Blog (Simulizi)

Can you please tell us a bit about yourself and your organisation?

MACOSS is the national platform for NGO’s in Mauritius. It was established and enacted by an Act of Parliament since 1970.  MACOSS have more than 100 NGO’s as members. All these NGOs are legally registered organizations working in different fields of specialization and implementing different sets of activities.

I serve as the voluntary chairperson for MACOSS.  This position is nominated by the members.  Therefore, my duty is purely philanthropic. I give and offer my service to the organization with a voluntarily.  As MACOSS, we have an established permanent secretariat of paid staff members. We have a clear governance structure at MACOSS with a Board of Directors. As an established institution we have put in place a strategy of worthy consideration in order for us to ensure that we achieve our desired vision and objectives. As an organization our prominent objectives are advocacy or rather policy influencing, networking, and empowering our NGO members. These are some of our fundamental objectives. We are a representative body as MACOSS; therefore, we collect the views of the civil society and then we submit these views to the government and various partners in order for us to ensure that we are meeting the needs of NGOs.

In Feminism Is For Everybody bell hooks talks about consciousness-raising groups, where women would organise to meet and discuss matters of sexism and patriarchy. These would often be someone’s house, a café, anywhere that could safely host a group. The idea was that in order to fight the patriarchy, one would need to learn how it worked and affected them. In the last few decades, these sites have become more expansive, finding homes on various corners of internet and inviting larger groups of women to learn from each other. One such site is the recently founded Tanzania Feminist Collective, which consists of women and non-binary people, with the “goal of wanting to provide education on rape culture, misogyny, women’s rights, and the nuances surrounding bigotry and how this is harmful to the fabric of Tanzanian society.”

As part of its series of youth focused webinars with the aim of contextualizing social impact entrepreneurship, Africa Philanthropy Network (APN) hosted the “Consultative Youth Webinar on the role of African Philanthropy in creating enabling environment for youth led development” on May 6^th, 2021. Speakers of the webinar were Positive Youth Development Activist and pharmacy student at the University of Zambia Florence Mulenga; Chimwemwe Kaonga, the Programs Director at Concerned Youth Organization in Malawi; and Reynald Maeda the Executive Director of the United Nations Association in Tanzania.

As expected from the diverse expertise from the speakers featured, the discussion yielded a number of descriptions for youth led development and African philanthropy. The definitions range from young people working for development of other young people, without ignoring what is happening outside youth group to all initiatives of development that have been initiated by youth.

Gender-based violence (GBV) has reached at the crisis level in Tanzania, adversely affecting women and girls. According to the 2019 Ministry of Health Study on Gender, 40.1 per cent of women experienced physical violence, while 13.8 per cent experienced sexual violence in adult life and only 27 percent arrived at health facilities within 72 hours. “Incidents such as wife-beating, men insulting women, grabbing their land, throwing things at them, are also on the rise in our communities,” noted a gender expert, Michael Thoshiba in an exclusive interview.

However, through legal aid and paralegal (a person who is not a lawyer but trained on basic legal issues to assist community members in resolving disrupts or to refer complicated issues to proper authorities) services which are widely available in almost all the districts of Tanzania mainland and Zanzibar, victims of GVB incidents are assisted to secure their rights.