A non-governmental organisation in Mzuzu has trained primary school teachers on how they can help end child sexual abuse.
The organisation, Girls Empowerment Network (GENET), organized a two day training in Mzuzu where 50 teachers from 35 Mzimba primary schools were told about child sexual abuse.
Mzimba district registers many cases of rape as a lot of primary school girls are sexually abused by their teachers in T/A Chindi and Mphembe.
Speaking during the training on Friday, GENET Project officer for North Linda Sichali said her organisation is concerned with cases of gender sexual violence in Mzimba hence the training.
She said her organization already has a running project in Mzimba North which tackles issues of sexual abuse in primary school but said the training will attempt to curb the rampant behaviour of abusing girls in schools by teachers.
“The training target teachers from Mzimba North where there has been a lot of cases concerning teachers who have been abusing their own students especially girls.
“We already have a project there called combating sexual gender based violence in primary school to improve primary education and this training comes under that project, and our aim is to reduce sexual abuse cases,” he said.
Commenting on the training, District Commissioner (DC) for Mzimba district Council Thomas Chirwa commended GENET for the training.
He said the training has come at the right time when a lot of young teachers are sexually abusing their pupils.
“Children spend a lot of time with teachers, so the teachers must be equipped with knowledge with how the children can protect themselves.
“Amongst the teachers, we have young teachers just coming from colleges who sometimes forget their roles as teachers and start looking for these girls as girlfriends, so the training is really important to teachers,” he said.
GENET is working in four districts countrywide namely Mzimba, Dowa, Phalombe and Balaka.
