Category: News

The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) is seeking a psychosocial accompaniment team to accompany a cohort of ten (10) feminist leaders participating in the twelve-month Feminist Leadership and Governance Strengthening Programme.

This consultancy forms part of Leadership and Governance Strengthening Programme, AWDF is supporting feminist organizations in Lusophone Africa through leadership coaching, organizational accompaniment, governance strengthening and collective learning. Recognizing that transformative leadership is sustained through both institutional resilience and individual wellbeing, AWDF is integrating a psychosocial accompaniment component into the programme.

Scope of Work

The selected consultant will provide:

-Participant Accompaniment

Provide confidential one-on-one psychosocial accompaniment to programme participants throughout the programme.
-Respond to referrals from leadership coaches where participants require specialized psychosocial support.
-Offer appropriate referrals to external services where additional support may be required.

Collective Learning and Wellbeing

-Participate in programme convenings, including the Inception Forum, selected learning sessions and the Closing Forum.
-Provide immediate psychosocial accompaniment during programme activities where emotionally significant issues arise.
-Design and facilitate periodic wellbeing and collective care sessions for programme participants.
-Support participants to develop individual and collective wellbeing practices that contribute to sustainable leadership.

Programme Support

-Advise the programme team and leadership coaches on approaches for creating psychologically safer and more supportive learning spaces.
-Collaborate with leadership coaches while maintaining appropriate professional boundaries and participant confidentiality.
-Contribute to reflective learning and adaptive programme implementation through periodic debrief sessions with the programme team.

How to Apply 

Interested consultants should submit their application to consultants@awdf.org no later than 7 August 2026.

Read full details in the Terms Of Reference in English and in Portuguese 

Are you ready to be part of a passionate, diverse, and dedicated team working to support and strengthen feminist organisations and movements in pursuit of gender justice and social transformation in Africa?

African Women’s Development Fund  is thrilled to announce three exciting vacancies that could be the career opportunity you are  looking for.

The Senior Programme Officer (SPO)- Bilingual.

About the role:

The Senior Programme Officer (SPO) provides strategic leadership for a portfolio of feminist actors and initiatives, leading grantmaking, partner engagement and accompaniment, learning and knowledge generation, and portfolio management. The role is responsible for shaping, implementing, and continuously evolving AWDF’s resourcing approaches to ensure they are feminist, responsive, trust-based, and grounded in the lived realities of partners and feminist movements across the continent, while contributing to organisational and sector-wide thought leadership on feminist resourcing and movement strengthening.

For more information and mode of application for the Senior Programme Officer (SPO), please visit the APPLICATION PORTAL HERE 

Executive Manager 

About the role:

The Executive Manager’s role is to provide support to AWDF’s CEO, executive leadership and senior management functions to ensure and facilitate effective priority-setting, decision-making, cross-department integration and organisation-wide collaboration, in pursuit of organizational goals and outcomes. The Executive Manager will support the CEO in coordinating collaboration across the AWDF leadership and management team. Working closely with the CEO, the Director of Programmes, Director of Operations and the Director of Partnerships & Voice, she/they will coordinate selected organisation-wide planning-related processes and initiatives. She/they will also oversee the Executive Office team’s work to ensure the CEO can focus her time and energy on top priorities and strategic objectives. In addition, the Executive Manager will work with the CEO in facilitating the strategic and effective engagement of the Board of Directors. The Executive Manager will directly supervise the Executive Assistant.

For more information and mode of application for the Senior Programme Officer (SPO), please visit the APPLICATION PORTAL HERE 

The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) is seeking two experienced bilingual (Portuguese and English) leadership coaches to accompany feminist organisations and leaders across Portuguese-speaking Africa on a transformative one-year leadership and organisational development journey.

This consultancy forms part of a programme designed to strengthen organisational governance, institutional effectiveness and feminist leadership across five feminist organisations in Portuguese-speaking Africa. Through an integrated approach, the programme will support a cohort of ten leaders while strengthening the institutions they lead.

Scope of Work

The selected coaches will:

-Participate in programme inception, baseline assessments and organisational capacity assessments.

-Co-design tailored coaching plans for assigned organisations.

-Provide regular one-on-one leadership coaching to organisational leaders.

-Support governance strengthening, including facilitating one board governance session for each assigned organisation.

-Contribute to programme-wide learning spaces, including the Inception and Closing Forums.

-Document progress, key learning and recommendations throughout the coaching process.

Who should Apply

We welcome applications from experienced conusltants who demonstrate:

-Fluency in Portuguese and English (written and spoken).

-Proven experience in executive, leadership and organisational coaching.

-Strong expertise in organisational development and governance strengthening.

-Strong grounding in intersectional feminist principles and gender justice.

-Deep understanding of feminist organising within Portuguese Speaking Africa.

-Experience facilitating participatory and adult learning processes.

-Strong coaching, facilitation and relationship-building skills.

-Experience working within African feminist networks—particularly in Portuguese Speaking Africa as well as  familiarity with trauma-informed, wellbeing-centred and collective care approaches will be considered an advantage.

Timeline

The consultancy will run over one year, with key milestones including:

• Inception Forum: August 2026
• Leadership coaching and Governance strengthening: Throughout the programme
• Closing Forum: At the end of the project

Specific implementation dates will be agreed with the selected consultants.

How to Apply 

Interested consultants should submit their application to consultants@awdf.org no later than 31 July 2026.

Read full details in the Terms Of Reference English and in Portuguese 

The African Women’s Development Fund have noticed a post currently circulating on LinkedIn that shares a link from our website dating back to 2023 and encourages individuals to apply for an old opportunity.

Please be advised that this posting is completely outdated, and that specific grant application window has long been closed.

To protect your time and personal information, please keep the following in mind:

• Check the Dates: Always verify the original publication date of any link or opportunity shared by third-party accounts.
• Apply Safely: We strongly recommend against submitting personal data or applications through unverified links or unofficial channels.
• Source of Truth: All active job openings, grants, and official opportunities are only hosted and updated live on our official website at https://awdf.org/.

Thank you to our vigilant community for bringing this to our attention. If you encounter any suspicious or misleading posts regarding our organization, please feel free to DM us directly or send an email to awdf@awdf.org.

The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) is seeking an experienced consultant to design and facilitate virtual MEL capacity-strengthening sessions for partners implementing the No to Backlash project across Africa.

This consultancy offers an opportunity to strengthen feminist organisations’ capacity to document, communicate, and demonstrate the impact of their work while contributing to collective learning and movement-building.

Assignment Duration

The consultancy will be undertaken over 14 working days, with the virtual sessions taking place during the last week of July 2026.

How to Apply

Interested consultants should submit:

• A technical proposal (document or slide deck) outlining the proposed approach and a costed work plan.
• A financial proposal, including the consulting daily rate and bank details.
• A current CV.
• A cover letter highlighting relevant experience and facilitation expertise.

Applications should be sent to consultants@awdf.org with the subject line: “Application for Submissions”

Deadline: Thursday, 17 July 2026, 11:59 PM GMT.

If you are passionate about strengthening feminist movements through learning, evidence, and impact storytelling, we encourage you to apply and contribute to advancing collective resistance to anti-rights and anti-gender movements across Africa.

Read more about this role on  Terms of Reference 

Across Africa, digital technologies have become critical spaces for civic engagement, organising, advocacy, and political participation. At the same time, shrinking civic space, democratic backsliding, and the increasing use of online harassment, surveillance, disinformation, and gendered attacks have created new threats to women, feminist activists, journalists, human rights defenders, and marginalised communities. Technology-facilitated gender-based violence has emerged as both a manifestation of structural gender inequality and a mechanism through which democratic participation and civic freedoms are constrained.

As part of our work to strengthen evidence-based advocacy, learning, and grantmaking, The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) seeks to engage a consultant to undertake regional research examining the intersections between Technology Facilitated Gender Based Violence (TFGBV), gender, digital technologies, and democratic civic space in Africa. The assignment will  also generate knowledge products that contribute to movement learning, policy engagement, and feminist responses to digital authoritarianism and democratic erosion.

Objectives

The consultancy will :

• Conduct regional research on the nature, prevalence, and impacts of TFGBV within changing democratic and civic space contexts across Africa.
• Analyse how digital technologies are being used to facilitate gendered violence, silence dissent, restrict civic participation, and undermine feminist organising.
• Document feminist strategies, movement responses, and promising practices for addressing TFGBV and defending digital civic space.
• Produce accessible knowledge products that support learning, advocacy, grantmaking, and policy engagement by women’s rights and feminist organisations.

Timeline

The consultancy will be undertaken over a period of 12 weeks, with all deliverables expected to be completed by 31 October 2026.

How to Apply

Interested consultants should submit the following to consultants@awdf.org by 17th July 2026. Please put as the email subject header, “Application for consultancy: Regional Research on TFGBV.”

• A technical proposal outlining their understanding of the assignment, methodology, and workplan.
• A financial proposal with a detailed budget.
• A curriculum vitae highlighting relevant experience.
• A sample of previous research reports or knowledge products on similar themes.
• Contact details for at least two professional references.

Read the full Terms of Reference HERE

By Nana Zulu

Article courtesy of Diaspora media

The Resources Were Always There, The Question Is Who Controls Them

African feminist movements have spent decades doing something harder: building durable, community-rooted resistance in contexts where backlash was never subtle to begin with. Funded in significant part by conservative forces in the US and Europe, the global anti-rights movement has found fertile ground across the continent, but it has also met its match. From Nigeria to Kenya to South Africa, feminist collectives have developed organising models that are decentralised by necessity, intersectional by instinct, and fluent in the specific terrain they’re working within.

Before the term feminist organising existed in global philanthropic vocabulary, African women were already doing it. They were meeting in community spaces, pooling personal resources, showing up door to door, and holding each other through crisis. This is not a romanticised history. It is the material foundation on which every movement I know was built.

African feminist organising is rooted in Ubuntu: community, solidarity, and mutual support. These values did not arrive with Western institutions or NGO frameworks. They predate them. What modern philanthropy often calls innovative or community-led are principles that African feminist movements have practiced for generations, long before they were legible to funders.

So when I am asked whether the global feminist funding landscape has meaningfully shifted, my honest answer is: not enough. Not nearly enough.

Rebrand is not the same as redistribution

Gender justice has been folded into philanthropic language. It appears in mission statements, in strategy documents, in the names of funds. But language is not money, and visibility is not power. When budget cycles tighten, gender justice and feminist organising are consistently the first areas cut. They remain at the periphery of global philanthropic priorities, even as they are placed at the centre of the branding.

We have also seen what happens when major donors enter “wait and see” mode. Movements do not get to wait and see. Communities in crisis need interventions now. The restrategising of philanthropic institutions or donor paralysis does not pause the violence, the displacement, or the economic precarity that African feminist organisers are responding to every single day.

There is also the subtler pressure: the ask to “wash down” feminist language. To make it more palatable. To strip away the political edge. But that edge is not rhetorical excess. It is the thing that makes structural transformation possible. Remove it, and you are left with programming that addresses symptoms while leaving systems intact.

Discard the assumptions. Start with the people.

If philanthropic institutions genuinely want to learn from African movements, the first requirement is simple and also radical: discard all assumptions. The image of African feminist organising that circulates in global spaces is largely constructed from media, from online information, from secondhand narratives. It does not reflect the lived experience, the indigenous knowledge, or the actual sophistication of movements on the ground.

This is why documentation matters. We need to resource the capturing and sharing of African feminist knowledge, frameworks, and models on our own terms, not as input for external research agendas, but as a body of knowledge that stands in its own right and informs how global collaboration happens.

African feminist philanthropy, for instance, was self-resourced long before named donors arrived. Communities created collective care systems, tontines, rotating funds, communal labor arrangements. These are not informal workarounds. They are sophisticated models for resourcing solidarity and collective care. When the NGOisation of civil society arrived, it pulled many movements away from these practices, orienting them instead toward grant cycles and donor timelines. We lost something important in that shift, and we should name it.

Communities know what they need. Fund accordingly.

One of the things I am rarely asked, but believe is central to this conversation, is this: what do communities already know they need? Because the knowledge is there. It exists on the ground, in feminist networks across the continent, in the organisers who have been navigating these systems for decades. The role of philanthropy is not to define the agenda. It is to resource it.

That means moving away from project-specific, top-down programming and toward core flexible funding. It means trusting movements to make decisions about their own resources. And it means going further: investing in models that allow movements to generate their own income, to own assets, to build financial independence that does not collapse every time a donor restrategises.

Gender lens investing is one avenue. If feminist movements were given core support that they could invest, with returns that flow back into the movement, they would no longer be wholly dependent on the cycles and priorities of external donors. They could build the long-term infrastructure needed not just to survive, but to proactively counter the anti-rights, anti-gender organising that is also being resourced and coordinated globally.

This is not a radical ask. It is a practical one. The resources exist. The question has never been whether there is enough money. The question is who controls it, who it flows to, and on whose terms.

African feminist movements have answered that question with their bodies, their voices, and their decades of unrelenting work. They have built the frameworks, trained the leaders, shifted the laws, and held the line when institutions faltered. They have done this, largely, on a fraction of what is spent on a single global conference. The least we can do is ensure that the women who have always sustained their communities – economically, socially, politically – are the ones who determine what support looks like and how it lands.

The backlash is not a surprise. It is a predictable response to progress. When feminist movements win – when they shift policy, change norms, and mobilise constituencies – those who benefit from the status quo organise to reverse those gains. What is new is the scale, the coordination, and the resourcing of that counter-movement. What is required, then, is an equally coordinated, equally resourced response which is proactive.

This means governments, multilateral institutions, and private philanthropies must be willing to ask an uncomfortable question: are we funding feminism, or are we funding the appearance of feminism? Core, long-term, flexible support to African feminist organisations is not simply the right thing to do. It is the strategically intelligent thing to do for anyone who claims to care about democracy, health, economic development, or peace.

African feminist movements are not waiting to be saved. They are already doing the work. The world’s task is not to lead, but to listen – and then to resource, with trust and without condition, the movements that have always known what freedom requires.

The resources were always there. Now the power must follow.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

This article was first published in Diaspora Africa 

Nana Zulu is the interim CEO at the African Women’s Development Fund.

By Hala Alkarib

Article first published in the Guardian 

Since April 2023, Sudan’s women and girls have been subjected to systematic rape and sexual torture. Specialised support and justice for them is key to the country’s recovery and future

In a village in South Darfur, I met a young girl about my daughter’s age – six or seven years old – who touched my hand and said: “I was taken by the Janjaweed.” This was more than 20 years ago, during the first Darfur crisis, and at the time, that was the term women and girls used as we struggled to articulate the scale of violence against civilians, especially sexual violence.

I saw my daughter in that little girl, and I saw myself in her mother. It was my first encounter with conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in Sudan.

In the years since, I’ve seen how successive regimes and insurgents in Sudan deliberately utilise sexual violence to sustain their grip on power. Perpetrators use it to seize land, force displacement, extract resources, loot communities, silence women and communities, and strip women of their agency. I’ve also seen that it can happen to anyone, depending on their proximity to those in power.

In Darfur and South Kordofan, generations of women have endured repeated waves of CRSV for more than 25 years because of ongoing insurgencies. Since April 2023, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allies have carried out one of the most widespread and coordinated assaults in Sudan’s recent history, committing sexual violence and other war crimes against women and communities in Khartoum, Gezira, and the towns and villages of the northern Blue Nile, White Nile and North Kordofan regions – areas that, until then, had not experienced such systematic CRSV in recent history.

I will never forget the schoolteacher who negotiated with seven RSF men to rape her instead of gang-raping her 14-year-old daughter, or the countless families who lost fathers and brothers, shot dead while the women and children in their households were gang-raped. One mother had lost her husband and was fleeing eastern Gezira on foot with her three daughters after they were gang-raped. One of her sons later found a lorry to carry them. On the journey, she mistook the blood coming from her 18-year-old daughter for menstrual bleeding, only to discover that her daughter had cut her vein. The young woman did not survive the journey.

I will also never forget the young bride who threw herself into the Nile or the 21-year-old woman whose family, after her rape became known, took her out of the hospital in shame and then hid her away, where she bled to death. Hundreds of women and children were kept on farms in northern Khartoum and in Omdurman city, and endured months of captivity as sexual slaves, with horrific encounters. The suffering and the torture do not end as the power relations turn; sexual violence against women and girls continues to exist in the Sudan Armed Forces’ territories.

Numerous victims who suffered violence from the RSF while trying to survive also faced blame and shame from their communities, as well as further criminalisation by the police and military intelligence.

In 2025, the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA), the organisation I work for, documented the cases of more than 850 women accused of collaboration with the RSF who were subjected to detention and long-term imprisonment; those women frequently experienced sexual violence during their time in detention.

My organisation, in partnership with grassroots lawyers, spent more than six months securing the release of four women who were held on suspicion of collaboration, without being charged, for more than a year. They say they endured sexual violence and torture while awaiting trial.

Fractured judicial and health systems, marked by limited capacity and inadequate legal, medical and mental health support, leaves hundreds of Sudanese women and children without access to justice or essential care and highly vulnerable to repeated cycles of violence.

To understand the cycles of sexual violence in Sudan, we must examine the legacies of the Sudanese state and how they shape views of women’s bodies, as well as the agency and voice of communities more broadly. CRSV in Sudan is rooted in the state’s violent and discriminatory character, which deepens collective trauma through anger, militarism and retaliation. The persistence of CRSV is further sustained by the unchecked flow of arms into a country that has long neglected demobilisation and security sector reform.

For more than 1,000 days, sexual violence didn’t stop, nor did anyone address it. Although the UK, EU and US have sanctioned a number of actors involved in Sudan’s war, none appear to have been specifically sanctioned or publicly held accountable for their role in perpetrating CRSV. At the same time, inadequate funding and support for women and communities affected by CRSV continues to deepen the crisis. This situation exacerbates the suffering of the survivors and their communities across Sudan and further demoralises Sudanese people as the violence continues.

Healing for survivors and communities is therefore deeply connected, and the fight against sexual violence must become central to the broader struggle for peace, justice and a new vision of sovereignty.

* All information regarding cases is based on SIHA’s database; specific locations are not mentioned to protect survivors’ privacy.

This articles was published by Guardian

Hala Alkarib is the director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa (SIHA). She works with women and communities affected by war, religious militancy and humanitarian crises in Sudan, South Sudan and the Horn of Africa

By Dr. Isatou Touray

In July 2024, The Gambia came closer than any country in the world to reversing a ban on female genital mutilation. A practice that had been criminalised for nearly a decade was on the verge of becoming legal again.

Then feminist organisers stopped it.

After months of sustained organising, community mobilisation and public campaigning, the National Assembly voted 34 to 19 to reject a bill that would have repealed the country’s 2015 ban on FGM. It was a major victory, not only for Gambian women and girls, but for feminist movements across the continent.

The fact that the vote happened at all should alarm us. Just months earlier, in March 2024, 42 members of the same Parliament had voted to advance the repeal bill. Its supporters argued that FGM is Islamic and the ban was a Western imposition – that Gambians, up to 96% of whom are practising Muslims, should be free to practise their faith as they see fit. These false arguments – there is no requirement for FGM in Islamic law – were not new, but they were better coordinated and more politically embedded than before. At a moment when anti-rights forces are better funded, better organised and more confident, The Gambia offers something the feminist movement badly needs: a documented win, and a template worth studying. It is a rare case of a movement turning a political crisis into momentum. But it is also a reminder that ‘winning’ in legislation does not automatically deliver change.

In August 2025, a one-month-old baby girl, Sarjo Conteh, was rushed to a hospital in Banjul. She had been cut. By the time doctors reached her, she had bled to death. The Gambian authorities confirmed that her injuries were the result of FGM. Conteh’s death was not an isolated incident. Activists on the ground have for years reported that the 2015 ban has not ended FGM, but pushed it underground, and led to girls being cut younger than ever. Many families believe that infants as young as a few days old will heal faster from the cutting, meaning evidence will be harder to detect.

Recently, activist Dr Leyla Hussein wrote about this tragedy with the clarity and fury it deserved. She named what so many institutions still refuse to: that FGM is sexual violence, that it is child abuse, and that the world’s reluctance to say so plainly is inseparable from the fact that the children being harmed are overwhelmingly Black and Brown girls. She asked why, if this violence were happening to white children, there would be any hesitation at all in calling it assault. There would not be.

Hussein also wrote about the particular cruelty of normalisation: the way survivors are taught to question the legitimacy of their own pain when the world has minimised it first. That is the atmosphere in which Sarjo Conteh died. That is the atmosphere in which three women were recently acquitted in connection with her death. And that is why the legislative fight in The Gambia, as hard-won as it was, cannot be the end of the story. Even now, the people who tried to roll back this right are petitioning the Supreme Court, claiming that the ban violates their right to religious and cultural freedom. This is a story about a victory. But it is also a story about the fragility of that victory, and about what enforcement, long-term cultural change and sustained feminist organising actually require.

How we got here

The 2015 ban was introduced under former president Yahya Jammeh. It was imperfect legislation, lacking a serious enforcement strategy, and many Gambians associated it with Jammeh’s dictatorship rather than with the rights it was designed to protect. For years, FGM continued largely unabated.Then, in August 2023, three women were convicted under the law for performing FGM on eight girls under the age of five, one of whom was just four months old.

Those convictions – the first for perpetrators of FGM in a Gambian court – were a breakthrough. Although the law states offenders can be imprisoned for up to three years, the women were issued fines of 15,000 dalasis – equivalent to up to half a year’s income for women in rural areas of the country – or one-year prison sentences if they were unable to pay. Amid national outrage, a prominent imam paid the women’s fines, lawmakers began to talk openly about repealing the ban, and, in February 2024, a private member’s bill was introduced in the National Assembly to do exactly that – arguing that it was ‘anti-Islamic’.

I want to be direct about this framing, because it is used to silence us – and we should not let it. The Quran does not mention FGM. There is no authentic hadith that promotes it. FGM predates Islam, is practised by communities of multiple faiths, and is opposed by Muslim scholars across the world. Associating FGM with Islam is not theology. It is politics. And its political purpose is to put the practice beyond critique.

The organising that turned it around

When the bill to repeal the ban was introduced, the Gambian government said very little, with the main opposition parties saying even less. Civil society did not wait for either.

GAMCOTRAP, which has spent three decades working community by community across this country, mobilised immediately. We were joined by organisations across the Network Against Gender-Based Violence, which became the coordination spine of the campaign. Together, activists ran events across the country. We ran radio programmes, put up billboards, and called legislators directly. We brought survivors to testify at the National Assembly, gathered evidence on death rates and health consequences, and put it in front of anyone who would look at it.

We also took the religious argument seriously, rather than dismissing it. Activists and lawyers facilitated a fact-finding mission to Al-Azhar University in Egypt, one of the most respected institutions in Islamic scholarship. The findings were clear: FGM is not required by Islam. That evidence was placed before lawmakers, and it mattered. At the international level, I took this fight to the UN Human Rights Council. I met with the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women and Girls, with UNFPA, WHO and state delegations, urging them all to use their mandates. I also warned them of something the global conversation tends to underestimate: if The Gambia had fallen, girls from neighbouring countries where FGM is banned could have been transferred across the border to be cut.

None of this was without cost. Activists faced harassment, particularly online. Speaking out against the repeal made people targets. Some survivors who were prepared to testify chose silence because the atmosphere had become too threatening. I want that recorded. The victory was real, and so was the price paid to achieve it.

What the movement needs now

The organisations that held the line in The Gambia need continued, sustained resourcing, not project funding tied to deliverables and donor reporting cycles. They need core funding that allows movements to respond to a political crisis in real time, coordinate across networks, and sustain community engagement over the years that real norm change requires. The fight against FGM is not the responsibility of women alone. It never was. It requires men, religious leaders, community elders, young people and lawmakers who are willing to be on the right side of this, even when it is uncomfortable. In The Gambia, we have seen what happens when enough of them are brought into the work. We have also seen what happens when they stand aside. I have spent decades on this. I will spend whatever decades remain on it. But two years on from July 2024, I want to be clear about what that moment meant, and what it did not. It meant that a specific, coordinated rollback was defeated. It meant that activists who risked a great deal showed it was possible to turn a political crisis into momentum. It did not mean that the work is done, or that the protections are secure, or that the next attempt will not come. We stood on the right side of history. Now we have to make sure we stay there.

Dr. Isatou Touray is the Executive Director of GAMCOTRAP (The Gambia Committee on Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children) and a former Vice President of The Gambia. A survivor of FGM, she has led community-based advocacy against the practice for over three decades, reaching more than 1,000 communities across the country. This reflection article was first published by Open Democracy.