Empowering the women we celebrate

On International Women’s Day, 8 March, we are intentionally choosing to move beyond celebration to empowerment and confronting a deeper question: how do empowered women empower others?

This year’s theme is ‘Give to gain’.

It has often been said that women do not help other women rise once they themselves have risen. Whether this has merit or not is yet to be properly studied.

However, one might confidently state that real power is influence over policy. It is the ability to shape systems and not only symbolise change.

Real power is looking back and knowing that the lives of 10, 20 or thousands of women are better because I shared my knowledge, skills and experience.

It is the ability to shape systems that determine whether a girl in a rural village can complete school and whether a woman entrepreneur can access capital without bias.

The issue of empowerment is a key factor that must be addressed at all levels.

What does it mean realistically? For the child at school level, it is ensuring that they are tutored in subjects they struggle with. It is ensuring that young girls who rely on older men to fund their basic toiletries are given start-up seed capital to purchase stock and scale up their businesses. This is true empowerment.

Empowerment is ensuring that young women are trained on how to answer questions in interviews and how to make their CVs stand out in the job market.

This is the type of change that can impact women forever, and this is the empowerment that the Swapo Party Women’s Council is striving for in 2026.

The Swapo Party Women’s Council was not formed to decorate politics. It was formed to influence it. It was built by women who understood that liberation without participation is incomplete.

Women must be taught how to participate, how to argue intellectually and how to make their case without feeling disliked. Today, that responsibility shifts to our generation.

We must redefine what leadership by women means.

It must mean competence, preparation and women who are not only brought forward during elections, but who understand budgets, governance, procurement, lawmaking and economic strategy.

Political maturity is power. Policy literacy is power. Financial independence is power, and that is more than just a slogan.

Women’s Day should challenge us to ask whether we are building a pipeline of leaders or a cycle of spectators.

When a young woman who has been in the Swapo Party Women’s Council finally makes it to parliament or Cabinet as a minister, prime minister or even as the president, will she have the capacity to carry out the mandate?

The women’s council has a unique role in this moment.

It must be a school of leadership, a platform where young women are mentored into public service, where entrepreneurs are trained to scale sustainably, where rural voices shape national conversations and where political participation is paired with technical skill.

Across Namibia, women are carrying households, driving small businesses, leading churches, running community initiatives and serving in public office. The capacity is already there.

What remains is intentional coordination.

When women organise around policy and capacity building, not personality, the results are transformative.

This Women’s Day, we celebrate women and challenge all women’s organisations to ask themselves this pertinent question. Are we empowering women and building deep capacity for the positions we have long advocated for? Or are we merely spectators advocating for change while never believing that change will ever come?

History shows that nations rise when women rise in substance, not in symbolism.

The Swapo Party Women’s Council is determined to raise women who are bold enough to demand more and disciplined enough to prepare for it.

– Fransina Kahungu served as deputy mayor of Windhoek in 2016 and 2017, and later as Windhoek mayor from 2019 to 2020. In 2022, she was elected secretary of the Swapo Party Women’s Council, a role she continues to serve in today.

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