Part of the responsibilities of all branch offices is to partner with various entities within communities like the South African Police Service, Child Welfare and the Department of Social Development to raise awareness on numerous aspects of gender-based violence as well as POWA services and rights education, with a specific focus on women’s rights and access to justice.

This is done through community meetings and conversations, formal workshops, presentations, campaigns, information stalls, dialogues, media interviews and the distribution of pamphlets.
Conducting local, provincial and national human rights education and awareness workshops is a critical component of the programme’s area of work.

We engage in rights education at local level, enforcing on a case by case basis as well as more generally, through campaigns and plain language publications, protections entrenched in existing legal and policy frameworks. In this way, we build women’s political agency to mobilise women’s voices to create the appropriate attention to women’s issues and cause the desired effect of reforms for better laws for the protection of women.
The overall goals of the media, information and communication component of POWA’s strategy is to “source, package and disseminate quality, credible, accurate and appropriate information to stimulate debate, discussion and activity on violence against women – and its intersections with poverty and HIV.

To spread GBV-awareness messaging and the latest on POWA’s projects and activities into communities far and wide, POWA staff engage in interviews on a range of print, online and broadcast platforms. POWA also amplifies its presence through our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram platforms.

POWA’s services are free of charge to ensure access is not an additional challenge to the already overwhelming difficulties for women to access their rights. This approach assists with the reduction of women’s vulnerability due to financial dependencies that play a huge role in violence against women.