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Farirai Machivenyika-Senior Reporter 

FEMALE Parliamentarians must continue ensuring that girls have equal access to education as boys if lasting gender parity is to be achieved, the Speaker of the National Assembly, Advocate Jacob Mudenda, said yesterday.

Addressing a Malawi Parliamentary delegation on a four-day reciprocal study visit to Zimbabwe comprising civil society and the Women’s Caucus of the Malawi Parliament, Adv Mudenda said education plays a critical role in empowering girls and ensuring long term development.

“Your coming here, I hope, will not be confined to your desire for political leadership but you would also want to be involved in the leadership in the private sector,” he said.

“The second port of call is education. One of your mandates, one of your visions, one of your missions is that you must look at society and look at the education sector and see how the girl child is being promoted. 

“There should be no preference of the boy child and less preference for the girl child from primary, secondary or tertiary education. Education is the most lethal weapon for the girl child to come up and be counted in leadership, so you need to engage the education sector vigorously.”

Zimbabwe had made great strides in empowering girls with education with the country’s oldest university, the University of Zimbabwe, now enrolling more female students than males.

Adv Mudenda also called on women politicians to lobby their political parties to enshrine provisions on gender equality in leadership positions in their Constitutions to ensure equal representation in institutions like Parliament.

Leader of the Malawi delegation, Ms Gotani Hara, said they had visited Zimbabwe to learn.

“The aim of the visit is to learn from each other and learn best practices. Our meetings have started with the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, Community and Small and Medium Enterprises plus the Zimbabwe Gender Commission and the Zimbabwe Women’s Parliamentary Caucus. We will meet other stakeholders in the coming days,” she said.

Chairperson of the Zimbabwean Women’s Caucus, Cde Goodluck Charamba, said they had visited Malawi last September on a benchmarking visit and to check their progress in achieving 50-50 gender parity in leadership positions.

She thanked Government for implementing the quota system in Parliament which she said had increased the number of female parliamentarians.