Feminist Movement Building

All of AMwA’s strategic approaches are geared towards strengthening African women’s voices on issues pertinent to themselves and creating a vibrant women’s movement that collectively works to advance the interests of African women in all their diversities. As a result, AMwA believe in the spirit of sisterhood and has built strong partnerships with women’s rights organisations, networks and coalitions on the African continent and beyond to ensure that issues of affecting women are prioritized and given due attention. Through Networking and Movement building, AMwA leverages on each organisations and/ or institutional strengths and resources to advance the rights and freedoms of African women that we could otherwise not have achieved if we worked in silos thus creating a collective voice and actions on issues that are critical to African women.

AMwA engages in organizational development with a feminist perspective as part of feminist leadership and feminist movement building in Africa. This is mainly through: a series of organizational development interventions with selected women’s organizations; publishing and disseminating African feminists’ analyses of African women’s experiences of and strategies to resist patriarchy; Oral Her-story of women of substance in Africa, write shops and production of a Leaders Journal highlighting issues and events significant to the African women’s leadership struggle.

Through this Programme AMwA hosted the 1st Uganda Feminist Forum from 2008 to 2010 before handing over to FOWODE following an endorsed decision to rotate the seat of the UFF Secretariat.

In 2009 AMwA continued to coordinate and participate in the Uganda and regional activities on the Maputo protocol. We produced and disseminated IEC materials on GBV/SRHR. Noting that the Government of Uganda ratified the Maputo protocol on 22nd July 2010 with reservations, AMwA working as part of a movement on the implementation of the Protocol, continues advocacy and lobbying through different coalitions specifically the Solidarity for African Women’s Rights (SOAWR) Coalition at Pan-African level and the Uganda Coalition for African Women’s Rights (Women First) Coalition at national level.

The Protocol has thus far been ratified by thirty four (34) of the 54 African Union member states. The Coalition has committed itself to utilizing the platform of the African Women’s Decade (2010- 2020) to intensify efforts to compel African States to deliver on their commitments to women’s human rights, through ratification of the Protocol, accelerating implementation through a multispectral approach, and prioritizing the promotion and protection of women’s bodily integrity and dignity, as well as their participation in governance, peace and security processes and structures.

AMwA chairs the CSO Committee on SGBV in the Great Lakes Region, which comprises national, regional and international human rights organizations and international NGOs based in Kenya and Uganda. The committee mobilizes civil society organizations in the Great Lakes region to participate in deliberations leading summits of Heads of State of ICGLR Member States Special Summit on Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV). And currently monitors and evaluates the implementation of the Kampala Declaration.

Coupled with this are coalitions and partnership initiatives that AMwA has greatly contributed to these have included the, Oral Herstory Project – Documenting Women’s Experiences through 3 Oral Herstory Projects on Sex Workers in East Africa which culminated in the popular publication, ‘When I Dare to Be Powerful’, the first-ever collection of life stories by sex worker activists in the region; an AFF documentation of a seasoned African feminist Dr Sarah Ntiro Biography’, a publication by AWDF and AMwA; and an oral herstory collection of women’s experiences of GBV and SRHR in conflict and post-conflict countries in Africa set in DRC and Sierra Leone.