Since November 2006, the Saartjie Baartman Centre has been presented to three international conferences.

At the United Nations

In April 2005 the Centre submitted a short report on the work of the Centre for the study on violence against women for the United Nations Division for the Advancement of Women. This led, unexpectedly and with great excitement on behalf of the Saartjie Baartman staff, to an invitation to the Centre’s director, Synnøv Skorge to participate in a panel discussion at the United Nations in New York on Ending violence against women: the role and responsibility of various sectors in effective prevention and response. The discussion accompanied the launch of the Secretary-General’s in-depth study on all forms of violence against women in the UN General Assembly on 9 October 2006.

Synnøv Skorge’s presentation on the Saartjie Baartman Centre as a best practice model of service delivery and prevention to end violence against women was well received, and she had a queue of people afterwards waiting to ask her more about our work at the Centre.

Kampala, Uganda

Irma Maharaj, the researcher at the Saartjie Baartman Centre, attended a conference in Kampala, Uganda on Strengthening regional work on gender-based violence on November 8-10, 2006. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together organisations working on GBV in order to:

(i)		share tools and promising intervention strategies
(ii)		strengthen capacity of organisations working on GBV
(iii)		facilitate exchange between regional actors
(iv)		develop strategies for future GBV programming in the region.

 

Irma did a presentation on the Centre (successes, challenges and lessons learnt). She also conducted a workshop on guidelines to ‘growing’ a one-stop centre. Both went well and generated a lot of interest in the one-stop centre model.

Begern, Norway

Synnøv Skorge was invited to be the key-note speaker at the National Gender Conference in Bergen, Norway in February 2007. Her speech included a detailed presentation on the Centre and the context in which the Centre operates.

Together with Shanaaz Suffla from UWC, Synnøv also led two seminars on the state of gender issues in South Africa.