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Speaker pro Tem Lieber and Ms. Makoni will be available for the press at 11:30 am in the State Capitol, Room #3013.
Contact: Cory Jasperson, 916-215-9463
SACRAMENTO, Calif., April 21 /Standard Newswire/ -- Assembly Speaker-Elect Karen Bass (D-Los Angeles), Speaker pro Tempore Sally Lieber (D-San Jose) and other legislative leaders will be meeting today in Sacramento with Betty Makoni, Founder and Director of the Girl Child Network in Zimbabwe to hear about how recent political turmoil in that country has impacted the safety of women and girls.
Betty Makoni, a former schoolteacher, is helping tens of thousands of girls in Zimbabwe fight back against sexual exploitation, poverty and violence. The Girl Child Network covers school fees and supplies, offers safe houses for counseling and rehabilitation and exposes cases of sexual violence and abuse. In ten years, the program has spread to most of the country’s rural districts and enrolls 35,000 girls.
As a schoolteacher, Makoni seized upon the idea for a non-profit network to fight violence, especially rape, when she saw that two-thirds of her female students had left school by the end of a year because of rape and other violence, extreme poverty or the HIV/AIDS infection, which affects one out of every five adults, most of them women, in Zimbabwe.
Makoni has publicly exposed alleged sexual crimes by powerful men, including by officials in President Robert Mugabe's government and has recently been forced to flee Zimbabwe for South Africa. Despite repeated threats, arrests and imprisonment she continues to advocate for the rights of women and girls.
Betty Makoni will be accompanied in Sacramento by filmmaker and children's rights advocate Michaelene Cristini Risley. Risley, who recently returned from being jailed in Zimbabwe, is making a film, 'Tapestries of Hope,' about Makoni's work. A film trailer is available at www.youtube.com/user/freshwaterspigot.
Makoni will also accompanied by representatives of the Ginetta Sagan Fund of Amnesty International. The Fund has chosen Betty Makoni to receive its 2008 Ginetta Sagan Award for Women's and Children's Rights at a ceremony on April 23rd in San Francisco. The fund is named for noted Californian and human rights activist Ginetta Sagan, 1996 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
