Reflecting on Movement Building Initiatives in Africa at the AFF

There were 11 women present: 3 south africa, 1 tanzania, 1 senegal, 4 nigeria and 2 zimbabwe.

3 representatives who offered to share their processes were from Sindi and I for Southern Africa, Tanzania and Nigeria.

Tanzania had started their process by working with womens organisations in the country, placing an emphasis on starting at local level and taking it to national. The general feeling I got from them was that they did not want to take their efforts to the national level without first streghthening womens understanding of movement building and feminism at local level. They are thinking of doing trainings at regional level but have not started.

Nigeria started their process by selected women from groups that they knew. They had thier training in a secret venue and could not advertise it to everyone as there have politics surrounding womens organisations and a lot of organisations working with men under the gender umbrella. They felt that it will be risky and not strategic to bring the 'gender groups' on board as they often take over the spaces and it would have been almost impossible to create a safe space for women. That is where Nigeria is generally at, they expressed the need for support in doing their work even though thier context is so different from Southern and East Africa.

From the caucus we have created a list serve where we will share materials and methodologies. It was also expressed that as movement builders we will call on to each other for facilitation during trainings, which means that if JASS Africa gets to do work in East Africa we will know who is doing what, and basically support those processes instead of starting afresh. In both countries, Tanzania and Nigeria they do not have a strong focus on young womens movement building and I think that this will be our opportunity to use our experience in blogging, developing digital stories and sharing lessons learned in young feminists movement building. The AFF movement building caucus will meet at AWID to strategise and find a way forward.

I will also be meeting Sipho Mthathi to do what is 'long overdue' as she and other collegues have done a training this year in movement building for young women.

Aluta Continua!

Azola Goqwana