By Levy Masiteng
Minister in the Presidency for Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation Maropene Ramokgopa has called for stronger, evidence-based systems to prevent femicide as government pilots a new approach aimed at identifying institutional failures behind the killing of women.
“Our women and children are under attack and South Africa is bleeding,” Ramokgopa said.
She was speaking on Friday during a national webinar introducing South Africa’s Femicide Review Methodology Pilot, hosted virtually by the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation (DPME) in partnership with the Pan-African Collective for Evidence (PACE).
“South Africa can no longer afford to respond to femicide only after lives have been lost,” Ramokgopa said, adding there was a need to learn from individual cases and use that knowledge to strengthen institutions responsible for protecting women and girls.
The webinar, held under the theme “Remembering Lives Lost. Building Systems That Save Lives”, brought together government, civil society, researchers, development partners and practitioners to examine how evidence from femicide cases could be used to identify systemic failures and improve prevention.
“Every life lost to femicide demands more than our grief; it demands action,” Ramokgopa said.
The pilot seeks to move beyond recording the number of women killed by examining individual cases in greater detail, including whether warning signs were missed and whether institutions responded appropriately before a woman was killed.
According to the DPME, the methodology draws on international best practice but is being adapted to South Africa’s circumstances. It uses a multi-stakeholder approach intended to identify systemic gaps, strengthen accountability and improve policy and institutional responses.
Research by the South African Medical Research Council found that the country recorded an overall femicide rate of 10.6 deaths per 100,000 women in 2020/21.
The same research found that the intimate-partner femicide rate was 5.5 deaths per 100,000 women in 2020/21, almost five times the global average.
UN Women highlighted the 5.5-per-100,000 intimate-partner femicide rate in 2024 as evidence of the scale of violence confronting women in South Africa.
Under the review methodology, individual femicide cases can be examined to establish the circumstances preceding a killing and determine whether weaknesses in the justice, policing, health or support systems contributed to opportunities for intervention being missed.
The process is intended to consider questions such as whether there were earlier indications that a woman was at risk, whether authorities or other institutions had previous contact with the victim or perpetrator, and whether better coordination could have prevented the killing.
The DPME said the pilot would also seek to strengthen coordination across sectors, with the department stressing that preventing femicide required collective responsibility from society and institutions responsible for protecting women and girls.
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