Seventy years after more than 20 000 women marched to the Union Buildings for our freedom and dignity, we mark Women’s Month under the theme “Empowered Women, Empower the Nation”. This theme reflects a truth we see every day: when women are empowered, they sustain households, strengthen communities and deliver the essential services on which our country depends. Women make up nearly 90% of nurses and 95% of ECD practitioners, supporting families while providing care. Women are also often the ones who take sick relatives to clinics, care for children and older people and hold our communities together during crises.
However, women make these contributions while navigating South Africa’s harshest socioeconomic conditions. Poverty remains more pronounced among women and unemployment is highest among young Black African women. Although gender-based violence and femicide (GBVF) were classified as a national disaster in November 2025, the 2026 Budget provided no new dedicated funding.
Health facilities are critical sites for identifying violence, treating its physical and psychological harms and connecting survivors to protection and justice. Therefore, classifying GBVF as a national disaster without matching healthcare investment fails women. If we are serious about empowerment, public finance must advance women’s health, safety and freedom through a well-resourced, resilient system that in turn empowers our nation.
Why Healthcare is Central to Women’s Safety and Empowerment
A robust public health system holds transformative potential to fulfil the constitutional right of access to healthcare for all. At its best, our health system can be a lifeline for survivors: recognising violence early, treating physical and psychological harm with dignity, and connecting even the poorest or most isolated women to forensic care and a path of safety. This is especially important in poor and rural communities, where public healthcare is often the only realistic option. Higher poverty and limited transport leave marginalised women with fewer alternatives when they need urgent treatment or support after violence.
Public healthcare is also central to women’s empowerment because we do not only rely on the system for care; we are the workers who keep it running. Women make up nearly 90% of South Africa’s professional nurses and up to 96% of the community health workforce, placing our demographic on the frontlines of identifying violence, caring for survivors and delivering the broader GBVF response. Therefore, investing in health both strengthens women’s livelihoods and working conditions while enabling us to provide survivors with dignified, timely care.
This burden extends into homes and communities, where women perform much of the unpaid care intensified by GBVF, from supporting survivors to caring for affected children and even filling gaps left by inadequate public services. When the health system fails, the gender, racial, class and spatial inequalities that wrap our society determine who receives timely care and protection and who is left to carry the consequences alone without support.
A Disaster Declaration Without a Budget Fails Women
South Africa is not short of strong policy commitments. The National Strategic Plan on GBVF and health policies promise survivor-centred medical, psychological, social and medico-legal care. But policies mean little when budgets deny them the resources needed to work. The budget is therefore a vital site of struggle: it can equip our health system to address GBVF, or reproduce the inequalities that place support beyond the reach of marginalised women.
Currently, public financing is failing to equip the public health system to respond adequately to the scale and urgency of the GBVF disaster. This failure takes three forms. First, despite GBVF being classified as a national disaster, no clear additional allocation, including to health,accompanied the declaration. Instead, departments were expected to reprioritise within already constrained budgets, leaving survivors’ care and safety to compete with services already under severe pressure. Second, those existing budgets have been weakened by more than a decade of austerity characterised by repeated real-terms cuts to public healthcare spending. As Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi has acknowledged, austerity has taken a heavy toll on public healthcare, hollowing out the very system now expected to respond to GBVF. Third, the funds intended to give effect to the GBVF disaster declaration remain difficult to trace. Without clear allocations, targets and public reporting, our government can claim that GBVF is being prioritised while survivors remain unable to see or feel meaningful improvements in the services available to them.
Fortunately, it is not too late to course-correct. The Medium-Term Budget Policy Statement gives our government an opportunity to honour women by funding the systems meant to keep us safe. The National Treasury must back the disaster declaration with an additional allocation, measurable targets, a credible implementation plan and transparent reporting. It must also include Departments of Health and Justice and Constitutional Development in the Gender Budget Statement pilot so that spending on survivor care and protection can be properly scrutinised and strengthen frontline survivor services. Anything less leaves women to survive another unfunded promise. Investing in our health and safety is how we truly empower women and, in turn, empower the nation.
Matshidiso Lencoasa is a budget analyst at SECTION27.
