The University of Pretoria’s (UP) Faculty Of Humanities has awarded former First Lady of South Africa Zanele Mbeki an honorary doctorate for her lifelong advocacy for an inclusive society and for championing the rights of women, with a particular focus on empowering rural women and amplifying their voices.
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The wife of the former South African President Thabo Mbeki, she holds a degree in Social Work from the Wits and a diploma in Social Policy and Administration from the London School of Economics and Political Science among other qualifications. Former Head of UP’s Department of Social Work and Criminology – Professor Antoinette Lombard acknowledged Mbeki for working to lift rural women out of poverty by founding the Women Development Bank and establishing a platform for women in South Africa and across the continent to work together to find solutions to Pan-African problems. “Mrs Mbeki’s commitment to development, advocating for justice and contributing to a better world goes back long before she became First Lady of South Africa in 1999, starting during her many years of exile from South Africa in the apartheid era,” Prof Lombard said. “Her deep concern for the plight of those who are left behind spans many years of work. This includes her contributions as a social worker in London, Zambia, Pakistan, India, and Kenya; in the fields of health and mental health as a social worker for refugees in Botswana and Nigeria as part of the United Nations High Commissioner Of Refugees; and Anglo American in Zambia as a case worker.”
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After Mbeki and her spouse, former President Mbeki, returned to South Africa in 1990, she and a small group of women founded the Women’s Development Bank (WDB), a micro-finance institution that catered to the needs of women in rural areas. The WDB aimed to improve the quality of life for women whose male relatives had been recruited to work in the mines and who were paid too little to send money home. In 2003, she established the organization Women in Dialogue to give voice to women across all sectors in South Africa and Africa, and to engage their full participation in economic and social development. Another of her initiatives is the Zanele Mbeki Development Trust, an independent, non-partisan public benefit organization that’s committed to improving the status of African women by engaging national governments, the private sector, civil society, and donors in partnerships to shape communal, municipal, provincial, national and continental agendas. “Mrs Mbeki has a longstanding relationship with UP, where many past Women in Dialogue conferences have been held,” Prof Lombard said.
