One Friday evening, Osman Leonard had retired to bed early.

The 23-year-old man had just returned from hospital with his mother, who recently suffered stroke that paralysed her left side.

The woman cannot walk on her own, so Leonard had to carry her nearly half of the way to the hospital. This left him tired.

Some minutes after dozing off, Leonard woke up with a start. There was a commotion outside.

When he got out of the house, a crowd had already gathered.  He later learnt from onlookers that his neighbour had come home drunk and started beating his wife.

Leonard attends a youth club meeting in Mangochi

Inside the house, Leonard could hear cries for help. He decided to do something about it.

“I am a male champion and my role is to ensure that we end gender based-violence in my community,” narrates the member of Tizisunge Youth Club in Mangochi.

His neighbour was well known for violent behaviour. Even the crowd outside his house were afraid to stop him.

“From one of the training we had,” says Leonard, “We learnt that we can always seek for help from other structures if we don’t have capacity to handle the issue.”

And Leonard just did that. He ran a kilometre to the house of the community policing chairperson to report the matter. The chairperson mobilised five men, who  rushed back to apprehend the wife batterer.

“We had to break the door to rescue the woman,” says Leonard, adding, “In the morning, we handed the man over to the police.”

The incident is one of the many he and his youth club deal with every day.

In Mangochi, as is the case in most parts of the country, cases of violence against women and girls are extremely high.

Fighting GBV

According to the Malawi Demographic and Health Survey of 2015, slightly over a third of women aged 15 to 49, some 34 percent, reported experiencing physical violence.

Some 14 percent reported experiencing sexual violence and 23 percent reported emotional violence a year preceding the survey.

“In our culture, men are allowed to have more than one wife,” says Leonard. “But many don’t have the means to support the wives. The result is stress, which then leads to emotional as well as physical abuse of their spouses.”

The 20-member group has 12 women. One of them,  Pauline Mambo, 24, says she and her female colleagues help sensitise the community, especially women and girls, on different forms of gender based violence.

“There are cases where women may not open up when men are around,” she says. “That’s where we come in. We record such cases and then make necessary referrals based on the seriousness of the issue.”

In the past month, Tizisunge Youth Club has investigated more than 10 GBV cases.

“Some of the issues we worked on were more serious cases such as rape,” explains Mambo. “For such cases, we let the police take the lead. Our role is to facilitate medical tests, and to follow up on the cases, if they are being prosecuted.”

Last year, the youth club enefitted from trainings supported by UNFPA with funding from the Government of Iceland under the Advancing Adolescent Girls and Women’s Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in Mangochi Project.

Men on board

UNFPA, the UN Population Fund, engaged Brothers2Brothers (B2B), to strengthen the capacity of the club to engage males in fighting sexual GBV.

This saw the creation of a platform for men and boys where issues of gender roles, masculinity and sexual and reproductive health and rights are discussed.

Last year, the project reached out to 855 men and boys with support from community leaders. They are now working as change agents raising awareness on family planning, gender-based violence and speaking against other harmful practices.

“We are seeing a change in how men perceive women in our communities,” says Mambo. “The gender fight is not only for women, but for all of us. Men and boys are now our allies in the fight.” .

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