Deputy Minister Mmapaseka Steve Letsike: Southern Africa Regional Convening on GBV Action Coalition Commitments
Deputy Minister in the Presidency for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities Republic of South Africa Reflection by Ms Mmapaseka Steve Letsike, MP at the Southern Africa Regional Convening on GBV Action Coalition Commitments on 8 September 2026, Sandton, 09:00
Programme Director; Representatives of Akili Dada;
Representatives of the Black Womxn Caucus and the Rozaria Memorial Trust;
Representatives of UN Women;
Commitment Makers from South Africa and Zimbabwe; Representatives of government, civil society and development partners; Feminist activists and leaders;
Distinguished guests;
We gather at the end of the Generation Equality Forum’s five-year action period to take stock of the commitments made between 2021 and 2026. Yet the conclusion of a reporting period must never be mistaken for the conclusion of the struggle itself. A cycle may close and a commitment may be recorded as completed. Still, the true measure of our work lies in whether the social and economic conditions that reproduce violence are being changed.
A declaration tells the world what we believe. A commitment tells the world what we will do, by when, with what resources, and how we will be held accountable. The credibility of Generation Equality will therefore not be judged by the number of commitments announced in Paris in 2021, but by whether those commitments travelled from international platforms into national laws and budgets, through functioning institutions, and ultimately into the lived safety, dignity and freedom of women and girls.
In South Africa, this is an urgent test. Much of the gender-based violence and femicide occurs beyond the immediate sight of the state: in intimate relationships, family homes, schools, university residences, workplaces, places of worship and, increasingly, digital spaces. It may take the form of physical or sexual violence, but also coercive control, psychological abuse, economic deprivation, harassment, intimidation, stalking and the deliberate isolation of a person from the support they need.
An act of GBVF may occur behind a closed door, but its consequences are never confined to that space. They travel with the survivor into the clinic, classroom, workplace, police station, shelter and courtroom. They are carried by children and families and impose costs on our health, social-development and justice systems, as well as our economy. What is sometimes described as private violence is therefore a profoundly public, constitutional and developmental concern.
South Africa’s first dedicated national GBV prevalence study, released by the Human Sciences Research Council, found that 33.1% of women aged 18 years and older had experienced physical violence during their lifetime, while 7.9% had experienced sexual violence by an intimate partner. Research by the South African Medical Research Council found that approximately 60% of women murdered in 2020/21 were killed by an intimate partner, while fewer than one in five intimate-partner femicide cases in that study resulted in a conviction.
These figures do not represent unrelated incidents. They reveal unequal power reproduced across relationships, institutions and generations. Violence is perpetrated by individuals, overwhelmingly men, but it is enabled or constrained by economic arrangements, institutional cultures,social norms and the quality of the state’s response. Alcohol and substance misuse may aggravate violence, but they do not cause patriarchy and can never excuse a perpetrator. Poverty may heighten vulnerability, but violence also occurs in affluent homes. Education may expand opportunity, yet institutions of learning can themselves become sites of harassment, coercion and abuse.
No single department, law or intervention can therefore end GBVF. The criminal-justice system is indispensable, but it ordinarily becomes involved only when an incident is reported or otherwise comes to the attention of the authorities. We cannot predict the precise home, classroom, residence, workplace or digital exchange in which violence will occur. But we can identify conditions of risk, recognise danger earlier, make reporting safer, respond rapidly and ensure that justice, care, healing and economic recovery follow the survivor rather than leaving them to coordinate a fragmented state alone.
South Africa’s response rests on a substantial constitutional and policy foundation. Our Constitution places dignity, equality, freedom, bodily integrity and non-sexism at the centre of the democratic project. These obligations are reinforced by CEDAW, the Maputo Protocol, the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development, the Sustainable Development Goals and our other international commitments.
The National Strategic Plan on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide translated these obligations into six connected areas of action: leadership and accountability; prevention and rebuilding social cohesion; justice, safety and protection; response, care, support and healing; economic power; and research, information and knowledge management. Togetherthey recognise that GBVF is a human-rights violation, a public-health crisis, a criminal-justice concern, an economic question and a struggle over power.
Since 1 April 2022, three significant pieces of legislation have strengthened this response. The Domestic Violence Amendment Act broadened the recognition of domestic violence and modernised mechanisms relating to protection orders. The Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Related Matters) Amendment Act extended protection for vulnerable persons, introduced sexual intimidation as an offence and strengthened the National Register for Sex Offenders. The Criminal and Related Matters Amendment Act strengthened provisions relating to bail, sentencing, intermediaries and the participation of complainants in relevant proceedings.
Our courts have also clarified the constitutional responsibility of the state. In various judgments, the Constitutional Court has affirmed that the state has a positive duty to protect women against violent crime, that public institutions may be held accountable when their failures expose people to foreseeable harm, that arbitrary time barriers must not deny survivors access to justice, and that the law must recognise the collective character that sexual violence can assume.
But laws do not implement themselves. Their meaning is ultimately tested in the experience of the person who seeks protection and justice. Prevention must begin long before a police docket is opened. It must begin in the institutions through which people learn what power, gender, consent, dignity and masculinity mean.
The Department of Basic Education’s responsibilities include the National School Safety Framework, school-related GBV, teenage-pregnancy interventions, human-rights education and programmes involving learners, parents and school governing bodies. Schools must protect children, but they must also teach a generation that care is not weakness, masculinity does not require domination, and another person’s body is never an entitlement.
The Department of Higher Education and Training’s Policy Framework to Address Gender-Based Violence in the Post-School Education and Training System provides a common basis for action across universities, TVET colleges and other institutions. Its success must be measured in whether students can report safely, residences and campuses have functioning referral systems, disciplinary processes are survivor-centred, and complainants are protected against retaliation.
In the world of work, South Africa’s ratification of International Labour Organisation Convention 190 and the Code of Good Practice on the Prevention and Elimination of Harassment in the Workplace recognise that violence and harassment are not peripheral employment matters. Economic dependence, job insecurity and unequal workplace power can silence survivors. Employers must create trusted reporting systems, prevent victimisation and build workplace cultures in which harassment is neither concealed nor normalised.
When violence occurs or a person is in immediate danger, the state must be reachable. The Department of Social Development’s Gender-Based Violence Command Centre, shelters, social workers, psychosocial services and community programmes form part of this protective network.
The Department has allocated R102 million to expand shelter services and respond to recommendations from the Second Presidential Summit and the National Shelter Indaba. Yet the continued absence of shelters in some districts reminds us that national policy becomes protection only when services are available where people live.
Health facilities are often the first public institutions to encounter a survivor. Healthcare workers must be able to identify abuse, provide appropriate clinical and forensic care, offer post-exposure prophylaxis and mental-health support, and connect survivors to the wider protection system.
The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development, the National Prosecuting Authority, the South African Police Service and the courts carry responsibility for investigation and accountability. During 2024/25, the NPA recorded 3,697 convictions for sexual offences, with more than 79% resulting in direct imprisonment. In the same period, 44,147 victims received support through 66 Thuthuzela Care Centres, while plans have been announced to expand the footprint of Sexual Offences Courts and Thuthuzela Care Centres.
These are important indicators of institutional activity and capacity. But the number of courts established, personnel trained or survivors assisted does not by itself demonstrate that violence has declined. We must become a state that counts not only what it has done, but what changed because it acted. We must measure accessibility, case attrition, secondary victimisation, repeat violence and whether communities have become safer.
Our response must also recognise women and girls in all their diversity. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and other persons of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics experience violence shaped by misogyny, homophobia, transphobia and rigid ideas about gender. So-called “corrective” rape, family violence, displacement from homes, harassment, assault and murder are not separate from the national GBVF crisis. They are among its iterations.
The National Task Team on SOGIESC Matters, established as a partnership between government and civil society, plays an important role within this response ecosystem. Through the National Intervention Strategy, Provincial Task Teams and Rapid Response Teams, it monitors hate-crime cases, strengthens coordination among the Department of Justice, the NPA, SAPS and civil society, and advances prevention and awareness. Established in response to violence targeting LGBTI people, particularly the murder and sexual assault of Black lesbian women in our townships, its work has broadened to address violence and systemic discrimination affecting people of diverse SOGIESC.
The Prevention and Combating of Hate Crimes and Hate Speech Act provides a legislative basis for recognising when an underlying crime is motivated by prejudice or intolerance, including prejudice relating to sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and sex characteristics. Its commencement must still be proclaimed, and its regulations completed with the meaningful participation of affected communities.
GBVF continues to evolve in its manifestation. Violence now travels through mobile devices, social-media platforms, surveillance technologies and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images. The form may change, but the purpose frequently remains to intimidate, control, punish, silence or exclude. We cannot confront twenty-first-century violence with institutions designed only around yesterday’s understanding of harm.
At the same time, we must confront an increasingly coordinated anti-gender and anti-rights movement that seeks to reverse gains in gender equality, bodily autonomy, comprehensive sexuality education and the human rights of LGBTI people. It exploits fear and social uncertainty, deliberately misrepresents equality as a threat to family, faith or African culture, and pressures governments and institutions to retreat from established human-rights commitments.
This is not merely a contest over terminology. It affects whether survivors can access services, whether young people receive accurate information, whether civil society can organise freely and whether some members of society are treated as less deserving of dignity and protection. Our response must therefore defend both the institutions that protect rights and the civic space in which feminist, youth and LGBTI movements hold those institutions accountable.
In November 2025, the National Disaster Management Centre classified GBVF as a national disaster under section 23 of the Disaster Management Act. This acknowledges the scale of the crisis and the need for coordinated action across departments and spheres of government. But GBVF has the scale of a disaster without the short lifespan of a conventional disaster.
A flood eventually recedes and a fire can be extinguished. GBVF is continually reproduced through human relationships, unequal power, social norms, economic conditions and institutional failures. We must therefore respond with the urgency of an emergency and the persistence required for structural transformation.
It is in this context that President Cyril Ramaphosa’s appointment of the National Council on Gender-Based Violence and Femicide represents an important institutional turning point. Its members were appointed on 31 July 2026 for a three-year term commencing on 1 August 2026.
The Council was not established because South Africa lacked activity. It was established because activity dispersed across institutions does not automatically become a coordinated national response. The NSP gave us a strategy, the 2024 Act established the statutory institution, and the appointment of the Council now creates the opportunity to convert fragmented mandates into shared accountability.
The Council must align implementation across national departments, provinces and municipalities; connect government, survivors, civil society, labour, business, traditional leaders and faith communities; identify geographic gaps; track financing; improve data; and ensure that the six NSP pillars advance together. It must not displace the responsibilities of line departments or diminish the independent voice of civil society. Its task is to ensure that every part of the response knows its role, performs it and accounts for the results.
This brings us to financing. The most widely cited South African study estimated that violence against women cost the country between R28.4 billion and R42.4 billion annually, equivalent at that time to between 0.9% and 1.3% of GDP. Because that estimate is now more than a decade old, South Africa needs an updated and comprehensive assessment of the economic cost of GBVF.
That cost extends across healthcare, policing, forensic investigation, courts, correctional services, shelters, social services, lost earnings, interrupted education, mental health and intergenerational trauma. South Africa is already paying for GBVF every day. The policy choice is whether we continue paying predominantly after violence has occurred or invest more deliberately in preventing it.
The National Council should therefore help drive an integrated financing framework for the NSP, supported by gender-responsive budgeting, expenditure tracking across departments and spheres, sustainable funding for civil society and survivor services, and greater investment in evidence-based prevention. Prevention is not an optional expense. It is a constitutional obligation and a long-term social and economic investment.
As we assess the Generation Equality period, South Africa can point to meaningful progress in law, policy, services and institutional development. But our stocktake must remain honest about uneven implementation, fragmented data, geographic inequality, financing gaps and the distance between formal protection and lived safety.
The South African and Zimbabwean Commitment Makers gathered here provide an important reference point. The next phase, however, must
extend across SADC. We need regional cooperation on prevention, trafficking, migration, technology-facilitated violence, survivor services, comparable data, sustainable financing and the protection of feminist civic space. If violence and anti-rights organising can cross borders, our solidarity, knowledge and accountability must do the same.
As I conclude, I return to the question of who we understand ourselves to be as African people.
We should not romanticise our past or deny that patriarchy has existed within African societies. But we must reject the claim that violence, domination and hatred are authentic expressions of African culture. Traditions of ubuntu teach that a person becomes fully human through the humanity of others. Our moral traditions place value on life, community, care and the protection of those exposed to harm. Even in times of conflict, African communities have carried ethical injunctions that women, children and other civilians must be protected.
Violence against women and girls, violence against children, and violence against LGBTI people cannot be defended as African values. They violate the human dignity upon which our shared humanity depends.
The manifestations of GBVF will continue to evolve. Our understanding, laws, institutions and methods of prevention must therefore evolve as well. But our moral position must remain immovable: no woman, girl, child or person of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression or sex characteristics should have to surrender their safety or dignity in order to belong.
The Generation Equality period may have ended, but our responsibility has not. South Africa has built many important parts of the response. The historic task before the National Council, government and society is to make those parts function as one coherent, adequately financed and accountable national system: one that prevents violence, is reachable when protection is required, holds perpetrators accountable, and accompanies survivors towards care, healing and renewed economicagency.
Violence is not who we are. It is not an inheritance we are obliged to preserve, nor a future we are prepared to accept. Our African values call us towards human dignity, solidarity and shared responsibility. They call upon us to protect life, confront injustice and ensure that every person can live without fear.
That is the commitment we must carry beyond this stocktake. That is the work we must now complete together.
I thank you.
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