Trish Makanhiwa

Trish, 17, is one of two Girl Ambassadors against child marriage selected by the Women Advocacy Project in Harare, Zimbabwe. Trish heads the WAP girls' club in the community of Epworth and made a block for the Zimbabwe Child Marriage Quilt in 2019. An outstanding leader of girls, Trish has responsibility for organizing soap training, arranging weekly meetings on child marriage, and ensuring that the other girls and their families receive emergency supplies during the COVID-19 crisis.



Making Soap has Reduced Child Marriage!

14 Sep

Opening up a market: Trish with a local shopkeeper who has agreed to sell Clean Wash soap.

 

To begin with, the WAP soap making project has created self-employment for our young girls in our communities. We are now able to work as girls using our hands and have improved our income.  The sales of soap have made it possible that we can now take care of ourselves and help our families to attain basic needs which were hard to access in the past before the start of the clean girl project.

Before we began the project, many of us had no occupation. We used to wonder around with some ending up in unplanned relationships which led many of our friends into unwanted sex, unplanned pregnancies and early child marriages.

Many thanks go to WAP for initiating this very significant project which has equipped us with important skills that have remained central to our lives.  We now have a job that keeps us busy, producing, packing and marketing our product. It has helped us not to fall into the traps of boys, hence reducing child marriages.

WAP has truly empowered us as girls. We have gained skills, knowledge and income and are in fact grateful. The soap making project together with the weekly educational sessions are a factual bid to ending early child marriages. We can see a reduction in the number of girls who were at risk of getting into child marriages. Though facing some challenges due to our economy, the project has helped us a lot to cater for our immediate need including accessing our sanitary wear.

Posted By Trish Makanhiwa

Posted Sep 14th, 2020

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