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If you have not already, meet Joyce Akumaa Dongotey-Padi. She is better known as Mama Zimbi and she is one of Ghana’s leading television and radio hosts. She deals with a lot of women’s rights and issues on her shows. “On the radio and TV I was dealing a lot with women’s issues, health, the family. Every time the show ended, we had lots of women coming in to tell us how they were being mistreated by their husbands.” But now, she has started a revolution in Ghana by battling a longstanding stigma against widows.
Standing up for Ghana’s widows
Women who are widowed in the nation are often blamed for their husbands deaths. Many are kicked out of their homes, abandoned by their families, and/or forced to go through embarrassing rituals. These rituals are intended to make sure their husband make it to the afterlife, and can include anything from sleeping with their dead husband’s corpse and drinking a soup made of his fingernails and hair. Mama Zimbi has been fighting these traditions through her charity – the Mama Zimbi Foundation. Her charity has aided and empowered thousands of Ghanaian widows who have been abandoned by their families.
“There was an increasing number whose husbands were dead, and they didn’t know what to do,” she says. “It was becoming a more regular question, so I decided to set up an organisation to deal with these issues.”
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An important foundation
The charity helps the women put their lives back together through money, education and business. Mama Zimbi also gives women hope of a better future. But she is not in the business of giving handouts. The women must work hard to make their businesses work. Mama Zimbi has even kicked women off projects for being too lazy and only works with those who show promise in paying off their loans. One of her projects is financing a mango farm that is run by widows from the nearby village ofAkuni. The women work on the farm; through growing and selling the mangos, they have turned it into a profitable business. Another of her projects is located inside a church building, where sixteen widows make charcoal and sell it at markets. To help fund the charity, Mama Zimbi received $20,000 from a World Innovation Summit for Education award in 2009. Other than that, she has not received much outside help other than some tools. Most of the financing comes from Mama Zimbi’s own pocket.
A local hero
The women are extremely grateful to Mama Zimbi. One woman, Ghana Malofah, was thrown out of her house when her husband died. They had been married for ten years. Now Malofah, age 52, works in one of Mama Zimbi’s businesses, making clay pots and bowls. “When he died, I lost everything. I arrived in the village and learnt this work. When I heard Mama Zimbi’s radio programme, I recruited other women and we set up this business,” she says. Mama Zimbi plans to help 8,000 widows from her own money. So far, she has helped 2,000 women.
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