a women’s-rights activist, describes the crisis as “a policy disconnect in terms of what we see on paper and what we see on the ground.”
She recalls her grandmother pointing at the scars on her body as she recounted the violence she faced from her husband.
“She would say, ‘Your grandfather beat me with a stick. So when you grow up, find you a partner that doesn’t put their hands on you,’” Wachenuka says.
For Wachenuka, tiny in size even by her own admission, these stories became the foundation of a lifelong commitment to standing up for women.
Today, as team lead and founder of the Harare-based Young Women’s Pink Foundation, she has transformed that childhood resolve into a dynamic organisation devoted to young women’s rights across Zimbabwe.
Surrounded by women who led families and provided for their households, Wachenuka couldn’t reconcile the world’s insistence that women couldn’t lead. Her family normalised her grandmother’s violence from her grandfather with time.
“When violence happens over and over again in a family, people tend to become silent about it,” Wachenuka explains.
In high school, long before she knew what feminism was, she found herself drawn to advocacy. As deputy mayor in Zimbabwe’s junior parliament system, she gravitated towards causes related to justice for female students facing harassment. Some of her teachers predicted she would become an advocate.
Shaping an advocate
Wachenuka went on to obtain a Bachelor’s in Peace and Governance (2017) and a Master’s in International Relations (2021) from Bindura University of Science Education.
The clarity came during her university years when she volunteered at the Zimbabwe Women’s Resource Centre and Network, where professional feminist work finally gave shape to what had always been an innate calling.
In 2016, she founded the Young Women’s Pink Foundation as a university club to teach girls about their rights. By 2017, it became licensed by the Zimbabwe Youth Council and later became a registered trust in 2020.
But Wachenuka made a crucial decision on this course: rather than rushing to build the organisation while clueless about institutional management, she spent years deliberately building herself professionally.
She worked for grassroots groups and international organisations. However, in 2025, while nursing her newborn daughter, Wachenuka began to reflect on her work.
Soon afterwards, she gathered colleagues willing to work with organisations without funding and launched in earnest. The response was overwhelming; organisations flooded her with partnership requests.
“When I look at what we have done so far, it’s a work that most institutions, if we’re being fair, can take a year or two to achieve,” she remarks.
The foundation’s work coalesces around women’s rights advocacy, gender equality leadership and participation, and research management.
A trigger for action
The organisation’s urgency amplified when a 12-year-old pupil was raped in broad daylight at a public bus terminus. It was so brazen that it signalled a frightening erosion of safety for girls in spaces where they should be protected.
The incident raised a deeper question in Wachenuka: “if people can and are daring to violate young children in public, what else is happening behind closed doors that is not?”
The case became the trigger for a three-month Ridza Mhere campaign, a Shona word for “Let out a loud cry,” culminating on December 10, International Human Rights Day, combining digital advocacy with intensive community-level mobilisation to ensure the message reaches those often left out of online conversations.
Prior to the 16 Days of Activism against gender-based violence, another case emerged: a seventeen-year-old student with developmental challenges, raped by classmates on video.
Sadly, the public response revealed the depth of Zimbabwe’s rape culture, people defended perpetrators, suggesting the child’s school uniform was “too short.”
Wachenuka acknowledges the country’s ratified conventions, gender ministry, and comprehensive laws. “But on a daily basis, you still have young children being raped, being murdered, women being killed.”
With high unemployment rates, when men expected to be providers fail to feed their families, physical violence often erupts in response to confrontation. The foundation has documented cases where economic desperation directly correlates with increased domestic violence.
Women report their abusive spouses to the police, only to return by day’s end saying, “No, release him. He’s the one that feeds my family.”
To address this, the foundation observed that prescriptions for problems from their eyes could not solve the problem in communities, so they chose the learning strategy.
“We have realised that the reason why we have these policies that don’t work for us is because we are not listening to communities.”
Today, they convene leadership schools for young women who would never otherwise access such opportunities, but only after conducting needs assessments.
They employ future literacy models, starting with young women envisioning the future they want, then working backwards.
The organisation also runs “Dandemutande Feminist Circles”, a Spiderweb inspired healing spaces where young women can interconnectedly shed society’s burdens and help themselves.
So far, the work comes with profound challenges, but the most painful is what Wachenuka calls the failure to reconcile the empowered young woman with her patriarchal environment.
“The more you empower young women without empowering young men or the men that they stay with, you are doing a disservice,” she observes.
To counter this, the foundation now works with men as allies, ensuring they receive the same information because once communities label you as “these angry women that hate men,” even legitimate issues get dismissed.
New frontiers of gender-based violence
Technology has introduced new forms of abuse, with leaked intimate images becoming what Wachenuka calls “a new animal” of digital gender-based violence.
Organisations find themselves constantly playing catch-up within a funding landscape full of restrictions. Grants arrive with predetermined objectives that often miss actual community needs, but Wachenuka advocates for funders to visit communities themselves before dictating how funds can be used.
She further illustrates the disconnect between urban activism and rural realities with a stark example.
When feminist circles mobilised to crowdfund sending a rural teenage bride back to school, the young woman refused, asking instead for something to help her make money. The feminists were outraged.
“We’re not listening. We are making assumptions, and we’re giving prescriptions,” Wachenuka observes.
The foundation’s current Izwi project, “voice” in Shona, aims to bridge the gap between policy and reality. They’re gathering evidence about what young women actually want regarding economic opportunities, political participation, and civil rights.
Once compiled, they’ll present these demands to the National Assembly, leveraging increased parliamentary appetite to engage with community-based civil society.
Looking ahead, Wachenuka envisions building a movement rooted in communities’ lived realities.
“You can’t tell me that post 35 years, post-Beijing, we’re still discussing the same things that we discussed at the Beijing conference. It shows us that we are implementing a model that doesn’t work,” she says.
One memory that stays with her was during a walk-in campaign in Hopley, a typically overlooked community—partnerships materialised.
Local authorities gave speeches. But the moment that shook Wachenuka most was seeing men voluntarily take the stage, committing publicly to doing better. A married couple danced to show solidarity.
“That activity felt like the community itself just wanted a space to convene and just self-reflect.”
For Wachenuka, real change happens in those spaces—homes strained by economic pressure, digital platforms where images become weapons, bus ranks where children should but do not feel safe. These are the front lines where Zimbabwe’s future will be shaped.
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