Chitungwiza–I am a LEMHster, and I want to share my experience on what was going on in my community during the elections in terms of participation of women, the violence and how young women were being treated. With the low numbers of female representation on the ballots, there were no female candidates running in our constituency.
I also understand that women have been socialised to believe that they are not smart enough to lead and that only men can lead, and because this narrative starts from home, women are demotivated to even go out to vote or participate in the public processes. When I went out to the school I was voting at, I saw a lot of people, especially youth. However, there was a very large percentage of men. The election agents decided to have five men go in to vote at a time but only allowed three women at a time. This negatively affected the women as they complained that they had household responsibilities and children to go back to. Despite this inconvenience to me as a young woman as well, I patiently waited until it was my turn and managed to vote.
My voting experience as a first-time voter was quite interesting as I was initially quite nervous. I did not know exactly how the process went so as I arrived at the voting site, I saw three classrooms that were being used to vote. When I went to look for my name outside the three classrooms, I could not find it. Another girl came beside me and had the same issue, so we asked the officials for assistance. This is when we were shown the three different polling name sheets. I eventually found my name at polling C. Polling C had a very long queue and I waited for two hours to receive the ballot papers so I could vote. When it was my turn to get inside the room to cast my vote, I started to recall the things I learned at the LEMHs program about our rights, agency, and responsibilities. Whereas I was scared of what people would say about my candidate choice, I reminded myself that I have the right to choose who I want to lead, regaining my confidence to cast my vote for the leaders I wanted.