Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi

Individual African feminists

I am a feminist activist, social entrepreneur, organisational development practitioner, fundraiser, trainer and writer. I am the Executive Director and co-founder of the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), an Africa-wide grantmaking foundation for African women’s organisations. Before I joined AWDF, I worked for Akina Mama wa Afrika, (AMwA) an international non-governmental organisation based in London, […]

I am a feminist activist, social entrepreneur, organisational development practitioner, fundraiser, trainer and writer. I am the Executive Director and co-founder of the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), an Africa-wide grantmaking foundation for African women’s organisations. Before I joined AWDF, I worked for Akina Mama wa Afrika, (AMwA) an international non-governmental organisation based in London, United Kingdom and Kampala, Uganda as Executive Director. While I was at AMwA, I established the African Women’s Leadership Institute (AWLI), which today, has helped nurture over 5,000 women’s rights activists and leaders across the continent. During my years at AMwA and involvement in the AWLI, I would wonder at how women would become transformed from being with other sisters, listening and learning. This is what has made me passionate about creating and promoting safe spaces for women. I believe that it is in these spaces that women learn how to love themselves and unlearn the many lies that patriarchy has told them over the years. It is in these spaces that I would come to value the power of women’s friendships, solidarity and determination to succeed against all odds. I am a feminist because I am angry. I am angry because despite what most constitutions, laws, policies and scriptures say, women are still treated as second-class beings. The lives of women and girls do not seem to mean as much as the lives of men and boys. We are poorer, more vulnerable to disease, we risk our own lives to bear life, we are bartered, sold, raped, beaten and even stoned to death. I am a feminist because I have hope. I have hope in the love, brilliance and creativity of my sister feminists, who rise and rise again. I have faith in my sisters who mobilise, campaign, research, write, run shelters, rule markets, nurse the sick, care for their families, run for office and risk their lives. It is all their eff orts that will make this continent great again. I would like to see a stronger feminist movement in Africa. The challenges we face as a continent are immense, and it is women who bear the brunt when States collapse. We need to ensure that women continue to stake their claim to the leadership of this continent. We have been adrift for too long, staggering from one crisis to the other, one war to another, one crazed despot to the next. Women are tired of picking up the pieces. It is time for us to say Enough is Enough! We need to go back into our local communities, and work with allies, including good men, to ensure that we create a new meaning for leadership and governance on this continent. We owe our children and ourselves a better future, and this can not be achieved if women continue to be marginalised; it is like trying to clap with one hand. A clap with one hand produces no sound, a clap with both hands resounds. I can hear the clapping now, it may be a bit faint, but I hear it. May the voices of African feminists continue to resound.


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