Double your Donation in the Big Give Week 2025: Support Women in Zimbabwe Rebuild Their Lives After Prison
By Womankind Worldwide
Big Give Week 2025 starts today, and for the next 7 days your generosity can go twice as far. If we can raise £26,500 for women restarting their lives after prison, it will be doubled to £53,000 by two incredibly generous donors.
Our partner Female Prisoners Support Trust (FEMPRIST) is an activist-led organisation dedicated to supporting women to recover and rebuild after experiencing incarceration in Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe is experiencing regular hyperinflation which was recorded at an astonishing 736 percent last year. Prices rise faster than people can earn, sometimes daily or even hourly. Essentials like groceries, fuel, and medicines become almost completely unaffordable. It is no surprise that the majority of women in Zimbabwe are jailed for poverty-driven and non-violent crimes, often theft carried out to meet basic needs.
Women in prison face overcrowded cells, poor sanitation, and conditions that do not respond to the needs of women or the infants often held with them. When they leave, they face poverty, stigma, and rejection from families and communities. All of this is compounded by the trauma of imprisonment. A criminal record lasts for life and blocks job opportunities and career progression.
This is why the work of Female Prisoners Support Trust (FEMPRIST) is so crucial. FEMPRIST is the only organisation in Zimbabwe working specifically to support women prisoners and women leaving prison.
> > Double your donation in the Big Give Christmas Challenge
Dr. Rita Nyampinga’s story: “The conditions were appalling.”
Dr. Rita Nyampinga, a lifelong activist and trade unionist, has been arrested many times because of her campaigning for human rights. What she witnessed inside Zimbabwean prisons changed the course of her life.
“The conditions were appalling,” she remembers. Cells were crowded and sanitation was poor. Women were incarcerated with their babies and young children. Families often could not visit and the women shared meagre rations.
Shocked by what they saw, Rita and a group of fellow activists formed FEMPRIST. “That is how it all started. It was out of empathy,” she explains.
For eight years they worked without pay, visiting women and girls in prison. Their presence alone helped women feel less abandoned by their families and by their communities. They brought basic period products and toiletries because most women arrived in prison with nothing. Womankind was the first organisation to fund FEMPRIST’s work in 2019 and today we remain one of their only funders.
Despite operating with extremely limited resources, FEMPRIST has already made extraordinary progress. They campaigned for an open prison designed to meet the needs of women and their children and in 2023 the government granted this request.
If this week’s Big Give Christmas Challenge is successful, FEMPRIST hopes to expand counselling services, provide peer support, and increase access to practical skills training for women in and leaving prison. These programmes help women learn skills that enable them to earn a living and support their families. FEMPRIST also works to change unfair laws, including the lifelong criminal records that trap women in poverty, and they train prison staff to treat women with respect and understanding.
> > Make twice the impact with one donation in the Big Give Christmas Challenge
Pamela’s story: “You feel like you have lost your dignity.”
Pamela had never been in trouble with the law until the day she was arrested. She had stolen money from where she worked to pay her father’s medical bills. Like most women imprisoned in Zimbabwe, it was financial insecurity that pushed her to commit the crime.
“You feel like you have lost your dignity,” she says. “I felt that I had really just lost it all. I was no longer human, no longer a part of anything. That is how bad it was for me mentally.”
Pamela was sentenced to seven years and served three. Her family rarely visited her and she felt isolated and forgotten. When she returned home, her community shunned her. Employment was unattainable. She tried to earn money by braiding hair, a skill she had learned in prison, but people were reluctant to come to her.
“I came back into a community where fingers were being pointed. ‘She has been in prison.’ ‘She is a bandit.’ You become an outcast.”
For five years she begged her probation officer to help her find any organisation that might support her. Then, she was finally introduced to FEMPRIST.
FEMPRIST offered skills training, emotional support, and funds to start a small agriculture business. Pamela seized the opportunity. “I convinced myself and I convinced them that yes, I am willing to learn. I am not an expert farmer yet, but I am getting there.”
She is now building a farm she hopes will one day employ others in her community, especially women released from prison. She has already hosted workshops on her land, helping other women learn how to start agricultural businesses of their own.
“My vision for myself is to see our homestead just a field of green. Earning a living from my own hard work. It pays to work hard, I promise.”
Your donation can change everything
FEMPRIST wants to expand mental health support, train prison staff, promote legal and policy reform, strengthen livelihoods, and reduce stigma so women can reintegrate with dignity. Their ambitions are limitless. Their resources are not.
This week only, your donation will be doubled. Every penny will go directly to supporting women in Zimbabwe as they rebuild their lives.
