Cape Town - Organisations offering sanctuary to victims of gender-based violence say while the scourge is one of the most-recorded human rights violations in the country, these shelters remain chronically underfunded by the government.
One of the oldest shelters in the city, St Anne’s Homes – which has been going for 118 years – faces imminent closure due to lack of funds, which director Joy Lange said could happen within the next few weeks.
And the Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children, the largest privately-run abuse shelter, needs to raise R2 million before the end of this year to stay afloat.
As it stands, the Department of Social Development funds it, amounting to about 30% of what the centre needs to keep its doors open, but it has a minimum monthly deficit of R500 000, and a minimum deficit every year of R6 million for basic services.
Western Cape Women’s Shelter Movement chairperson and Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children director, Bernadine Bacra, expressed the need for emergency private-sector funding for these shelters.
Bacra said the current economic climate had rendered the financial situations of shelters untenable – funders were tightening their belts or did not have access to funds they had before.
“Shelters simply cannot fight GBV alone. We urgently need funding from the private sector. Our shelter has been unable to raise sufficient funds to cover our budget deficit this year, our financial situation is dire. We are all chronically underfunded. The only way is to get the private sector involved and for it to stand with us.”
By last November, the provincial social development department funded 25 shelters for victims of violence and abuse. The economic recession had limited the government’s capacity to expand across all service delivery areas, it said.
Bacra said if the organisation was unable to raise that money, it would have a direct impact on the services offered to survivors and children. The curtailment of services would not only directly impact the shelter’s programmes, but also women survivors in the community.
Lange said confirmation from the private sector at the recent Presidential Summit on GBVF that funds paid over to the government to dispense to NGOs for GBV initiatives, had been returned was “shocking and incomprehensible”.
Instead, Lange said there had been no changes in the past two years, after the Commission for Gender Equality report on the state of shelters in the country, which found that shelters were grossly unfunded.