Category: News

Our partners continue to create inspiring spaces for feminist organising and leadership development across the continent. The Network for Women’s Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT), with funding from AWDF through Leading from the South, brought together 50 young feminist activists for their National Young Feminists Conference under the theme “Claiming Space, Shaping Futures.” Participants explored digital feminism, economic justice, climate change, and political leadership through workshops, poetry, music, and storytelling. The conference reinforced that Ghana’s feminist future must centre on inclusion, care, and collective power.

Read reflections from participants:

https://tinyurl.com/mpkeshpy

https://tinyurl.com/yc7kwzjy

Read more about NETRIGHT here

Have you heard of the African Union Convention on Ending Violence Against Women and Girls? 

The Convention was adopted in February 2025 during the 38th Ordinary Session of the African Union Assembly of Heads of State and Government. The Convention aims to provide a comprehensive framework for addressing and eliminating violence against women and girls in Africa.

Join Akina Mama wa Afrika, Fos Feminista, and The Initiative for Strategic Litigation in Africa as we unpack the convention and reflect on what this convention means for African women, girls, and gender-expansive persons in all their diversity. 

When: Aug 27, 2025  12:00 pm WAT/ 1:00 pm SAST/ 2:00 PM EAT  

Register here: https://shorturl.at/ctsWD

In the face of rising backlash against gender equality and women’s rights, Gender Links (GL) has launched the #PushForward4Equality campaign – an urgent and collective call to action across Southern Africa and beyond.

The campaign which kickstarted at the beginning of South Africa’s Women’s Month and ahead of the SADC Heads of State Summit  in August – comes at a critical moment to demand regional leadership on gender justice. The campaign will also build momentum toward the G20 and W20 summits later this year, where global commitments to women’s rights face mounting pressure.

This year marks 30 years since the landmark Beijing Platform for Action, the global blueprint for advancing the rights of women and girls in all their diversities. While the past three decades saw significant advances – legal reforms, policy advances and changing social norms – this progress is increasingly under threat.

Across the world, including in Southern Africa, conservative forces are mounting regressive legislative efforts, promoting discriminatory narratives and coordinating attacks on feminist movements and civil society. Backlash doesn’t just slow progress – it puts women’s freedom, safety and autonomy at risk. Recognising and countering it is one of the most urgent challenges facing gender justice movements today.

The #PushForward4Equality aims to counter these regressive trends by spotlighting powerful stories of resistance, amplifying voices and galvanising collective movement-building. It is a call for united action – to push forward, together.

“We are living in a time where hard-won rights are under threat,” said GL Special Advisor Colleen Lowe Morna. “The #PushForward4Equality campaign is our rallying cry – to resist, to rise, and to reclaim space through solidarity, storytelling and sustained advocacy.”

The campaign is powered by collaboration with Gender Links’ extensive network of regional partners, including the SADC Gender Protocol Alliance, Women of the South Speak Out (WOSSO), the Marang Fund, African Women in Dialogue (AfWID), media organisations and others. The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) through Leading from the South supports the campaign’s focus on deepening advocacy, advancing digital strategies and strengthening feminist movement-building across the region.

Read more about the #PushForward4Equality here.

Article courtesy of Gender Links

Francoise Moudouthe CEO of the  The African Women’s Development Fund recently challenged the philanthropic sector to rethink its role in today’s crisis driven world. Speaking during the opening plenary of  the recently ended Philea Forum 2025, Moudouthe observed the contrast between how the  philanthropy sector and feminist movements are navigating the current ongoing crises differently. She observed philanthropy’s sense of “panic” and contrasted it with the resilience and adaptability of African feminist movements  who are approaching this moment from a distinctly different approach that,

“...we’ve been here before, We’ve experienced this loss of life, loss of rights, loss of resource, loss of allyship. We’ve survived it and we’ve built back and we’ll do it again…”

Drawing from African feminist movements’ experiences, she shares what it takes to meet this  moment using  three transformative lessons from the movement  that she believes philanthropy can learn from African feminists. She notes that philanthropy needs to centre justice – social and gender justice are the foundations for the change we want to see. Secondly, to centre movements  as they are best placed to make justice happen and lastly to undertake feminist philanthropy

Watch more from Moudouthe’s submission at the Philea Forum 2025 below

For more information about the Forum visit philea.eu

Celebrating Arielle Enninful: A Heartfelt Thank You

After nine exceptional years on the AWDF Board, we bid farewell to Arielle Enninful as she steps down from her role as Board Treasurer. Her dedication, expertise, and unwavering commitment have been instrumental in the growth and impact of AWDF.

As Board Treasurer, Arielle provided meticulous financial oversight and maintained the highest standards of governance and transparency. Beyond her fiduciary responsibilities, she has been a strategic advisor whose insights have guided critical organisational decisions and shaped AWDF’s evolution.

Françoise Moudouthe, CEO 

“Arielle has been an exceptional partner in AWDF’s journey. Her financial expertise provided the solid foundation we needed to grow our impact, but it was her strategic insights and genuine care for our mission that made her truly invaluable. She didn’t just manage our finances—she helped us navigate critical decisions with wisdom and integrity.”

Taaka Awori, Board Chair:  

“In nine years of service, Arielle exemplified everything we hope for in a Board member. Her meticulous attention to governance, combined with her thoughtful contributions to our strategic direction, made every Board meeting more productive. She brought both professional excellence and authentic commitment to our shared vision.”

Dr. Hilda Tadria, Founder:

“Arielle understood from day one what AWDF stands for and what we’re trying to achieve. Watching her steward our resources with such care while never losing sight of the communities we serve has been truly inspiring. She’s helped ensure that our financial foundation is as strong as our mission. She brought grace and a great smile, both of which  I hope to match one day.”

Gertrude Bibi Annoh-Quarshie, Director of Operations :

“On behalf of the entire operations team. I would like to extend our heartfelt gratitude to Arielle for 9 years of strategic guidance, commitment and care. Arielle’s listening, collaborative approach, and financial acumen made even the most complex investment, budget, and financial management discussions seamless and productive. She found ways to support our programmatic goals while maintaining fiscal responsibility. Arielle’s leadership style has left a lasting impression that will continue to inspire us.”

As Arielle’s Board tenure comes to a close, she will continue to be part of the AWDF community. The strong financial foundation and governance framework she helped establish will continue supporting our work for years to come.

We extend our heartfelt gratitude to Arielle for her extraordinary service and wish her continued success in all future endeavours.

This year, with support from African Women’s Development Fund, Femme Forte Uganda unveiled the Virtual Museum of African Feminists — an interactive digital platform that documents, preserves, and celebrates African feminist histories, thought, and resistance. 

Femme Forte described this as a “historic and deeply personal launch. The museum emerged as a bold response to shrinking civic space, erasure of feminist narratives, and the silencing of gender- diverse communities across the continent.

 The virtual museum has drawn widespread attention from mainstream and new media. Dubbed by Ugandan media as “Uganda’s feminist digital museum” and hailed as a “groundbreaking virtual museum” this spaces marks the “dawn of a new era”.  It curates archival materials, storytelling, activist histories, and visual content that reflect the depth and diversity of African feminist organising. 

Answering why anyone would want to visit a feminist museum, in her speech, Penelope Sanyu, then Chief Stewardess of the Femme Forte, noted that “the simple answer is because history has always done a good job at erasing the genius labour, and stories of women”. 

The Virtual Museum of African Feminists is designed as both a memory project and a tool for education, it enables women, queer, and gender-diverse persons to reclaim voice and visibility on their terms. By reimagining digital museums as civic and political spaces, Femme Forte is expanding how feminist knowledge is produced, preserved, and accessed. This initiative offers a model for how digital platforms can resist erasure while affirming the lived realities and resistance of African feminists. 

African feminist stories deserve to be told and this is a powerful tribute to the voices, struggles, and victories of African feminist icons.

Watch the launch HERE 

Step inside the museum here

In feminist organising, we have often been asked to document the fight, narrate the work, and “give voice” to those unheard. But what if communication is not simply the storytelling of activism  what if it is the activism itself? That was the central question  sometimes spoken, sometimes lived  during the feminist gathering held in Accra in May 2025. It was not a traditional convening. It was a space of reckoning: with language, with strategy, with the politics of representation. It brought together feminists from Africa  not to learn how to better communicate for impact, but to radically reimagine what feminist communication is, can be, and must refuse to be.

🎥 Watch the video that captures these voices, silences, and acts of redefinition here:

Communication as a Site of Structural Violence

One of the most potent revelations from the convening is that communication, as practiced within development systems, is not neutral. It is a site of structural and epistemic violence.

The feminists gathered in Accra did not discuss communication merely as the final layer of a project. They dissected how the words we are asked to use empowerment, awareness, beneficiaries, impact stories do not simply describe the world. They shape what counts as legitimate knowledge. They delimit who gets to speak, and on what terms.

Participants exposed how this language is often inherited from colonial structures and donor expectations. It flattens complexity, sanitises struggle, and turns resistance into palatable narratives for funding cycles. In this context, to say “we are fighting” becomes “we are raising awareness.” To say “we are healing” becomes “we are building resilience.”

The violence of this translation is real. It erases the very people and processes it claims to support.

What Accra made clear is that every word carries ideology  and feminist organisers must remain vigilant, constantly renegotiating the terrain of language.

The Politics of Naming and Renaming

Faced with imposed vocabularies, the women at the convening did more than critique they actively re-authored. They turned to ancestral languages and culturally embedded concepts as a way of reclaiming voice.

Words like tchologo (power), yaté (strength), or gbèlè (truth) surfaced repeatedly in discussions. These were not symbolic gestures of cultural pride. They were tactical. These words are embedded in contexts of resistance, in embodied histories, in epistemologies that predate colonial imposition.

What happens when feminists speak from these words  instead of about them?

In Accra, we saw a linguistic insurrection. Feminists refused to use the vocabulary of those who have historically silenced them. Instead, they turned language into a weapon not of division, but of collective clarity. This is not just semantic. It is political. Because to name is to claim history, claim struggle, claim futurity.

Visibility as a Trap

A central tension that emerged in the convening  and which is powerfully visible in the video  is the contradiction between visibility and voice. In the age of social media metrics and donor reporting, visibility has become a currency. But for whom? And at what cost?

Several participants questioned whether visibility, as currently practised, serves the movement or dilutes it. The logic of virality often rewards simplicity, speed, and relatability which leaves little room for contradiction, pain, or radical imagination.

In Accra, communication was not used to perform empowerment. It was used to hold contradiction, to carry silences, to document fracture. That kind of communication doesn’t trend. It doesn’t neatly align with hashtags. But it transforms. It listens instead of amplifies. It builds relationships rather than audiences.

This shift reframes communication not as a bridge between movements and the world  but as the fabric of the movement itself.

Storytelling as Feminist Infrastructure

The role of storytelling in feminist movements is widely acknowledged, yet rarely theorised with the depth it deserves. In Accra, storytelling was not treated as a decorative output  it functioned as method, memory, and movement.

Participants described how, in their organising, stories are far more than narratives: they are ways of transmitting intergenerational knowledge, of healing collective wounds, of resisting silence under regimes of repression. Stories allow feminists to build political memory in spaces where official records are absent, censored, or violently erased.

In this sense, storytelling is not “creative content.” It becomes infrastructure. It is how strategies are shaped, how histories are carried, how survival is sustained.

Importantly, these narratives are not always meant for public consumption. Some feminist stories must travel in hushed tones, encoded messages, or private networks. They circulate underground, resisting the extractive gaze. The documentary produced from the convening recognises this. It honours what must remain unsaid  not by showing everything, but by refusing the compulsion to expose it all. It reminds us that feminist storytelling carries its own ethics of discretion, intimacy, and protection.

Feminist Media as Refusal

Alongside these reflections, the convening articulated a subtle but sharp critique of mainstream media logics. Feminist communication, participants insisted, must not replicate the formats and rhythms of extractive journalism or branded storytelling.

Instead of offering clarity at all costs, feminist media can embrace non-linearity, hold space for ambiguity, and move at the pace of trust. It may resist translation. It may choose opacity. Not everything must be immediately understandable  especially to systems that have historically consumed and commodified feminist voices for institutional gain.

In this refusal to simplify, to smooth, or to explain, lies a powerful act of resistance. Feminist media does not always aim to be useful. Sometimes, it exists to disorient, to haunt, to protect.

The documentary itself reflects this ethos. It does not narrate the convening through a voiceover. It does not insert easy lessons. Instead, it evokes. It feels. It unsettles. Through its atmosphere, its silences, its unrushed rhythm, it invites the viewer to unlearn the demand for resolution and to witness on different terms. In doing so, it rejects surveillance and spectacle, and joins a long tradition of feminist media that resists not only what is said, but how it must be said.

Rethinking Resources and Recognition

If feminist communication is infrastructure, then it must be resourced as such. And yet, participants described communications teams being underfunded, isolated, and last in line for organisational support.

This devaluation is not accidental. It reflects a broader refusal to see voice, memory, and imagination as strategic.

What Accra offers both in practice and in theory is a call to reverse this logic. To treat communication not as a way of “disseminating” change, but as making it. To invest in the people who hold the stories, who shape the discourse, who refuse the easy narrative in favour of a truer one.

We Speak, Therefore We Fight

The video that emerged from the Accra gathering does not simply document what happened. It extends it. It holds the texture of a political moment  a moment where African feminists refused to be tools of someone else’s message. A moment where they reclaimed time, language, narrative, and voice.

What this convening proved is that communication when treated as feminist practice  becomes something else entirely. Not a deliverable. Not a campaign. But a mode of existence. A form of resistance. A method of care.

To communicate, in this way, is to organise. To remember. To insist.
And in a world that constantly tries to silence, flatten, or consume feminist voices, this insistence is everything.

Bintou Mariam Traoré is a Communication officer , AWDF. This blog is a personal reflection of the Advocacy and Communications training that took place in Accra, Ghana.

International day for the elimination of sexual violence in conflict

Across Africa, from Sudan, South Sudan, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone to the Democratic Republic of Congo, armed conflicts are marked by gross forms of sexual violence including mass rapes, sexual slavery, abduction for sex, and child and forced marriages. These atrocities disproportionately affect women, girls and gender-diverse people, with devastating impacts that go far beyond the duration of the conflict.

Join Us for A Critical Conversation

In commemoration of the International Day Against Sexual Violence in Conflict, AWDF is partnering with women’s rights defenders, frontline activists and organisations to draw the attention of funders, the global community, researchers and policy makers. This webinar will shine a light on the need for survivor protection and sustained advocacy, reparations for survivors and solidarity in the quest to end sexual violence in Africa’s conflict zones.

Date: June 19, 2025

Time: 11 am GMT| 1pm SAST| 2pm EAT

The webinar is aligned with the African Union’s 2025 theme, “Justice for Africans and People of African Descent through Reparations,” which addresses the continent’s ongoing conflicts rooted in colonial legacies; and the 25th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security, particularly relevant as Africa continues to face conflict-related sexual violence, where violence is used as a weapon of war.

Register here

Interpretation will be available in French, Portuguese and Arabic.

Let us break the silence. Stand in solidarity with women, girls and gender-diverse persons in conflict.

The  African Women’s Development Fund  seeks the services of four experienced coaches to provide individualised and organisational coaching to selected organisations over a  one year period. These coaches will support our work on the Feminist Leadership and Governance project which aims to strengthen organisational systems and culture at the board level; improve the delivery of quality services at the organizational level; and develop the leadership capacity of individual women leaders within five French-speaking feminist countries. Two representatives from each country will participate in the coaching program, totaling 10 participants.

The selected coaches will play a vital role in supporting the organisations and individuals  to achieve the project’s expected outcomes and personal growth with a specific focus on navigating the complexities of working within African feminist spaces. Once confirmed, the four coaches will work with issue-specific facilitators who will be brought in from time to time to engage with individual leaders, especially, collectively. These include keynote speakers, knowledgeable individuals on critical issues like affecting the wellness of leaders and organisations such as anti-rights organising, feminist political education and consciousness.

What’s involved:

Each coach will be responsible for:

• Participating in the baseline assessment process for their assigned organizations and individuals.
• Contributing to the due diligence/capacity needs assessment to identify organizational gaps and inform tailored coaching content.
• Providing regular individual coaching sessions to representatives from assigned organizations, focusing on leadership development, management skills, communication, and navigating the specific challenges and opportunities related to their work in African feminist spaces.
• Providing governance strengthening activities for the boards of assigned organizations, including observation, review, support services, training, and advice. This will include one dedicated governance board training session per organization
• Facilitate the Inception and grand finale forum

Application Process

Interested consultants should submit:

• A technical proposal outlining their understanding of the assignment, methodology, and work plan.
• A financial proposal with a detailed budget.
• A CV or profile highlighting relevant experience. 

Applications should be submitted to consultants@awdf.org by 13th June 2025

Read more in  HERE…

Join our dedicated webinars to receive comprehensive information and guidance on the application process, eligibility criteria, and expert tips to inform your applications.

Scheduled sessions:

6 May, 2025 | 10:00 am GMT: English webinar with Arabic and Portuguese interpretations. 

Register – https://bit.ly/3GFmqo4 

7 May, 2025 | 10:00 am GMT: French webinar with English interpretation

Register – https://bit.ly/3YEddD1 

More on our current funding cycle here.