Girl Child Network Zimbabwe Selected amongst Top African Investors-On the Up
At the time of our visit, we still hadn’t met Betty, just spoken on the phone from her new home in Essex. This was enough to give us a flavour of Betty’s character… tenacious, passionate and powerful. But the two days we spent with her organisation in Zimbabwe, Girl Child Network (GCN), gave us a whole new sense of this formidable woman. To hundreds of thousands of Zimbabwean girls, Betty Makoni is an icon.
Like many social entrepreneurs, Betty has a personal motivation behind her work. Perfectly at ease with sharing her story, she told us, “When I was raped as a child, I knew I had been wronged and I also knew I wasn’t the only one.” She also grew up a witness to the cruelty of her father who regularly beat her mother. “I pleaded with my mother to report her suffering to a police officer but she said she couldn’t do it. The family is our nucleus and we have to stay together – that is the mantra of our country.”…….
Read on http://www.ontheup.org.uk/index.php/2011/05/exiled-for-empowering-the-abused-girls-of-zimbabwe/
