JASS Southern Africa builds, mobilizes and leverages the collective power of women to demand their rights, address their practical needs and promote democracy in their communities. To build movements for women’s rights, JASS analyzes and challenges women’s inequality through the lens of power and HIV/AIDS.
Who?
JASS trains, supports and accompanies women activists and diverse organizations, focusing on young, grassroots, and HIV/AIDS organizers in Malawi, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Through regional training, learning and action, JASS also sustains a virtual network of activists, researchers, and educators in all of the countries in the region: Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. JASS Southern Africa’s work is driven by a regional team and, as of 2010, furthered by a unique partnership of faith-based leaders, LGBTI activists, youth organizing for sexual and reproductive rights, and feminist IT facilitators.
Why?
Women’s inequality in Southern Africa is the product of tightly connected economic, political and social factors that cannot be addressed by technical quick fixes, issue interventions or policy advocacy alone. HIV/AIDS both spotlights and exacerbates these inequalities – but also potentially sparks new forms of organizing.
Women represent nearly 60% of HIV+ adults in sub-Saharan Africa, with young women three times more likely to be HIV-positive than young men. The highest infection rate today is among African women in steady partnerships. Misguided policies and programs failed to factor in sexual and domestic violence and the intimate dynamics of gender inequality. Solutions that tap into women’s traditional care-giving role without providing resources have produced a disastrous overburdening of women, increasing their health risks while decreasing their productive capacity to generate income and food for their families.
To organize for rights and freedoms (health services, HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention, protection from violence, access to credit and resources), Southern African women must challenge the powerful traditions, taboos, backlash and discrimination that frame women and their sexuality as the problem.
How?
What’s needed is an integrated women’s agenda, linking struggles for decent healthcare to sexual rights to economic and political justice. Rather than urban-based NGO business-as-usual, Southern African women call for community and political organizing skills and an alternative model of leadership judged by the numbers empowered to speak out and sustain pressure for accountability. Among JASS’ interconnected strategies to meet this demand is a back-to-basics set of political skills and tools. Training and accompaniment equip activists and feminist leaders to organize women around concrete issues and to build bridges across diverse agendas.
Country-Level Movement-Building
Malawi: Across the country, JASS works with informal women’s networks and community organizers to put new political skills and innovative local strategies into action. Successful local organizing efforts have succeeded in getting mobile ARV clinics and land rights for women in some communities while educating the police and the public to stop violence against women. These distinct local efforts by grassroots women, working with their NGO allies, begin to drive a national advocacy agenda. Read More
Zambia: In 2010, JASS’ sustained activist training and accompaniment gave birth to two diverse alliances: one of young women’s rights leaders and another of leaders of CBOs (community-based organizations).
Zimbabwe: JASS is initiating women’s heart-mind-body groups to combine healing from trauma and stress with strategizing around practical needs and political rights.
Regional-Level Movement-Building
Southern African organizers come together to analyze, learn and strategize in JASS processes and alliances:
Young political facilitators in 7 countries – JASS connected movement-builders – have been training and participating in a regional network since 2007. Read More
Scholars and practitioners inject cutting-edge thinking from Southern African feminism and raise critical questions. Read More
Regional partners combine national-level skill-building and action with SADC-level strategies across sectors and constituencies.
In the Spotlight
JASS Southern Africa Partners Spotlight Marital Rape and
HIV in Malawi
“How are women expected to negotiate safer sex if they are refused the power to negotiate the very act of sex?” asks JASS Regional Coordinator, Shereen Essof as JASS Southern Africa'spartner, MANERELA+, presented a key paper that underlines the correlation between the legal impunity of marital rape and the high prevalence of HIV in Malawi at the Global Commission on HIV and Law’s Africa Regional Dialogue. This important submission focuses on women’s lack of autonomy within relationships and calls on law reforms that define the age of consent and criminalize marital rape to allow women to stand equally under the law with ownership of their own bodies.
Women Crossing the Tech Line
in Southern Africa
Women activists from Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe are reclaiming and using ICTs to amplify women’s voices for rights. From July 18th to 20th, JASS Southern Africa and Women’sNet hosted a Southern Africa Regional Feminist Tech Exchange (FTX) in Johannesburg with nine activists to build ICT skills and strategies to support their organizing. “I am only a grassroots woman but [now] I am empowered with the skills on technology especially the use of the Blogs, Facebook, twitters, and Flickr,” wrote Malawian organizer, Mirriam Msewa. The space unleashed exciting ideas and tools, as women learned-by-doing, creating a Facebook page, blog, and video. Read more.
Connecting Heart, Mind and Body
in Zimbabwe
In April 2011, JASS Southern Africa and Musasa Project launched the Heart-Mind-Body initiative in Zimbabwe, gathering 26 women activists, each with diverse experiences and perspectives, united by a common anxiety: how to sustain themselves and their work in challenging and often violent environments. Putting self-care at the center of sustained women’s organizing, the circle was a space for reflection, relaxation, and dialogue. Over two days, women shared experiences of insecurity, trauma and violence and exchanged survival strategies. The success of the wellbeing circle only confirms the urgent need for safe spaces for activists to reenergize themselves and their organizing. Read more.
Path-Breaking Partnership
JASS Southern Africa 2011
JASS Southern Africa is launching an unusual partnership to work for women’s rights. At a dynamic kick-off workshop late 2010, JASS gathered faith-based leaders living with HIV, lesbian activists, youth organizing for sexual and reproductive rights and feminist IT facilitators to forge a powerful collaboration to build movements for women’s rights throughout Southern Africa. Read more.
African "Thinkshop" on Women's Movement Building
JASS gathered 22 women researchers, scholars, practitioners, and activists from around Southern Africa to share experiences and spark new thinking. It was an extraordinary debate because it originated from Africa and featured the voices of Southern African female human rights activists. Read more about their deliberations in Johannesburg…
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
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.
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.
JASS Southern Africa returned to Zambia in December to support the women of Generation Alive (GAL) and Basali Amoho (Women Together) as they develop action plans to collectively challenge issues of power in their lives and in public spaces. "These young women (GAL) want to make feminism more accessible and less academic to their peers. They also concluded that, in order for them to make a difference, they need to be bolder and to 'kick ass'!" shares JASS' Shamillah Wilson. Read more.
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.
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.
