Marvis Gwenha, 69, is the founder of the Women’s Voluntary Intercessors Trust Zimbabwe. Her organisation equips women with skills in farming, catering, preaching and several other sectors.
Under a memorandum of understanding signed recently, Mozambican women imparted skills such as necklace and sandal manufacturing and food catering to marginalised rural women in Zimbabwe.
The visitors spent two nights at the rural home of Chief Chikukwa, who works with WITZ. The women later reciprocated the gesture and visited their Mozambican counterparts on a five-day educational visit.
“I founded the Trust in 2006 after realising that rural woman could not be separated from farming and preaching. The fact that the women were generally regarded as second-class citizens fuelled my desire to improve their lot,” said Gwenha, noting that she would actually share skills with the women not impose her knowledge on them.
She recently constructed a gazebo at her Borrowdale home to use as an office. Current beneficiaries of the project are women from Gokwe, Mutoko, Goromonzi and Murewa, but the initiative will soon spread to other parts of the country.
In most of her endeavours, Gwenha uses her own resources to empower the beneficiaries as she travels to targeted areas to share her own skills with the women. She works closely with the Zimbabwe Farmers Union.
The project’s Mozambican counterparts were given some 200 acres of land on which to run women’s training, and Gwenha appealed to the authorities to follow suit and allocate her adequate land to use for training purposes.
The Mozambicans conduct both practical and theoretical lessons on their land, and Gwenha dreams of running a similar institution on a spacious plot in Zimbabwe during her lifetime.
Fact box
Marvis Gumbo was born in 1945. She did Cambridge Ordinary Level education before studying for A Levels through correspondence. She later trained as a school teacher and worked as such from 1969-2001 when she retired. She now does relief teaching at Vainona Primary, a school where she broke the records by becoming the first black teacher in the early 1980s. Women Voluntary Intercessors Trust is an affiliate of Rural Women’s Assembly.
Post published in: Gender Equality