Partners suffer in silence
tion-based society organization that deals with challenges faced by key populations.
These include same sex, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex persons, sex workers, women who have sex with women and men who have sex with men.
Through its drop-in centre and other programmes, SRC assists the LGBTIQ+ community access sexual reproductive and health rights (SRHR) services.
National Aids Council (NAC), an organisation established by government to coordinate and facilitate the national multi-sectoral response to HIV and AIDS has been actively involved in supporting LGBTQ+ programming.
Sinatra Nyathi, NAC Bulawayo provincial manager said NAC is a sub recipient of the Global Fund from where some resources are channeled towards programmes for the LGBTIQ+ community.
Such programmes can include addressing inter-partner violence.
“We have sub-granted the Sexual Rights Centre and other partners to implement LGBTIQ+ programmes,” she said.
Nyathi said the LGBTIQ+ community has been discriminated for a long time and government was trying to create an enabling environment for members to receive decent health services.
“As NAC, we will continue to coordinate LGBTIQ+ programmes,” she said. “We have also realized that in their communities there is intimate partner violence which needs to be addressed.”
From 1980 to 2017, the late former president Robert Mugabe actively discriminated against LGBTIQ+ people and spoke out in public against homosexuality.
In August 1995 Mugabe said: “I nd it extremely outrageous and repugnant to my human conscience that such immoral and repulsive organizations, like those of homosexuals, who o end both against the law of nature and the cultural norms espoused by our society, should have any advocates in our midst and elsewhere in the world.”
President Emmerson Mnangagwa, however, seems to have abandoned Mugabe’s rigid stance against the LGBTIQ+ community.
In 2018 in an interview during an LGBTIQ+ organised multi-stakeholder dialogue meeting on sexual orientation, gender identity and expression in Zimbabwean societies, Mnangagwa said the operating environment under Mugabe was quite restrictive in terms of what people could say or do.
“It was quite limiting in that we were also not able to meet with stakeholders that we thought could be important to facilitate dialogue.”
While the constitution of Zimbabwe guarantees rights such as equality and non-discrimination it is silent on speci c rights for the LGBTIQ+ community.
*This article was done in partnership with Information for Development Trust (IDT) under a project encouraging active grassroots community participation in investigative journalism content production.