GBVF national disaster: What’s changed so far?

Ten months ago, South Africa reached a milestone that took over a million signatures to achieve.

Today, the organisation behind that petition says it’s time to ask an uncomfortable question about what’s actually followed.

Women For Change fought for this classification, and the government announced it on 20 November 2025, after their petition gathered more than 1.1 million signatures.

how the classification came about

President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the decision at the G20 Social Summit, following the “G20 Women’s Shutdown”campaign.

That announcement followed a wave of nationwide protests.

There, demonstrators lay down in silence for 15 minutes to honour the estimated 15 women murdered daily in South Africa.

Bongani Sithole, head of the National Disaster Management Centre, made the formal classification after reviewing reports from government and civil society.

Those reports showed the ongoing violence met the legal definition of a national disaster.

The classification aimed to unlock emergency funding and drive a more coordinated national response.

It also aimed to redirect government budgets toward implementing the long-standing Emergency Response Action Plan on GBV and Femicide, first introduced back in 2019.

what Women For Change says is still missing

In a recent statement, Women For Change said South Africans still don’t have a clear, publicly accessible, costed implementation plan.

They want to know what will actually be done, by when, by whom, with what budget, and against which measurable targets.

The organisation asked pointedly where the dedicated funding for the disaster response actually is.

They also asked where the transparent allocations for the National Strategic Plan on GBVF have gone.

The group didn’t stop there.

They also pointed to the timing of two new commemorative R2 coins that entered circulation during Women’s Month.

One honours Charlotte Maxeke, the first Black South African woman to earn a university degree.

The other marks the more than 20,000 women who marched to the Union Buildings in 1956.

Women For Change said that recognition matters.

But they called it a painful irony to honour revolutionary women on currency while women today are still fighting for meaningful action against the violence killing them.

Their message was blunt: classification was never meant to be the finish line.

It was only the starting point, and a national disaster cannot exist only on paper.

But in my opinion, “irony” is the perfect word for it. 

A R2 coin doesn’t fix the issue at hand, it feels more like a distraction for a minute, while the bare minimum has actually been done since the announcement. And South African women simply aren’t standing for the bare minimum anymore. We demand actual change.

Do you think enough has changed since the classification was announced?