Meet Dr Mzuri, the woman behind women's and girls’ rights in Zanzibar

Advocating for women and girls rights is something that pushed her to use her journalism career to advocate for the amendment of the 1985 draconian law against girls while she was working as a journalist at the Zanzibar Leo Newspaper.

This is Dr Mzuri Issa, the founder and director of the Tanzania Media Women’s Association Zanzibar (TAMWA Zanzibar).

The draconian law was named the Spinster, Widows, and Female Divorcee Protection Act No. 4 of 1985.

It called for the imprisonment of girls who fell pregnant out of wedlock and their outright dismissal from school.

“Almost the whole country was against girls and was impressed by the draconian law that jailed them, saying this would stop girls from being sexually active and provocative,” she says.

But they forgot that the girl child was facing multiple challenges, including rape, walking long distances, poverty, peer pressure, a lack of protection by the family, society, the government and globalisation,” Dr Mzuri says.

She adds that it was through publishing media stories on a regular basis with new angles and new sources that she got support from TAMWA members across the country to champion for the law amendment.

Among the sources she interviewed included the current Union President, Samia Suluhu Hassan, who admitted that the law was harmful to girls.

By then, she was the minister of the Ministry of Community Development, Gender, Elderly, and Children in the Zanzibar government.

The interviews she conducted also covered issues pertaining to family planning, the health of the pregnant mothers in jail, and the likely health of the baby.

“In 2005, eventually, the law was amended to become the Spinster and Single Parent Children Protection Act No. 4 of 2005, which promotes the rights of girls. The law dropped the jail sentence, allowed the reinstatement of girls to school, and ordered fathers to provide for the maintenance of the child,” she said.

Commenting on the challenges she went through when championing for the law amendment, she said she had to push and meet her former boss, who was reluctant to publish her articles.

The editor said Zanzibar Leo was a government newspaper and that publishing the stories would be like going against the government and would also be promoting extramarital affairs, especially for girls.

“I shared with the team through the postmortems the challenges facing girls, along with the associated stigma, expulsion from school—effectively punishing them for life—and the jeopardy to the welfare of their babies when incarcerated,” says Dr Mzuri.

In 2007, she dropped her job at the government newspaper and founded TAMWA Zanzibar.

Through policy reviews and advocacy, a number of policies and legal reviews that were harmful to women and children were later changed.

Among the reviews made were the Evidence Act No. 9 of 2016, which accepts circumstantial evidence and evidence of only one person, including a child, in GBV cases; Kadhi’s Act No. 9 of 2017, which now recognises matrimonial division of assets in cases of divorce; and the Criminal Procedure Act No. 7 of 2018, which allows the primary and regional courts to issue longer sentences on rape cases.

There was also the Penal Act No. 6 of 2018, which now makes rape and gang rape non-bailable offences.

Dr Mzuri stood for Kadhi’s Act, the structural transformation of the Court to include women's voice and issues, and the matrimonial division of assets.

She said it was again a joint effort, but it was the ugliest fight as some religious leaders didn’t understand their intentions.

Reflecting on past struggles, Dr Mzuri says her tireless efforts to advocate for the rights of women and girls have made her strong enough to withstand criticism and judgement.

Her leadership style is participatory and empowers staff, with a particular focus on uplifting women and girls. She can never compromise quality or integrity.

After years and years of advocating for the rights of women and girls and being able to put gender equality laws in place, women issues have now come into the public discussion, and GBV is fought across the country without much finger pointing, which was a great success for her.

Continuously striving to extend support beyond TAMWA, the organisation facilitated the establishment of village and savings groups to empower women residing in rural areas.

Currently, there are more than 600 people scattered around nine districts in Unguja and Pemba, normally composed of 30 people, she said.

She has empowered a number of women to grab leadership positions by contesting for various posts.

“A significant number of women, totaling 4,765 aspirants, have ventured into a domain previously dominated by men,” she says.

This achievement was made possible through training programmes aimed at preparing women to engage in mainstream politics.

These initiatives included instruction in public speaking, familiarity with social policies, understanding community issues, networking, campaign strategizing, media utilisation, and other essential skills.

Dr Mzuri also supported the establishment of various structures to carry out a sensitization campaign towards female leadership posts, notably male change agents and citizen brigades.

She supported the establishment of the Zanzibar Media Committee (ZAMECO), which has been actively advocating for the review of media-based laws and working with other coalitions and networks to foster good governance, citizen participation, and gender equality.

As much as Dr Mzuri likes doing the real work on the ground, like policy and legal review, a lack of reliable funds is forcing them to waste much of our time doing the tedious work of writing proposals.