In 2022, AWDF set out to re-evaluate our impact in our first 20 years, and our direction looking ahead. In conversation with each other, our grantees, movement partners, peers, and activists, donors, and African feminists – and with support from our Strategic Advisory Committee – we asked, we listened, and we received. From this 9-month process of listening, reflecting and synthesizing, our new strategic framework was born. We are indebted to the time, energy, and contributions of the many minds and voices who showed up for the process of developing the strategic framework. This framework will guide and orient us over the course of the next ten years as we continue to learn from, resource and accompany feminist movements and rights organizations. We anticipate sowing new seeds of possibility, nourishing, and growing – internally, and alongside our various movement partners and feminist ecosystem members.

As we dream into the next ten years, we see AWDF tending the growing thickets and blooming bushes, and pruning tall trees with roots as deep and intertwined as the solidarity that keeps feminist movements together.  We draw plants and flowers of all shapes and colours, evoking a garden as diverse as the girls, women and gender-expansive people we work with.

We see birds flutter about the garden, their songs as joyful and powerful as the revolutionary verses sung in feminist protests. We picture AWDF providing the resources that allow such beauty to blossom, while offering enough cover for activists to rejuvenate and tend to one another.

Will you walk with us, and grow with us?