Feminist Movement Building
Southern Africa
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In the Spotlight
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Amayi Tadzuka! Women of Malawi, Awake!
JASS’ Malawi Movement Building Initiative – Amayi Tadzuka! Women Awake! – launched in February 2009 with three workshops in Lilongwe, Mzuzu, and Blantyre. Then, at the end of 2009, a national workshop consolidated the transformative process with district-level leaders from February, together with their national-level coordinators. Read Hope Chigudu’s reflections on this innovative process – engaging women from the most intimate to most public levels – and view year-end conclusions by Hope and Sindi Blose. Malawian grassroots leaders report on action in their own areas.
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Victoria, a teacher by profession, has been using the JASS training to ‘disorganize’ her church, demanding to talk about HIV and AIDS, thus ending the culture of silence and stigma.
Asnat went to see the District Commissioner and demanded that seed coupons be given to HIV+ women.
Lillian ‘crossed the line’ (her words) by fighting for mobile clinics to provide ARVs for adults and children on the same day to save women multiple journeys each week.
Petite Doreen used her new leadership skills to lobby the seed company to supply women living with HIV/AIDS.
Malawian women leaders, nine months after their first JASS workshops
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JASS Kicks Off in Zambia
JASS launched movement-building in Zambia through broad-based consultation and assessment. Dialogue with diverse groups and leaders revealed that, despite its strong history in this country, women’s rights organizing seems demobilized in recent years, fragmented by competing issue agendas. As a first step in re-connecting this work with women at community level, 21 young women and 2 men – all activists in HIV/AIDS, youth, and women’s reproductive rights – met at a JASS workshop (Lusaka, November 2009) to map out ways to strengthen women's organizing and leadership to confront stigma, increase access to healthcare, and improve basic livelihoods – all part of a core agenda for women’s rights.
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What We Do
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In Brief
JASS Southern Africa
JASS in Malawi
Framework
JASS looks at HIV/AIDS through the lens of power and inequality in order to define opportunities for movement-building and for energizing women's rights agendas. Watch and use JASS’s short, compelling video, and read a powerpoint interpretation.
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Telling Our Stories
Women created digital stories in a JASS workshop with Women'sNet (Johannesburg, May 2008) and have used them as movement-building tools since then.
Watch the stories
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Crossing the Lesbian–Feminist Divide
in Zimbabwe
Organizing in Zimbabwe has been difficult, even dangerous, for some years. Lesbian activism confronts particular obstacles, notes Patience Mandishona of GALZ (Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe): the president's open homophobia and the challenges of mobilizing Southern African women, even feminists, around issues such as hate crimes against lesbian, gay, transgender and intersex people (LGBTI). Read an interview with Patience and Martha Tholanah on GALZ’ innovative action and its intersection with JASS movement-building. |
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Who’s Leading Women’s Organizations?
“My safe space called the women’s movement is going, or even gone. It’s been taken over by men. And I am scared and angry," writes the provocative Zimbabwean feminist Everjoice Win on the JASS blog. When conducting an assessment for a movement building institute in Zambia, the JASS Southern Africa team was struck by the large number of men who are leading women’s organizations. A subject of debate, we invited Everjoice share her thoughts on this topic. Read the blog and join the discussion.
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Movement Building
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African Feminist Forum, Kampala, Uganda, September 2008. JASS participants represented the voices and concerns of HIV+ feminists.
International AIDS Conference, Mexico City, August 2008
Training of Political Facilitators for Movement Building (Cape Town, February 2008)
Launch of JASS’ movement-building process (Johannesburg, November 2007)
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Who We Are
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Women Crossing The Line
Martha Tholanah, JASS Southern Africa Regional Coordinator. An advocate for universal access to holistic healthcare and for women's reproductive health and rights, Martha participates actively in national, regional, and international advocacy and activism around the rights of those living with HIV, particularly women and children. Having lived positively with HIV since January 2003, Martha has been public about her status since 2004. Read her commentary on World AIDS Day 2008.
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