Year: 2020
“The future is a wild card”. Last in the series of Jessica Horn’s reflections on her tenure at AWDF
“The future is a wild card”. Last in the series of Jessica Horn’s reflections on her tenure at AWDF
This is the last in a series of reflections by Jessica Horn, the outgoing Director of Programmes at AWDF, on programme strategy, organisational culture and feminist transformation
We were all perhaps a bit too smug at the start of 2020. The numerology suggested it was going to be an auspicious year. As I write we are still in the midst of COVID19 pandemic, a global health emergency that has been as much about political leadership, the military-industrial complex, macroeconomic policy and (gendered) inequality as it has been about a virus. Just as we were contending with the onset of this maelstrom another exploded into public view with the viral video of the murder of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, USA. Like Rodney King, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland and the far too many other black men, women and transpeople murdered by police in the USA- this sparked rage. However this time there was something palpably different in its scale- enough to inspire action and introspection about the state of abusive policing in Nairobi and Accra, as much as on the racially marked streets of US cities.
Still, despite a few victories for radical critique these past few months have definitely been unsettling. In this ‘upside down’ moment I have been revisiting African American science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s work, prophetic as it was about the burning worlds we find ourselves in. I have also been looking back at AWDF’s own piece of sci-fi The Sky Garden , a wild card scenario from the AWDF Futures scenario series, and thinking about what it could tell us about the ‘where next’.
For context, in 2016 AWDF embarked on a strategic planning process. I had proposed that rather than the usual past-facing approach, we engage the idea of futures. Working with Kenyan foresight practitioner Katindi Sivi Njonjo, I helped shape an organisation-wide process that dug into the data on African futures, surfacing the main drivers shaping our gendered realities. In addition to a strategic plan, the process yielded two pieces of knowledge - the publication Futures Africa: Trends for Women by 2030, which is the first futures trends analysis for the African continent done specifically with a feminist analysis of what the trends mean for women, and a set of four scenarios stories developed and narrated by AWDF staff. We chose to tell these stories about the future from the vantage point of a protagonist Mariam. Mariam is- as a majority of Africans will be by 2030- young and living in an urban environment still grappling with the realities of climate change and its impacts on food security. She is also a wheelchair user and a developer in a feminist tech collective. In the four scenarios Mariam faces different patterns of gendered social, economic, political and cultural power - some supportive of a social and ecological world worth living in, others not.
In The Sky Garden our protagonist Mariam is active in a new world, revived from the dry earth of a past framed by corruption, exploitation and environmental destruction. The way out of this dystopia has been shaped by young women self-organising, linked into a meta-consciousness but ultimately leaderless- or, as we prefer to say in the social justice world, leaderfull in their ability to collectively organise without a singular person making decisions and determining direction. The common good is central as people form farming cooperatives to transform the otherwise desolate urban environment around them into sources of localised organic food production. A society of shared care labour, with economies that support work in pursuit of meaning rather than daily millet or the accumulation of money in the hands of a few corrupt officials and well connected business people. In The Sky Garden, technology is the animating force of these radically new ways of being- although technology can equally be read as a metaphor for the potential for a liberated collective imagination, the force of combined creative feminist will.
As COVID19 gathered pace, many in social justice spaces started to ask whether we should see the pandemic as a launch pad for radical transformation, a “portal” to use Arundhati Roy’s framing. A chance as the more mainstream policy sector puts it to “pivot” and eventually “build back better”. What will become of this moment? Will we indeed take seriously what the pandemic has laid bare concerning the gendered crisis of care, the realities of domestic violence and the fact that few homes are as safe as we imagine they are for girls and for women, the precarity of our current choice of austerity framed neoliberal economy, and the dire state of public health services almost everywhere. As eye-opening as it has all been, will we actually just slide back into the way we were? The familiar is, after all, something we can achieve without a fight.
Now, it may not come as a surprise that I for one am ready for something new, guided by the insights that African feminist activists across the continent are sharing about where the points of friction are, and what some of the macro-policy catalysts of change could be. The Sky Garden suggests that nothing shifts without action, and that in order for the action to succeed it needs to be embedded in collective agency, inspired by brave imagination, and with deep attention to what younger African women in their diversities are saying and imagining for all of us.
Today ends almost five years in my role as Director of Programmes at AWDF. In that time the grantmaking budget has more than doubled. Our annual grant sizes have increased to $500,000 a year, although our smallest grant remains at $2,000, positioning AWDF to resource the full ecosystem of African women’s organising. From grantees like Boxgirls who give little girls living in extreme marginality in Nairobi boxing gloves and big dreams, to IDIWA in eastern Uganda turning a forward-thinking national policy on disability inclusion into actual economic opportunities for differently-abled women, to regional organisations like FEMNET and the Coalition of African Lesbians marshalling panAfrican policy in the direction of full equality. If COVID19 has shown us anything its exactly that- that anything is possible. And as we say in bold letters on the entryway to AWDF House- it is African women who make the impossible, possible. I leave AWDF even more committed to this work, and ready for it all. That wild card future? It’s time to make it real. Tugende!
Workplace Giving: Put your Money where your Heart is.
Workplace Giving: Put your Money where your Heart is.
By Lydia Maclean, Communications & Fundraising Specialist
As an organisation with a mission to mobilise financial, human and material resources to support African women’s organisations, the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) has provided over 50 million dollars in grants since its inception in 2001.
AWDF is both a grantmaking and fundraising organisation, and therefore straddles two sides of philanthropy. This provides a deeper appreciation of the various forms of philanthropy that exist, especially in Africa where philanthropy is deeply embedded in our culture and traditions, but generally goes under-acknowledged.
CEO Theo Sowa, in an interview with Alliance magazine, made this observation:
“There are lots of different agendas around philanthropy on the continent. Philanthropy has been strong in Africa for a very long time, but it’s not been properly documented or valued. On the one hand, you have the Ibrahims and the Motsepes, high net worth individuals who set up foundations and give large amounts of money. On the other, we have giving by millions of ordinary Africans that comes from solidarity, not necessarily from surplus, so people with very little will still give. Gerry Salole of the European Foundation Centre has this great line that ‘there is no successful African who has not benefited at some point from another African’s philanthropy’. Philanthropy is ingrained in Africa”.
AWDF staff firmly share this belief, and in 2006, initiated a workplace giving scheme which has raised substantial amounts and supported various causes across the continent. In an earlier article on workplace giving, Director of Operations Gertrude Annoh Quarshie refers to it as an “opportunity to take action”. In addition to showing solidarity and inspiring others to give, workplace giving contributes to team building as it creates collective impact.
Over the years, the AWDF Workplace giving fund has supported various organisations and women’s groups in projects including the re-opening of the Ark Shelter of the Ark foundation in Ghana, and donation of materials for a training workshop at the Nsawam female prisons, also in Ghana.
The most recent beneficiary of the AWDF Workplace giving programme is the Rape Crisis Cape Town Trust, based in South Africa. The Director of Rape Crisis, Kathleen Dey, affirms that “Thanks to this donation we will be able to provide communication support for our work with women during this time of COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa. The fact that this donation comes from your staff’s monthly payroll contribution and that they chose this project to support moves us all very deeply.”
For more information about the AWDF Workplace giving programme, please send an email to awdf@awdf.org
With Seeds, Soil and Rain we will Flourish: Second in Jessica Horn’s Reflection series
With Seeds, Soil and Rain we will Flourish: Second in Jessica Horn’s Reflection series
African feminist activism has been going through an increasingly introspective moment. A moment when we are considering not just the external politics of our thoughts and practices towards change, but also the impact that all of this is having on our physical and emotional bodies. I think its fair to say that there is a collective sense of exhaustion, compounded at times with the actual direct threat of harm in response to speaking up (the contemporary political moments in Egypt, Algeria and Zimbabwe, and the ongoing process of articulating a public queer African feminist politics come to mind). As a sector we have dubbed the extending reach of oppressive states as a phenomenon of ‘closing space’. However its toll is not just felt in the restriction of public space for civic action, it is also felt in the inner space of feminists activists and in the sense of emotional depletion that constant battles without replenishment can create. And while activists and donors increasingly recognise this, there are still very few practical resources to fully meet this need on the African continent.
I came to AWDF having spent some years developing AIR– an initiative supporting African practitioners to document practice and develop new tools around sustaining emotional wellbeing and mental health in contexts of deep structural and direct violence, from war zones in the Great Lakes to the deep poverty and xenophobia of South African cities. In AIR we ended up focusing our energies on reconceptualising trauma from a transformative feminist perspective (work that I have written about here). AWDF was a founding member of the AIR network, and on joining AWDF, the CEO Theo Sowa and I agreed that we would find ways to bring some of the creative visions of AIR’s work into AWDF’s programming, in particular the idea of creating a retreat for African feminist activists.
In July 2017 the Novo Foundation put out an unusual call for applications- inviting pitches for ideas for ways to nurture radical hope. This seemed a perfect place to plant the vision of resourcing the deep work of care in feminist activism. I started to draw out the concept, combining elements of practice that together would enable our activism to flourish: seeding inspiration for the growth of African feminist movements through documenting activism and inter-generational dialogues, grounding through piloting a model of an activist retreat for African feminists and women’s rights defenders; and connecting feminist activists to convene and grow their feminist organising at national and community levels linked to the African Feminist Forum.
Our concept note passed the first stage and we were invited to submit a full application. Novo recognised that with limited budget not all great proposals could be funded, and in an absolute golden egg of a policy in the philanthropic world, they explained that any organisation submitting a full application that did not end up funded would receive an amount of money to recognise the labour that had gone into developing it. They had made it so there was nothing to loose by allowing ourselves to imagine. A few months later we got the news. AWDF was selected as one of 19 successful organisations- drawn from a pool of over 1,000 applications. The Flourish Initiative was going to be fully funded.
I began designing the Flourish Retreat with the newly hired Catalytic Initiatives Officer Akosua Hanson - a Ghanaian feminist theatre practitioner and popular radio DJ. We assembled a facilitation team with the kind of magical energy that could pull something like this off: lead facilitator Hope Chigudu, a pioneering voice in integrating wellbeing into feminist organisational practice; Laurence Sessou, Beninoise aromatherapist, massage therapist and holder of sacred space, and Ghanaian psychotherapist Laurita de Diego Brako. We invited organisations doing frontline work around violence against women across Africa to recommend staff to attend, and we gathered them by the banks of the Volta River for our activist experiment- the Flourish Retreat. Thanks to Akosua’s spatial design vision and Laurence’s aromatherapy wisdom we ensured that the space looked, smelled, and felt like possibility. The days were intense but incredible, and every day in our debriefs the facilitation team became more and more clear that this work was indeed essential.
As I explained in an interview by my colleague Akosua Hanson after the Flourish Retreat:
“I see activism as a form of collective healing. We are looking to both prevent and find lasting cures for the individual and collective wounds caused by patriarchal injustice and violence. Some activists do this by providing direct services- so the practical side of people’s needs for legal, medical, emotional, educational, economic and other support. Some people do this by working on challenging the systems that cause these inequalities and harm in the first place. And many work on both. Activism is healing work. And the questions is- if that is the case then who heals the healers? Who provides the same kinds of support and solidarity for activists? I think it’s important to say a deep thank you to the people who help sustain and make our lives better. We focus these days so much on celebrity, on corporate leadership, on mainstream political leadership. Yet who makes our lives liveable? Who nurtures hope? Activists do. Practitioners do”.
Now, any gardener knows that in order to create a flourishing landscape you don’t only need someone to explain to you when to plant or how often to water. You need soil, seeds, and the desire to see your garden grow. We designed the Flourish retreat methodology so that participants left with seeds in their hands. In true activist spirit, many of them have decided to return to their own soil and continue to plant. A few days ago I received an email from Hope Chigudu describing the work that the retreat participants from Uganda have been doing. Continuing to both hold space for each other and for their communities, they have now produced five editions of Diaries of African Feminists reflecting on the emotional dimensions of COVID19 lockdowns and ongoing thoughts about navigating activism. One has opened her home as an informal wellbeing space for women needing safety from their abusive homes, with others in the group dropping in to offer support. This adds to the other stories of retreat participants who have gone on to use their renewed sense of inner vision, and new tools for resilience to reshape how they are engaging in their women’s rights advocacy and in their activist communities.
As a women’s fund, AWDF is first and foremost a donor- a provider of resources. Indeed a majority of AWDF’s financial resources go directly to support the work of African women’s organisations through its grantmaking. However we have also learned that if our resourcing is to sustain this work of change-making it has to be done with attention to the who and the how of transformation. We need to ‘take care’ as we so often say in English. To pay closer attention not just to the numbers of people reached, or whether the work is feeding into internationally agreed change goals, but also to the realities of the lives of women taking risks, facing threat and acting as anchors for community hope. To keep asking the question of whether our funding and programming models seed enough, water enough, clear enough ground to enable activists to thrive.
This article is also published on Medium, and is the second in a series of reflections by Jessica Horn, the outgoing Director of Programmes at AWDF, on programme strategy, organisational culture and feminist transformation.