The Feminist Leadership, Movement Building and Rights Institute – East Africa Nairobi, Kenya

Last Date to apply 10th December 2022

29th January – 4th February 2023

Applications are open for CREA’s Feminist Leadership, Movement Building and Rights Institute (FLMBaRI) – East Africa. The Institute will take place in Nairobi, Kenya from 29th January – 4th February, 2023. 

CREA is a feminist international human rights organization based in the global South and draws upon the inherent value of a rights-based approach to sexuality and gender equality. CREA promotes, protects, and advances human rights and the sexual rights of all people by building leadership capacities of activists and allies; strengthening organizations and social movements; creating and increasing access to new information, knowledge, and resources; and enabling supportive social and policy environments. Impacts take place when shifts occur. To achieve true impact, CREA believes that these shifts are necessary at multiple levels and works in partnership with organizations, networks and movements, individuals activists, practitioners, and leaders with the long-term vision to create a strong global South-based organization that works at local, regional, and international levels.

The Institute
CREA’s Feminist Leadership, Movement Building, and Rights Institute – East Africa is a residential program designed to strengthen feminist solidarity, leadership, advocacy, and strategies for building collective power for social transformation. The Institute engages feminists from across the region to build a substantive understanding of our present with all its challenges and possibilities. It interrogates concepts and structures that affect our strategies by embedding patriarchy and gender in concepts of nation, identity, religion, polity, and development. To make meaning of what feminist struggles have transformed and how new forms of patriarchy are part of existing inequalities.

The Institute is designed on the premise that feminist leadership can be strengthened and have greater impact when women’s rights activists and advocates have greater conceptual clarity and strategic approaches that go to the roots of inequality rather than dealing with its symptoms alone. The Institute aims to encourage and enable participants to:

Interrogate

Concepts such as nation, identity, power, and development affect our struggles and strategies by reshaping the discourse and practices of patriarchy and gender.

Explore
Different forms of leadership through feminist journeys, histories and standpoints across generations.

Build
New and collaborative modes of resistance in the face of emerging configurations of power. A team of feminist activists from the global South will teach at the Institute using classroom instruction, group work, theatre, simulation exercises, films, music and case studies. The process of learning is based on four core pedagogic principles

Locate
Locate our everyday, ‘micro’ individual and organizational practices in the macro context of the more significant women’s movement and other struggles for gender equality and justice.

Reflect
Deepen curiosity and self-reflexiveness among participants by facilitating conversations that traverse geographies, generations, diversity of concerns, and political standpoints.

Expand
Build solidarity across borders by bringing into focus the shared sense of being African. This includes a deeper understanding of our shared heritage, historical interlinkages, and ruptures and differences. The idea is to explore together what constitutes African Feminist practice — both as an assumption and an aspiration

From this, participants will be able to critically assess women’s movements in Africa and explore concrete strategies to strengthen links between women’s movements and other social justice movements to collectively advance women’s human rights.

Institute Pedagogy
Activists, practitioners, and academicians will teach the course using classroom instruction, group work, case studies, fiction, and films.

• The Institute emphasizes linking theory to practice.
• The participants will learn to critically analyze policy, research, and program interventions using a rights-based approach.
• The Institute is not a training or workshop and attempts to recast the idea of collective and experiential ways of learning.
• The Institute emphasizes learning led by world-class faculty.

Logistics
The Institute will be held from 29th January – 4th February in Nairobi, Kenya. Participants will be expected to arrive on 28th January and depart on 5th February, and expected to be present throughout the entire duration of 8 nights and 7 days.

Institute Costs

• CREA will cover tuition, accommodation, and meals for all participants during the course. Accommodation will be on a twin-sharing basis.
• A limited number of travel scholarships are available (visa fees and travel insurance are not included).
• Those not receiving a travel scholarship are responsible for making their own arrangements for travel, visa, and insurance.

Faculty
Core Faculty:
Dipta Bhog is a creative facilitator, who has over three decades of experience of working on issues of gender and education, women’s rights and development. She is a founder member of ‘Nirantar’, a Centre for Gender and Education in New Delhi. Identity and caste are new areas of interest, while in the past she has worked with rural women and grassroots women leaders -building on their leadership and organizational strength. She was part of the setting up of Khabar Lahariya, the first rural and Dalit women led newspaper in 2002.

She conceptualized and coordinated a study titled, Textbook Regimes: A Feminist Analysis of Nation and Identity, in partnership with four leading Women’s Studies Departments in four Indian state universities, that analyzed language and social science textbooks from elementary and secondary schools. She has developed curriculum, textbooks, creative reading material, comic-books and digital installations to communicate feminist ideas and insights. Recently, she conceptualized The Third Eye, a feminist learning portal, working on
the intersections of gender, sexuality and technology.

Paromita Chakravarti is professor, department of English, Jadavpur University (JU) and has been Director, School of Women’s Studies, and a convenor of the Cell against Sexual harassment at JU. She teaches drama, women’s writing, queer and film studies and has worked on gender representation in school textbooks, sexuality education, women’s higher education, women and HIV and AIDS. Closely associated with the women’s movement in Kolkata,she is active in the queer, sex worker, homeless and single women’s movements. She has introduced one of the first postgraduate courses in Queer Studies in the department of English at JU. Her book, Women Contesting Culture, co-edited with Prof. Kavita Panjabi was published in 2012. Dr. Chakravarti is also the founder member of the NGO “ebong alaap” which works on critical pedagogies and serves as board member of “anjali”, an NGO which works on mental health.

Solome Nakaweesi is a Pan-African feminist activist, active participant and analyst within the women’s rights, human rights, sexual rights and feminist movements in Africa and internationally and has played a fundamental role in supporting the (re)emergence of progressive social movements and organizing. Currently, Solome is an International Development Consultant who has specializes in: progressive social movement building (esp.
feminist movements, youth movements and SRHR movements), organizational development, transformative leadership, human rights and governance. Previously Solome has worked as Executive Director of Akina Mama wa Afrika, Executive Director of Uganda Women’s Network, Chief Executive Officer of Nnabagereka Development Foundation, Lecturer at Makerere University, Nkumba University and as an External Research Supervisor for Noragric University. Solome has a proven track record in kick starting, reviving, and running successful organizations, institutions and social movements that engage with cutting-edge, highly contested issues and development work. She has been at the center of designing, co-creating, running, anchoring and lead facilitating a number of leadership development programmes: CREA’s prestigious Feminist Leadership Movement Building and Rights Institute (FLAMBaRI) East Africa; Akina Mama wa Afrika’s African Women’s Leadership Institute (AWLI); East Africa Young Women Leadership and Feminist Mentoring Initiative (EAYWLMI) for Akili Dada/Global Fund for Women/Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; Action-Aid International Women’s Leadership Development Programme; FAHAMU Movement Building and Community Organizing Camp (MBBC); The First LGBTIQ+ Leadership Academy for Kenya run by PHI; Ji-Sort! Capacity Development Programme for Anglophone and Francophone Eastern Africa LGBTIQA and Sex Work organizationsrun by UHAI-EASHRI; Uganda’s First Ever Online and Offline Safety and Security Guidelines for Women Human Rights Defenders for UN Women, OHCHR and Women Human Rights Defenders Network of Uganda (WHRDN-U); Uganda’s First Ever Comprehensive Effective Legislative Engagement Training Curriculum for Women Members of Parliament for FOWODE, UWOPA, Uganda National NGO Forum and USAID; International Republican Institute Training Political Parties Training; Young Women’s Leadership Programme (YWLI), and The Black Women Centre Kenya Girl’s Camp, among others. Through her work and agency, Solome has won a number of national and international awards including the Ugandan
Professional Woman of the Year Award by the British Council Leadership Forum, Change Makers East Africa Transformative Leadership Award by Women Direct, and; in June 2022, The Special Pride Awards Category at the Pride at 10 Awards in Uganda. Solome serves as the CREA East Africa Regional Advisor and sits on the CREA Advisory Board representing Africa

Visiting Faculty
The course will also be taught by other activists, academicians, practitioners and researchers from Africa.

Application Criteria
FLMBaRI East Africa is for activists, service providers, community organizers, researchers and human rights practitioners working on issues of sexuality, sexual and gender diversity and diversity of sex characteristics/ LGBTIQ rights, sexual rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights, rights of persons with disabilities, HIV/AIDS, public health, violence against women/gender-based violence, health, and/or gender, nationally, regionally. 30 participants will be selected to attend the Institute. Participants must be embedded in human rights and/or feminist movements or civil society or work closely with them. Full-time students are not eligible. All applicants must be fully vaccinated against COVID and willing and able to undertake travel to Nairobi, Kenya. We invite members of structurally excluded groups from East Africa to apply.

Application Deadline and Selection Process
Applications are due on or before 10th December 2022. The selection committee will carefully review each application. We will only contact applicants who have been selected to attend the Institute.

Note: The process of selection will begin with the application of participants. You are requested to send the filled-in application form as early as possible.

You can also download the call for applications in an accessible PDF: https://bit.ly/3ityYTG
or Word document: https://bit.ly/3OPPb1w

Send your applications to flmbari-ea@creaworld.org