Broadly, a women focused website and digital video channel, has debuted a short documentary on Boxgirls Kenya, a community outreach programme, that focuses on young women and girls’ sexual and health rights. Founded in 2008 by professional boxers, Boxgirls Kenya uses boxing as a tool to tackle issues of sexual and gender based violence affecting young women and girls in marginalised communities in Nairobi.

The programme has made significant strides, reaching over 1,200 girls in the community while challenging negative perceptions about women and girls and breaking the silence on sexual abuse and violence. In 2014, Boxgirls Kenya received a grant from the African Women’s Development Fund to support its Msomi project, which included training coaches, sexual abuse prevention education and an annual boxing tournament.

The short documentary, dubbed “Nairobi’s Boxgirls Fight Back,” highlights their work in educating young Kenyan women and girls about their rights while equipping them with skills to help defend themselves against violence.

Watch the short piece below:

*Fatou Wurie is an AWDF African Women Writers 2015 participant. She is a writer and activist whose articles appear in the Huffington Post and TheJournalist among others. Read her original article here

This article was originally published on The Journalist. Read the original article here.

Ebola is an infectious and generally fatal disease. It’s marked by fever and severe internal bleeding, spread through contact with infected body fluids. The countries of Sierra Leone and Guinea on Africa’s West Coast have been especially hard hit with about 4 000 people dying since the start of the outbreak a couple of years ago. The writer participated in the recent Writing for Social Change Workshop in Kampala – an annual event of The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) in collaboration with FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers Association.

Five years ago I was sexually assaulted and I call myself a survivor. I live in a country where this word survivor is thrown around like confetti. Just another term for global consumption. A euphemism for scars, underneath which lurks the pain of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) outbreak that hit Sierra Leone.

There is a silver lining to the horrific experience. Not everyone died. But now we have to face up to a reality that survivors are often re-victimised. People lack a rational explanation. Lack a sense of agency to deal with the trauma. So their responses become irrational, and often cruel.

As a survivor of trauma I know this all too well. For those, especially the women, who have survived Ebola the real battle has just begun. Now they have to pick up the pieces of their lives.

Mamusu Mansaray, a 30-year-old, is animated. We sit across from one another. She bounces around a bit in her chair, attempting to make herself more comfortable. She recalls her experience, talking repeatedly about the fear.

“When I began to fall sick I got scared to call 117 (emergency service). We heard that those who were taken away by Ebola ambulances didn’t return. And when I finally found myself in an ambulance and taken to a treatment centre I was so, so scared that I would die in the ambulance like everyone else. I was sure I was going to die, laying there in the ambulance with other people who were sick too.”

Fear Paralyses

Fear often paralyses one during a crisis. This is what I recall after my own assault. Fear nested in every crevice of my body. Fear paralysing the physical pain yet amplifying the experience enough for it to be forever etched in my memory. I remember the feeling of becoming just another statistic. Then feeling calm in fleeting moments. But soon the tears would appear of their own accord. But for the most part, I remember feeling incredibly scared. The journey out of physical pain was a long and arduous one, with symptoms that till this day appear unexpectedly. The road towards emotional recovery? Well, it will take a lifetime. Perhaps.

Rabiatu Kalokoh is 23 years old. She contracted Ebola through a pastor’s anointing oil while treating a pregnant girl that was ill in her community. She remembers:

“One morning in the bathroom I started bleeding heavily down there. I knew it wasn’t my period because it wasn’t the time. I called for my grandmother who got angry and asked me what I had done to myself. I told her nothing, I hadn’t done anything but she was really angry at me.”

Women & Girls Most Vulnerable

In the role as primary care-givers culturally and socially, women and girls are most vulnerable during health epidemics. In Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone women have also been the least supported as effective social mobilisers, as health workers, as community leaders and now as survivors.

During the Ebola outbreak heroic acts surpassed gender, tribe, race and nationality. It has been a case of humanity acting for humanity. Yet, women and girls remain the bearers of the burden. Bone-deep existing social issues like high illiteracy rates, frail health care systems and gendered economic disparities were thrown into sharp relief due to Ebola. Adequate social, economic and political, gender-targeted responses to these social fractures have been slow. It has made ‘surviving’ the disease only half of the battle for many women who have contracted Ebola.

Women in Sierra Leone were disproportionately affected by Ebola because of gendered roles within our society. We are the primary custodians of care for our families and communities. In the health care system women make up the majority, acting as nurses and maternal and child health aids (MCH) in community clinics and larger hospitals.

Flawed Health Care

Nurse Adiatu Pujeh’s story is a testament to effects of a health care system that delayed providing adequate Infection Prevention Control (IPC) training and equipment to health care personnel.

Adiatu walks with a limp and a spark in her eyes. Meeting her for the first time you know that she is one who beats the odds every time. She and four of her colleagues, all female nurses, contracted Ebola in November 2014. She is the only one who survived.

“Three days after I was discharged and came out alive, I went back to work. I didn’t want anyone else to suffer the way I had suffered. I went back to work. Look, I’ve survived a car accident and have a plate in my arm and I have survived Ebola. God clearly doesn’t want me yet! So, even though it has been very hard, I am still here and will continue to do what I can to save lives”.

As survivors of trauma we gravitate towards others. Extending understanding and empathy becomes part of who we have become. I choose to play my part in assisting women and young girls who have survived Ebola through art and advocacy with the hope that something good, something positive could grow. Reaping a positive harvest from an experience that dances with death.

Survivors & Shame

After my own assault I was surrounded by resources, colleagues and access to counseling that initiated the process of healing. I was completing my studies at university. In short I had many more privileges and access than many women in Sierra Leone will ever have. Even then, self-inflicted shame prevailed in social structures that either boxed me into a rape statistic or demanded I prove an unassailable narrative. But the experience to this day remains fragmented, culturally damaging and personally dehumanising.

So much has been asked of Ebola survivors. To share their stories, to utilise their experiences for social good, to speak when requested to speak, to become caricatures of the trauma or not speak about it at all. The women and young girls in our programme, The Survivor Dream Project, are Ebola survivors who have relayed feeling isolated and betrayed by people close to them. Their most intimate experiences are made public for intake without tangible, sustainable social support.

Adiatu the nurse still feels stigmatised:

“I filmed my story when I just came out of the treatment centre and after that, I could not go to the market for months. Every time I go to the market they call me the Ebola woman. Even at work, where I caught the virus it’s taken a while. I still get the looks”.

As a survivor of another type of traumatic event these realities resonate with a deep understanding that the Ebola Survivors of Sierra Leone face heightened social structural barriers; access to quality health care, quality education, safe space for dialogue and sustained economic support.

Survivor Dream Project

This is how The Survivor Dream Project came to be. It is our way of exposing the hidden reality of ‘surviving’ which is the ability to pick up the pieces of life when all is destroyed. It is about designing a localised programme to assist in building capacity for women and girls who have survived Ebola to become economically empowered. To address the lack of access to quality health care services and to cultivate a safe space for heart-to-heart skin-to-skin discussions. It is about supporting women and young girls garner strength to push through stigma and not be defined by Ebola, to not remain a statistic. Most importantly, to remind our policy makers and the world that we still fail our women, we still fail to cultivate social systems conducive to gender based right to dignity, social and economic growth and empowerment.

The Survivor Dream Project is about nourishing the dreams of our women in the programme. Five years from now, where will the 20 women in the project be? What type of positive change would have occurred? In what part of their bodies and psyche will this trauma reside? These questions for any survivor are difficult to conceptualise without a safe space and system dedicated to nurturing them, so that it becomes possible to envision a future where they did not only survive, but bloomed.

Fatou Wurie is a health communications and policy advocacy activist, writer and photographer. Her work has been featured on the Huffington Post, Okay Africa, Amnesty International Blog and the Standard Times- a leading local newspaper discussing women’s health, maternal and newborn health, sexuality and politics. Her passion lies in curating spaces and places through community designed projects, technology, and advocacy policy to drive improved social services for marginalized communities – especially women. She is the founder of The Survivor Dream Project – a community led project that creates sustainable change in the lives of vulnerable populations across Sierra Leone. Fatou participated in AWDF’s 2015 African Women Writers Workshop. You can follow her writing at her blog.

After more than a year of unimaginable suffering, West Africa looks cautiously ahead to the end of the most devastating outbreak of the Ebola virus the world has ever known. Yet the road for the three worst affected countries is still one of tough challenges.

Whilst Liberia is celebrating a second round of being declared Ebola-free, the announcement of new cases in Sierra Leone this week is seen as a real setback to national efforts to get rid of the disease. The new outbreaks, in the northern part of the country have led to a fresh round of enforced quarantines for thousands of people.

The first case of Ebola broke out in Guinea in December 2013, but the disease went undetected for four months until it crossed the border into neighbouring Sierra Leone, reaching its peak in August 2014. To date Ebola has claimed over 11,200 lives in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea. Thousands of others died of other causes due to the shutdown of emergency and regular health care services as hospitals closed their doors in the wake of the epidemic.

At AWDF, our Ebola relief support for 52 women’s organizations in Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, underscores our concern for women who play the role of frontline responders in emergency situations on our continent. Within weeks of the outbreak we disbursed $450,000 to these women’s groups in the three countries.

Given the brutal impact on their already battered economies and the acute shortage of healthcare professionals, getting the countries completely Ebola-free and restoring what remains of virtually non-existent healthcare infrastructure will require the efforts of regional and national governments, individuals and the international community.

Early evidence from this outbreak has shown that women were disproportionately affected. Women’s livelihoods, security and lives came under direct assault as the epidemic waged its war.

For the next two weeks, we would like to salute the courage of the healthcare professionals, doctors, workers and ordinary everyday citizens who survived the unimaginable and through whose efforts the halt in the epidemic’s advance was made possible.

Through stories, features, reports and photographs we will tell the story of the impact of Ebola on women over the past year. Women who have demonstrated courage, resilience and the ability to survive the outbreak of one of the deadliest viruses on earth.

Click here for featured stories.

Students at University of Ghana (AP Photo/Gabriela Barnuevo)

Read published article here: on Qz.com

BY Amba Mpoke-Bigg

Over the past couple of decades Ghana has won a hardearned reputation as a stable and settled democracy.

Yet, as news broke last week that a young university graduate from Ghana had left home to join Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS), it was hard not to dread the prospect of a mass exodus, or worse, deadly jihadist violence on our shores.

Those concerns were heightened when an investigative report by popular local radio station Starr FM reported that ISIS agents in Ghana are enticing unemployed youths with promises of cash and a gateway to heaven.

“They are promised initial spending fee and luxurious life before they travel to Syria and Iraq. Again their immediate families are assured quality life after they have left, so many of the young guys are considering it, especially in the Zongos (a slang term for neighborhoods populated by majority northern Ghanaian Muslims),” it quoted an interviewee as saying.

Twenty-five year old Nazir Alema Nortey, a graduate of one of Ghana’s leading universities sent a WhatsApp message to his family telling them he left the country earlier this month to join the Islamic extremist group, leaving behind a devastated family. The University Of Science and Technology graduate, is described by his father as a gentle, well-mannered man. Nortey was an active student on campus and showed no signs of being radicalized. He had a girlfriend. He was an ordinary man. Sketchy details of a second recruit, identified only as Rafiq also emerged this week at an official media briefing but there are already unconfirmed reports of a third—a young woman whose name has been given as Shakira Mohammed.

“Anyone is a potential recruit,” National Security Co-ordinator, Mr Yaw Donkor, told reporters at the briefing.

Donkor said would-be members were being headhunted from mainly tertiary institutions in Ghana where students were drafted into WhatsApp and Facebook social media forums in which radical discourse and indoctrination took place.

Among the many questions a shocked nation is asking itself is what might happen if radicalized youth return home. A look at what’s happening across Africa and around the world shows a sharp rise in the number of youth joining ISIS.

Ghana prides itself on its stable democracy and social harmony, but it was surely only a matter of time before the specter of Islamist militancy touched our shores given how close we are to troubled regional neighbours like Nigeria to the east, Mali to the northwest and Niger and Chad to the northeast. These are all now hotspots for militant Islam and terrorist activity.

Boko Haram, which has launched massive attacks in Nigeria since 2009, is the most troubling. The group which initially had links to al-Qaeda, pledged allegiance to ISIS in March. With little in place in terms of anti-terrorism measures in Ghana, what is there to stop us following the lead of our volatile neighbours?

Back in June there were angry demonstrations in Accra when city authorities ordered security forces to raze part of one of the largest slums, largely inhabited by Muslims, leaving thousands homeless.

One placard brought home the frustration: “Before 2016 , you will see Boko Haram in Ghana,” the sign read.

While some are blaming the internet and the accessibility of radical social media sites, there is an increasing possibility Islamic disaffection with Christian fundamentalism might be on the rise.

Christians make up 70% of the population of Ghana and Muslims 18%, according to official census figures from 2000. This has been disputed by Ghanaian Muslim leaders and other official sources who set the number at between 18% to 30%. Relations between the two religions have been peaceful in Ghana. But it’s often noted development and education have spread much faster in the predominantly Christian south than in the mainly Muslim north.

Ghana’s main political parties are not organised primarily on religious or ethnic lines, as happens elsewhere on the continent, and the country has had several Muslim vice presidents. Yet in the wake of these revelations the potential for Islamophobia against its Muslim minority is real.

We need to ask ourselves what the attraction is for an ordinary, middle-class Ghanaian young man, or woman, in joining the most dangerous jihadist group in the world. Words like radicalization seem almost incongruous with moderate Muslim youth. Yet it is true that education and liberalism aren’t foolproof armour against radicalization.

Neither can the economic factor be overlooked, given that Ghana, once Africa’s star economy, has turned to the International Monetary Fund to help it resolve its financial crisis.

President John Mahama says growth needs to be at least 8% to provide jobs for its young people, but growth has shrivelled in the past two years and it is expected to stand at 3.9% in 2015—below average for subSaharan Africa.

Unemployment data in Ghana is not collected, but Desmond Biney, director of the Unemployed Graduates Association Of Ghana sets the figure for unemployed graduates over the last five years at around 287,000. Current membership of the group which was set up as an advisory and placement service has doubled in the last two years.

And in further evidence of the impact of current economic conditions, Ghanaians have joined the hundreds of thousands of migrants risking their lives on the Mediterranean to seek work in Europe.

It is important not to overstate the problem. So far this is a tiny handful of people in a nation of 26 million. But for the majority of Ghanaians their decision to join ISIS should set alarm bells ringing. The question that needs answering is: how far will they go?

As part of the 2015 African Women Writers Workshop, The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) and Uganda Women Writers Association- FEMRITE- held a Public Dialogue on Friday July 31st in downtown Kampala, Uganda. That evening, the workshop participants, 22 African women writers, joined members of Uganda’s literary, art and activist community for a discussion on the status of African women in decision making spaces. The overall theme of the event was ‘African Women & Public Policy: Are We Getting It Right?’

The dialogue was led by a panel of noted African women thinkers including AWDF’s CEO Theo Sowa, Dr Tabitha Mulyampiti, a senior lecturer in the department of women and gender studies at Uganda’s Makerere University, writer and lead workshop facilitator Yewande Omotoso and the workshop participants.

It was a lively debate, which was well attended. Following the event AWDF CEO Theo Sowa gave an interview to the Ugandan radio station Power FM. You can listen to the interview and report on the event below:

WRITING FOR SOCIAL CHANGE.mp3

[tp lang=”en” not_in=”fr”] AWDF is Delighted to announce the appointment of Jessica Horn as icts new Director of Programs Beginning October 1, 2015. Ms Horn’s ground breaking work, commitment to feminist philanthropy, and vividly innovative communications strategies-have-been integral to social change and social justice leadership on the African continent.

Jessica is a founding member of the African Feminist Forum Working Group, a board member of Urgent Action Fund-Africa, and sits on the International Grants Committee of Comic Relief. In 2012 She Was named an African woman changemaker by ARISE Magazine and as one of Applause Africa’s 40 Africans Changemakers under 40. Her research and analysis has-been published in professional journals The Lancet and Feminist Africa, and media platforms Al Jazeera, openDemocracy and The Feminist Wire.

“AWDF is Delighted That She Will Be joining our team and look forward to her leadership AWDF Taking forward into yet Reviews another phase of our journey Promoting and Achieving African women’s rights and global social justice” AWDF’s CEO Theo Sowa said.

Jessica’s work under her consultancy, Akiiki Consulting, HAS led to ground-breaking initiatives, Including in social justice philanthropy, with the establishment of UHAI -EASHRI- the first African-led fund Supporting the rights of sexual minorities. She Was a leader in early thinking around funding models for FRIDA – The Young Feminist Fund and aussi managed funding for Women’s Rights and Minority Rights at the Sigrid Rausing Trust, one of the Largest private human rights funders in Europe, overseeing substantial businesses growth in Both funding portfolios.

“Jessica Horn HAS Worked for over 15 years Supporting activist organizations, funders and the UN, to Deepen analysis, shape policy and funding, and refine interventions to defend women’s rights to health, bodily autonomy and freedom from violence. This includes 10 years in women’s rights and social change philanthropy as a donor Grantmaker and in advisory and governance roles. “

Ms Horn join AWDF from the Stephen Lewis Foundation Where She Has served as Senior Advisor to AIR (The African Institute for Integrated Responses to Violence Against Women & Girls and HIV / AIDS). Ms Horn replaces Sarah Mukasa, Who served in the position for nine years. [/tp]

[tp lang=”fr” not_in=”en”] AWDF is pleased to announce the appointment of Jessica Horn its new Director of Programmes at 1 October 2015. The innovative work of Ms. Horn in engaging in feminist philanthropy communication strategies were an integral part of social change and leadership for social justice in Africa.

Jessica is a founding member of the African Working Group of Feminist Forum, a member of the Board of Urgent Action Fund-Africa, and serves on the International Comic Relief Grants Committee. In 2012 she was named African woman ‘changemaker’ by ARISE Magazine and as one of the 40 Africans among 40 Changemakers by Applause Africa’s. Its research and analysis was published in professional journals The Lancet and Feminist Africa, the Al Jazeera media platforms, and openDemocracy The Feminist Wire.

“AWDF is thrilled that she is joining our team and we are delighted that its leadership leads AWDF forward into a new phase of our journey to the promotion and realization of the rights of African women and global social justice,” said the Theo Sowa CEO of AWDF.

The work of Jessica as his counsel Akiiki Consulting, has led to pioneering initiatives, including philanthropy for social justice, with the creation of UHAI -EASHRI- the first African funds directed to support the rights of sexual minorities. She was a leader in the early days of reflection on the funding models for FRIDA – The Fund young feminists and also managed funding for women’s rights and minority rights in the Sigrid Rausing Trust, one of the largest private funders of human rights in Europe, overseeing substantial growth in two portfolio funds.

“Jessica Horn worked for over 15 years in supporting militant organizations, donors and the UN in order to deepen the analysis, shape policy and funding, and refine interventions to defend the rights of women to health, bodily autonomy and freedom from violence. This includes 10 years on the rights of women and the change of social philanthropy as a funder and governance donor and advisory roles. “

Ms. Horn joined AWDF after the Stephen Lewis Foundation, where she served as Senior Advisor AIR (The African Institute for integrated responses to violence against women and girls and HIV / AIDS). Ms. Horn replaces Sarah Mukasa, who operated at this position for nine years. [/tp]