Victoria Falls Tourism Corridor: Economic Empowerment & HIV Vulnerability Reduction Initiatives

"Ladies, when we came to this town people looked down on us. Without much hope, we even called ourselves sex workers. We are now leaving this workshop as proud business women ready to face the world, well empowered",

said one female participant after attending a BDS workshop convened in September by the ILO and UNFPA. The workshop was held for 50 leaders of a group of sex workers with a thousand members from Hwange and Victoria Falls. The workshop was part of the response package to the UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board (PCB) field visit to Zimbabwe in June 2015. It came out strongly during the tour that there was need for the ILO to partner with UNFPA to provide economic empowerment training to the sex workers in order to give them alternative and more sustainable sources of livelihoods.

The annual PCB visits provide an opportunity for Board representatives to observe the AIDS epidemic and response of a country, as well as to appreciate the challenges related to the sustainability of a country’s response.

In Zimbabwe, projects in Hwange and Victoria Falls were among those visited by the PCB. The members expressed their desire to exit from the trade, if offered alternatives. The interventions would include undertaking a needs assessment and organizing the women into savings and credit cooperatives, registration of the cooperatives and provision of training in business development services.

The strategy resonates with ILO’s existing contributions to national HIV/AIDS responses in Zimbabwe that are centred on economic empowerment, a strategy which acknowledges that prevention alone is inadequate and unsustainable in the fight against HIV and AIDS. The approach promotes economic opportunities through promoting decent work for populations located along selected transport corridors and hotspots, in order to provide viable survival alternatives. The ILO, therefore, provides business related services which include entrepreneurship, enterprise development and access to finance for vulnerable groups of women.
Despite the difficult economic conditions, the Hwange and Victoria Falls groups of women have been able to raise more than US$2,400 in a space of two months through savings. Members who have borrowed from the fund have been levied an interest rate of 20 per cent per annum. The group is expecting to have raised aroundUS$14,000 in six months from their buying and selling of a variety of goods, which include imported second clothes. Only three out of the ten groups are not into buying and selling; with one in laundry and mending garments, the other in goat farming, while the third group has ventured into hairdressing.

It is clear that the women will require further technical support and assistance to access land, buy equipment, link with markets, access finance, registration of their respective savings and credit cooperatives, more training in leadership and the management of businesses. For sustainability, the local council in Victoria Falls has taken over the leadership of the project, placing it under the office of the Housing Directorate. The council will also support the women to coordinate with all key stakeholders who are willing to provide the much needed support of varying degrees.