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Image: Koketso Phasha
"The National End Gender Based Violence and Femicide (GBVF) Dashboard is a groundbreaking public accountability tool to track South Africa’s progress in ending GBVF."
These were sentiments of Sindisiwe Chikunga, Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities (DWYPD).
Chikunga spoke at the launch of the Roots to Rise: A Movement to End GBVF in Johannesburg on Wednesday morning.
She said South Africa had a serious GBVF problem, largely rooted in patriarchy and historical inequality.
Chikunga expressed that the campaign will go a long way in fighting against GBVF.
"I believe it is campaigns such as the one you are launching today that will move the needle in rallying all of society to reflect on the past, ongoing, and intersectional ways through which violence against women is being reproduced at systemic, structural, household, and individual levels."
Explaining the use of the dashboard, Chikunga said it will will centralise real-time data on service delivery, prevention efforts, and justice outcomes.
"This will allow us to identify patterns, gaps, and progress with clarity. It will also enable us to track implementation across all six pillars of the National Strategic Plan, offering a bird’s-eye view of how our country is responding."
She added: "With this dashboard, we will be able to monitor institutional readiness and hold ourselves accountable to timelines, targets, and survivor-centered outcomes as it integrates multiple data sources, from case backlogs to resource allocations and presents them in an accessible, interactive format to support planning, coordination, and intervention.
"Most importantly, it equips government, civil society, and communities with a single source of truth — a reliable foundation for evidence-based action and transparent reporting."
Chikunga called for continued collaboration, transparency, and community-driven action to make the National Strategic Plan on GBVF a reality in the lives of all South Africans. Chikunga added that: "The dashboard will enable us to go beyond formal definitions of violence and begin to provide context to what we are campaigning against".
Speaking to IOL, The Commission for Gender Equality (CGE) spokesperson Javu Baloyi said: "The minister and her department should make meaningful effort towards resolving the issue of the DNA backlog, it has been proven that cases have been withdrawn due to failure to produce DNA results in court."
"It is for institutions like the DWYPD, the CGE, and other institutions within the sector to be capacitated, both with human and financial resources, to avoid straining the personnel and make faster progress.
"Another issue is that of the delays in prosecution in cases of GBVF and the shortage of court staff who are dedicated to dealing with such matters, from magistrates to judges.
"We believe justice delayed is justice denied. Police also need to get more training in dealing with such cases, There is also a factor of secondary victimization, where suspects get bail and go terrorize communities. It is for this reason that we believe they must not get bail until the cases are thoroughly attended to in court," concluded Baloyi.
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