On 21 November 2025, thousands of women dressed in black lay on the ground across South Africa for 15 minutes. One minute for every woman murdered each day in this country. The silence was deafening. The Women for Change movement had seized the global spotlight on the eve of the G20 Summit, forcing world leaders gathering in Johannesburg to confront an uncomfortable truth: you cannot speak about economic growth while women’s bodies remain the battlefield beneath it.
This was not merely a protest. It was a national reckoning with a crisis that President Cyril Ramaphosa would finally declare a national disaster – a recognition that came not from political will alone, but from the weight of more than one million signatures and the bodies of 15 women lost every single day.
The question we must now ask is not whether GBV constitutes an emergency, but whether we possess the collective courage to address it as the structural injustice it truly represents.
The anatomy of structural violence
The statistics paint a picture of a society at war with half its population.
More than one in three South African women – nearly 36% – have experienced physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, according to the First South African National Gender-Based Violence Study released in 2024. This translates to more than seven million women who have endured physical violence and more than two million who have survived sexual violence. South Africa’s femicide rate stands at five times the global average, with 5,578 women murdered between April 2023 and March 2024, a shocking 33.8% increase from the previous year.
But these numbers, as staggering as they are, tell only part of the story. GBV is not simply an accumulation of individual crimes; it is a manifestation of structural inequality woven into the fabric of society.
It is economic when women cannot leave abusive relationships because they lack financial independence. It is economic when women bear the brunt of mass unemployment, hunger, malnutrition and income poverty. It is economic when it is women who provide unrecognised and unpaid labour for care in the home, protecting children and the elderly from the failures of the state in social security.
It is psychological when controlling behaviours systematically erode a woman’s sense of self.
It is institutional when survivors face secondary victimisation in police stations and courtrooms designed without their dignity in mind.
The intersectionality of this violence reveals its true structural nature; women with disabilities experience lifetime physical abuse at rates of 29.3% compared with 21.7% for women without disabilities, and face double the rate of sexual violence. Black African women, still bearing the intergenerational trauma of apartheid’s state-sponsored violence, experience disproportionately high rates of victimisation, and LGBTQI+ individuals continue to be targeted with sexual, physical and psychological violence simply for existing outside prescribed gender norms.
Now, this violence has found fertile ground in the digital world, creating new battlefields where anonymity emboldens perpetrators and harm spreads at the speed of a click. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 95% of online aggressive behaviour and abusive language in South Africa is aimed at women and girls.
Online GBV takes many forms: cyberstalking and harassment, non-consensual sharing of intimate images, deepfakes targeting women leaders and activists, and gendered disinformation campaigns designed to silence women’s voices and push them out of public life. Text-based harassment through WhatsApp and SMS, along with abuse on platforms including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, creates an environment where women face violence whether they leave their homes or stay within them.
This is not a crime problem. This is a social justice crisis that has metastasised into every corner of our lives, physical and digital. And it needs solutions that are rooted in social and economic justice.
The role of philanthropy: From charity to justice
If GBV is fundamentally a question of structural inequality, then our philanthropic response must be equally structural. Yet too often, funders approach GBV through a lens of service provision and crisis response, rather than addressing the power imbalances, economic dependencies, patriarchal systems and digital platforms that create the conditions for violence to flourish.
Across Africa and South Africa specifically, a dangerous funding gap threatens to undermine the critical work being done to combat GBV. When donor governments scale back international commitments, funding for gender equality and women’s rights is among the first to disappear.
The abrupt ending of funding has left thousands of survivors without essential services across crisis-affected regions, with organisations forced to close safe centres, halt HIV prevention programmes and scale back maternal health services.
Yet examples of transformative funding approaches exist, demonstrating how philanthropy can work strategically across a number of stakeholders to address GBV systemically.
The FirstRand Empowerment Foundation has demonstrated what intersectional engagement with GBV looks like by understanding that violence does not exist in isolation. Through partnerships with organisations such as the Centre for Study of Violence and Reconciliation – which uses evidence to inform prevention, advocacy and community intervention – the foundation recognises the need for comprehensive response systems.
The Ford Foundation has long championed gender justice across Africa, recognising that addressing GBV requires tackling the structural inequalities that enable it. Their funding supports organisations working at the intersection of women’s rights, economic justice and social movements, understanding that sustainable change emerges when communities are empowered to challenge patriarchal systems from within.
Similarly, the Hlanganisa Community Fund for Social and Gender Justice, through its grant-making and capacity-building work, supports grassroots women’s organisations addressing violence while simultaneously tackling issues of climate justice, economic inequality and political participation. This integrated approach recognises that a woman’s vulnerability to violence is often compounded by poverty, environmental degradation and lack of access to resources and decision-making power.
What distinguishes these funders is their willingness to work collaboratively with diverse stakeholders – government departments, community-based organisations, academic institutions, traditional leaders, faith communities and survivor networks.
On the ground, organisations such as Sonke Gender Justice and People Opposing Women Abuse (Powa) exemplify how comprehensive, justice-oriented approaches can transform lives while challenging systems. Sonke’s rights-based, gender-transformative work recognises that gender inequalities harm everyone, and that men and boys have critical roles in ending violence – this is important as during the protest on 21 November, it continues to be predominately women who are on the front lines of saying “no more” to this violence.
Sonke, through their One Man Can campaign and as secretariat of the MenEngage Africa Alliance spanning 23 countries, combines community mobilisation with strategic litigation, policy development and continental advocacy. Powa, established in 1979 as the first organisation to create a shelter for abused women in South Africa, provides comprehensive services while engaging in feminist advocacy that challenges the structural conditions enabling violence, including emerging forms such as cyber harassment.
A call to collective action
The declaration of GBV as a national crisis and subsequently as meeting the threshold for a national disaster, is a beginning, not an ending. It acknowledges what activists have long known: that this crisis demands the same urgency, resources and coordinated response we reserve for pandemics and natural disasters. But declarations mean little without transformation.
For philanthropy, this moment requires a fundamental reimagining of how we fund social change. We must move beyond supporting individual organisations towards building movements and power which can be used to fight the structural inequities that women face which are both economic and social. We must fund not just service provision but economic empowerment; not just crisis response but prevention through education and norm change; not just physical safe spaces but digital safety and literacy initiatives; not just shelters but the research and advocacy that challenges laws, policies and platform algorithms perpetuating inequality.
For society, the Women for Change shutdown offers a powerful lesson: without women, South Africa stops. Economic participation means nothing if women cannot safely travel to work or navigate online spaces. Educational advancement rings hollow when girls fear sexual violence at school and online harassment in virtual classrooms. Political progress is illusory when women are excluded from leadership through intimidation, harassment and weaponised deepfakes designed to destroy their credibility.
The 15-minute silence was a prayer, a demand and a warning. It honoured the women who never made it home, those driven to despair by relentless online abuse, and those who carry trauma in every breath they take. As Ramaphosa acknowledged: “No society can thrive for as long as gender-based violence and femicide continue and the agency of women is denied.”
As we move forward, we must remember that GBV, whether on streets, in homes or digital spaces, is not inevitable. It is a product of choices: budgetary choices about investing in social services that will benefit women; societal choices about whose bodies matter, whose safety is prioritised, whose humanity is recognised, and whose voices are amplified or silenced online.
And choices can be changed.
When women lie down in mourning and protest, it is time for the rest of us to stand up – not in solidarity alone, but in the sustained, structural transformation that justice demands. The question is not whether we can afford to address this crisis.
It is whether we can afford not to. DM
This article is the second in a four-part series produced by Independent Philanthropy South Africa. The articles look at issues of structural inequality and the role of philanthropy through a social justice lens. It considers the vital role philanthropy can play, urging funders to move beyond short-term fixes and support those working to dismantle systemic inequities and drive transformative change.
The first article in the series was: Beyond waiting for the world — how SA philanthropy can help shape our climate future
Dr Zuziwe Khuzwayo is the social justice project manager at Ipasa, where she coordinates a network of local and international donors who advocate for more social justice funding in South Africa. Previously, she worked at the Ford Foundation as a global programme associate, focusing on gender-based violence affecting women, girls, LGBTQI+ individuals, indigenous women and disabled women.