BY Florence/Khaxas
Oshimaliwa* means “money” in Oshiwambo
Mapa ha ti mari sa? means “where is my money?” inKhoekhoegowab
ti soros ge means “it’s my body” in khoekhoegowab
Building agency, community & Economic Autonomy
Post-pandemic economic responses have seen a rise of African Young Feminists who have become social entrepreneurs using alternative, modern and non-traditional mediums to promote gender equality and empower fellow African women and girls. We have seen a rise in technology that enhances access to information as young women are starting to demand their rights to bodily integrity and economic autonomy. However, gender inequality still leaves millions of girls and young women disadvantaged and at the highest risk of poverty. The Young Feminists Movement (Y-Fem) Namibia, which I’m a part of, is one of the feminist organizations in southern Africa that have been using feminist community building as a tactic to build the agency of young feminist movements in Namibia. The resilient movement has been rethinking economic autonomy and its link to women’s human rights. Community building supports people to build a sense of belonging to their local communities and create a new kind of narrative. Y-Fem uses collaborative and strategic feminist think tanks to create innovative safe spaces for effective strategies, and programs that build the capacity of individuals and groups to be active in their communities and achieve positive, community-led change. We do this by working towards and creating an autonomous feminist movement that resources itself.
To date, Y-Fem has been operating for 14 years. Over the years, Y-Fem has actively been advocating for the leadership and justice of lesbians, rural, urban, indigenous cis and trans adolescent girls, young women, non-binary youth, HIV+ women, their movements and organizations to enjoy respect in a safe and just world. Y-Fem has been flexible, innovative, courageous and bold in the way she organize herself and continuously shifts power for younger feminists to analyze their own lives, to create their own feminist knowledge and create an indigenous Namibian feminism knowledge base to serve as a tool for analyzing discrimination and oppression through the system of patriarchy.
But Covid 19 was an unpleasant surprise that caught us all off guard. Y-Fem, like so many other young feminist organizations, wasn’t ready to mitigate the high risk of that magnitude. With grief, an empty organizational bank account and no salaries, my tears as the Executive Director of Y-Fem forced me to try and re-imagine a better future for the younger generation of feminist leaders. The anxiety of not being able to provide rapid responses to the increasing violence and economic hardships that our communities faced led me to rethink crisis leadership as well. I parked the grief of the ‘new normal’ and escalating death toll, not knowing how the organization or myself would even survive if anything had to happen to the management. I started having honest conversations with donors about the need to prioritize the wellbeing of my team as we were all on survival mode. After positive responses from feminist donors who understood the complexity of women human rights defenders and their organizations, we were able to create a creative healing space to pause and breathe. That space gave me clarity and understanding of the urgency and importance of planning for long term sustainability for ourselves as individuals and as the organization.
We took some time off to focus on wellness, and as a team we held space for each other. Feminist friendship is feminist solidarity and part of community care. Our strongest organizational feminist value is love. When the world and the economy didn’t make sense to us anymore, we returned to love. Feminist writers sustained me in the midst of global despair and that gave me the power to get back in alignment to my purpose as a feminist leader – learning with love and using love to guide us as feminist organizers.
“If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.”
“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients – care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
I realized that the only way Y-Fem can survive is to rethink social enterprise and to find solutions to social problems by using our expertise; to generate income for causes we support and ourselves.
Soon, with the support of more donors that believed in us, we moved into our first office space. We bought office plants and turned our first office into a wellness forest – and we emphasized on “Fo -rest”, creating a space of rest, creativity and productivity. We hosted meetings and gave our space to communities to organize book launches, community engagements and arts activities. Our imagination of self sustainability continued as the Y-Fem team and community provided research consultancies in collaboration with regional partner organizations. That is how we started building our financial reserves for rainy days and emergencies. When periods of rainy days came to us, we were able to use our reserves to sustain ourselves by supporting day to day utility payments and transport support to the community of Y-Fem. Eventually after years, Y-Fem reached its first financial milestone of purchasing a mini bus to provide safe transportation for Y-Fem communities who are mostly from minority groups that experience discrimination on a daily basis. The bus today provides services to our partner CSOs and provides safe transportation to our team.
Most donors don’t support procurement of assets as young feminist groups are so underfunded. When we negotiate with donors on sustainability, they refuse and only give small pockets of small-scale project grants which are not sustainable for the survival of young feminist groups. But despite the funding constraints, Y-Fem has survived through autonomous feminist organizing. For the most part we funded ourselves by donating our time as founders, volunteers, coordinators, steering committee members, advisors and feminist community leaders. I founded Y-Fem at the age of 21 and in a way I was the first donor to the organization, so going back to this mode of sustaining our movements made me remember this powerful fact, which instantly shifts the power dynamics and gives agency to the brilliance of young feminist organizing. Y-Fem is living evidence of the power of multigenerational advocacy of feminists worldwide and how it truly empowers girls and younger feminists.
Exclusion, discrimination against LGBTQ communities, and a glimpse of what we try to do about it
Who has the access or control over productive resources? Not women. Not Indigenous women nor migrant women, not the youth, not LGBT people, not black communities, not people with disabilities, not people that live in extreme poverty who wear the face of a woman in most African nations. What about African Lesbians? They are constantly the direct recipients of harmful cultural narratives that push them deep in poverty and constant threat. Our queer bodies have been the subject of discrimination, violence, poverty and humiliation.
As a response to hate, Y-Fem uses creative arts as a form of healing, sustaining ourselves as artists by creating paid artist performance opportunities to empower feminists in the creative space that face economic hardship.. Through the Ti Soros ge/It’s my body program on bodily autonomy, which is a consortium partnership that we are part of, Y-Fem led a creative space of using arts to advocate for change and created space for feminist artists to perform to economically empower themselves.
For the first time, our feminist edutainment arts group was commissioned to perform in South Africa in February of 2023. The ti soros ge- its my body artists performed their hit song in Johannesburg at the AIDS Rights Alliance of Southern Africa SRHR Symposium.
Legal context
Homo/Transphobic stigma is a significant concern that leades to structrual violence in practive, and we’ve seen this with the removal of sexual orientation from the labour act – Namibia’s first post-independence labor law. During the revision of the Labour Act (No. 11 of 2007), all mention of ‘nondiscrimination on the basis of sexual orientation’ was removed. It had previously provided protection from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but this was removed from later versions of the labour law.
The Gender Research and Advocacy Project of the Legal Assistance Centre Legal Assistance Center (LAC) produced a booklet on LGBT & Labour in Namibia. LAC states that
Employers may not discriminate against employees on the basis of family responsibilities. Employers must make allowances for the family responsibilities of both male and female employees. LGBTIQ families can assert their rights to protect children of LGBT communities under the The Labour Act 11 of 2007.
The Labour Act 11 of 2007 does not define “dependant”, but the concept is broad enough to include a same-sex partner, and children being cared for within a same-sex partnership. An employer may be reluctant to apply the law in this way, but you can assert your right to have “dependent” defined fairly for this purpose.
Feminist consciousness raising, politics of money and globalization
We draw inspiration from social justice movements and women’s social entrepreneurship which is focused on critique of neoliberalism. Feminist consciousness raising helps us to develop critical thinking of oppressive cultures and patriarchy to shift the discourse of women’s unpaid care work vs paid work. When we start to position ourselves by tapping into indigenous knowledge building with tools and ways our ancestors have used for centuries for survival and sustainability. If women get their economic rights realized they will have more control and autonomy over their lives to ensure having proper housing, education, access to quality healthcare, controlling what happens to their land, having access to decent work and living free from violence. Violence against women is directly linked to gender inequality and poverty which further creates a barrier to access SRHR services especially for AGYW & vulnerable women. We need to continue educating women about their rights so that they can assert and demand their economic rights. The African feminists’ movements need to advance intersectionality in the discourse to expand their voices of women and all other marginalized groups such as LBT groups and the youth to participate in key decision-making processes on issues pertaining to Water, land, housing, policies. Feminists Futures is requesting to rethink climate justice and economic inequalities as a matter of urgency. We need to enable sustainable production and livelihoods for vulnerable women by building their agency and leadership to ensure feminist economies which are thriving and narrowing the gaps of globalization. When Reconnaissance Energy Africa, a Canadian mining and exploration company, prospect for oil and gas in the northeastern regions of Namibia bordering Botswana with potential impact of oil drilling on water, wildlife and rural women who are sustained from the river, oil extraction is an negative impact of globalization directly for women rights, climate rights and the protection of Heritage site.
The Namibian Government continues to struggle to provide basic services for the increasing population for example: serviced land, sanitation, and electricity & clean water. With the increase of urbanization as more people migrate as more people flock to urban areas in search of employment opportunities.
We need to shift to feminist entrepreneurship which is centered in solving practical problems within the communities by having human rights principles that guide their enterprises.
Neoliberal economic order is clarified on how unjust disparities between women’s lived realities and policies that violate and the violence towards minority groups. The economic value of the work of women also argues the importance for deeper understanding of how power, intersectional issues such class, race and gender inequalities are impactful in the context through our response to oppression. Exploitation of the natural resources due to corruption further expands political unrest and gender inequality and its women who feel the impact the most. It also has the direct impact on WHRDs and CSOs as if they speak out on these issues, they face threads and shrinking civic spaces. Resourcing feminist economies gives us the opportunity to rethink feminist organizing and community care by taking back our power to control our access to resources, land and demand our human rights.
‘We draw inspiration, knowledge and leadership from the many feminists who have led the way, in Namibia, Africa and globally. These women have recognized and built resistance to all forms of discrimination against and oppression of women. They have built a powerful movement for equality, peace and social justice based on the claim for women’s equal human rights and active citizenship’ – quote from Y-Fem the Young Feminist Movement Namibia 2010 strategy
As Feminists, we have donated our ideas, creativity, experiences and imagined how we wanted to shift the power towards younger feminist to build their own agency and develop their own voice. We collaborated with each other on projects by donating our skills and expertise.
As young feminist movements that reside in the global south, we must never stop dreaming and imagining a just world, where we all thrive economically and are empowered to access services for betterment of our livelihood. We are the key to innovative solutions to respond to the feminist agenda as we set it ourselves and not donor driven agendas.
As a feminist human rights organization, creating autonomous alternative funding streams is a political act of resistance in this capitalist economy that harms us and our planet. As a feminist philanthropist from the global south, I thrive to continue to stand in solidarity with my African feminist sisters as we collectively set agendas in our diversity to create feminist economies.
We are reclaiming our autonomy as a movement to resource ourselves and rethink the sustainability of the movement. And be proactive to the negative impacts of globalization, rise of neo-liberalism and patriarchy in the settings of our homes, culture, church, school and economy.
A call to action
I call on global governments to shift to adopting feminist policies and directly fund feminist funds and women’s organizations. Influence fellow states to stop funding anti LGBT , fundamentalist organizers that have stripped humanity from africa states into becoming war zones against queer bodies. Bodily autonomy criminalization that denies us from seeking sexual reproductive health services and extractivism strips away the only planet we can call home.
Fund us boldly, proudly, abundantly with unrestricted core support and investment so that we can empower ourselves, our organizations and movements with improved, strengthened feminist ethics and compliance that makes sense to us. Fund girls, activists, women human rights defenders, artists, academics, journalists, farmers, teachers, writers, students, healers. Understand that the feminist movement is not a homogenous group but our strength lies In the intersectionality and solidarity with each other beyond the diversity of our various movements. Fund disability justice, energy justice, economic justice, gender and social justice, climate and environmental justice. Fund us without questing us why but give with trust for that is how we shift the power from oppressed to empowered.
We call on the philanthropy community to hold themselves accountable to put the money where it counts, in the feminist movements that do transformational work globally to advance human rights for all.
I call on communities to realize the power within themselves by putting resources together for rapid interventions of community driven protection responses for the most vulnerable within their communities so that no one is left behind.