Life In the SA NGO Space: Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women & Children

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The Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children offers a lifeline to women who are escaping gender-based violence.

South Africa (05 February 2024) – “The reality of working at the frontline of GBV response and prevention in South Africa is that, in everything you do, you are constantly aware that the system continues to fail women and survivors – it’s a systemic failure,” says Bernadine Bachar, Director of the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women & Children in Manenberg in the Western Cape.

“The criminal justice sector, the public health sector, the justice system – and particularly law enforcement – all fail women when it comes to seeking help. Our role is to make sure they don’t fall through the cracks by navigating these failing systems on their behalf and with them.”

The Saartjie Baartman Centre is a one-stop centre for women and children who are survivors of abuse. Its vision is the creation of a safe and secure society and a human rights culture where women and children are empowered to exercise their full rights.

Bachar says being so close to the violence other people experience all the time is incredibly challenging.

“A woman recently tracked down my phone number over a weekend and called me from her home, where she was trapped with her abuser. She’d locked herself in a room and was looking for emergency assistance, so I spent hours on WhatsApp walking her through the process of extricating herself safely, organising her transport and getting her to a safe place,” she says. “It was such a nerve-wracking conversation because her abuser wasn’t aware she was talking to me and one wrong step could have far-ranging repercussions for her.”

The centre also offers programs for women who are unable to or don’t want to come into the shelter.

“The reality is that most women who we take in haven’t finished formal schooling or have never had formal employment, so we start from scratch with each of them, furthering their education and teaching them skills,” says Bachar.

“When they leave, we want to make sure they have access to employment and housing – if those two things aren’t in place, they’re more likely to go back to their abuser, who generally holds the purse strings.”

The programs they offer include job skills training, entrepreneurial programs, counselling, an ECD centre for young children, a home school centre for older children, a legal assistance program to get divorce orders, maintenance and protection, food parcel distribution and plenty of others.

“We’ve assisted over 270 000 women and children survivors over the course of our 25-year history and work hard to not only save survivors, but establish plans in the community in a bid to stop GBV. We speak to dismantling patriarchy, bridging the gender gap and making the rest of society aware of the inequalities faced by millions of women across the country – and around the world,” says Bachar.

She says that the reality for herself and her colleagues is that the work they do is a kind of privilege because they get to see the changes in women who arrive too battered and afraid to take up space, suffering from anxiety or depression and lack of self-worth and seeing them emerge four months later as completely different people who are ready to start new lives.

“Our day-to-day reality is also made more challenging by the area we’re based in – Manenberg is a dangerous place where we’re constantly confronted by gang warfare as we’re in the middle of an area of contested turf,” says Bachar. “It’s not unusual for us to hear gunshots while sitting in a meeting, or for our teams to have to take cover when there’s an incident on their way to work – but we do our level best to make the area inside our gates as safe and calm as possible”

The Department of Social Development had previously been the Centre’s only secured source of funding – but the Department indicated to Western Cape NGO’s late last year that due to budget cuts, they are unable to guarantee funding to any organisation from 1 April 2024.

“That’s extremely worrying for us – and leaves us working hard to secure additional funding from next and existing domestic and foreign donors – with the latter group increasingly wary in the face of instability and corruption in the country,” she says.

“Foreign donors see the crumbling infrastructure around us and the area we’re based in and they start to question why they’re funding us – but that’s exactly the reason they should. We’re able to provide a sanctuary in the midst of this chaos – not without emotional and financial challenges – and we’re based in Manenberg because it’s a huge GBV hotspot”.

The Saartjie Baartman Centre is a beneficiary of the MySchool MyVillage MyPlanet program and Bachar says that every single contribution makes a difference in their work. Society has a shared responsibility to work towards eradicating GBV for this generation and the ones to follow.

“We should all want to make sure that women and children feel safe in their home and by running the variety of effective programs that we do is key to achieving that. We have to have the determination and drive to keep going and make sure we centre our clients in all the work we do”