Susan Chenai Mutambasere is a 2020 South Africa Program grantee and PhD student studying Law at University of Pretoria. Susan is Zimbabwean and a lawyer whose focus has been on human rights working in both the public and private sector and serving as a Board/Founding Member of Cradle of Hope Trust. Her passion is driven by seeing girls drop out because of the belief that their only value was in marriage. Her thesis is looking at how culture, customs, and traditions affect the implementation of the Maputo Protocol on reproductive rights of married women in Zimbabwe. She plans on carrying out research, and consultancies, as well as teaching with a view to supporting sexual and reproductive rights on the Africa content. She has a dream of assisting in the establishment of a specialist Master’s program in sexual and reproductive rights at a university in Zimbabwe.

“I have more than a decade experience as a human rights lawyer, and i have worked on civil and political rights in a non-profit set up, as well as different types of rights in a private sector set-up. I have also engaged in consultancy, working with different types of organisations whose mandates focus on an array of rights. In all these activities which i undertook in my country, I realized that sexual and reproductive rights remain an underdeveloped area of human rights. Given that i have worked in various sectors, my next career goal is to enter the academic arena as a researcher and teacher.”