07 May 2018

They are just two elderly women, unemployed and certainly have no financial means to classify them as wealthy.

On a normal day, they are just mothers and grandmothers to their grandchildren and also join Ipelegeng, a government drought relief programme that offers temporary employment on a monthly basis, from time to time to irk an income.

They do not own any company or sit on the board of directorship for any company and are not wealthy farmers either.

They earn less on a monthly basis from their community voluntary service duties such as serving as community members on their local Ward Development Committee (WDC).

However, these two elderly women have boarded aeroplanes to many countries than many people with the same income can dream of in Botswana.

They boast of hopping across the world in their normal German print dresses and head gears like Batswana women are known to dress and have also been to many international airports around the world connecting to their final destinations.

They are the formidable women of Botswana Homeless and Poor People’s Federation, an informal organization that strives to empower people to have decent dwellings and rid the world of slums.

Botswana Homeless and Poor People’s Federation also exists to empower mostly women to be financially stable through their simplified financial saving schemes.

Ms Keletso Dambe and Ms Masego Kgathola are world travellers on their own right and have earned it, thanks to their local federation and their mother body organisation called Shack Dwellers International (SDI) headquartered in India. Thanks to full sponsorships from SDI, the two have been on regular continental benchmarking and networking trips to some countries in Africa such as Kenya, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

On this exchange trips, they share their experiences with federation peers in other countries about their achievements, challenges and how they work with their respective governments to push their agendas.

“Federation in other countries such as Namibia and South Africa are well ahead of ours because they work well with their governments to deliver on their mandates.

In our trips to Namibia, we learned that their Homeless and Poor People’s Federation receives an annual funding of seven million Namibian dollars from the government reserve to get their projects going, that is why federation has been successful there,” Ms Dambe said in an interview recently.

These exchange trips are often sponsored by SDI, but some, such as their trip to the third United Nations (UN) World Habitat Forum in Quito, Ecuador, in South America in 2016, are sponsored by the government of Botswana.

Their recent trip on February this year, Ms Dambe said, was to the 9th World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Both Ms Dambe and Ms Kgathola attended this forum and while there, they were graced with the attendance of Botswana’s Minister for Presidential Affairs, Governance and Public Administration, Mr Nonofo Molefhi.

The forum, which was hosted by SDI and its partners, was meant to, among others, showcase the power of women to transform slums into inclusive, resilient neighborhoods as well as the fact that women can influence global agendas.

“At this forum, SDI with their partners, Cities Alliance, CGLU Afrique and others through their New Urban Agenda launched the Know Your City magazine that seeks to encourage countries to use community collected data for successful implementation of the new urban agenda,” Ms Dambe said.

The Malaysia forum was the most successful and significant trip, Ms Dambe said, and through many of their discussions there, that included grassroots assembly and plenary meetings, some recommendations to carry back home were made.

Some of those recommendations, she noted, were to rid the world of slum dwelling or make slum dwelling habitable using community-driven data collection and analysis for mobilizing grassroots community.

Further, the forum called for identifying priorities; the application of a gendered approach to accessing secure tenure; and the need for government accountability through effective participatory monitoring.

“The ideas that we get from our international trips are implemented here locally to improve the lives of Batswana,” Ms Kgathola added.

Ms Dambe noted that normally when they travel outside the country, they are accompanied by either the founder of the Botswana Homeless and Poor People’s Federation, Ms Goitsemang Maano, organization leader, Mr Mark Batisani or a representative from Trust for Community Initiatives, Ms Chedza Sechaba. ENDS