Forging the sovereignty of African feminist movements through strategic communication and financial resilience.
Facing a two-front battle of narrative control and systemic financial dependency, African feminist movements were at a critical juncture. For AWDF, Aether Strategies orchestrated an integrated response, turning these challenges into powerful levers for collective power and sustainable autonomy.
May 2025, Accra, Ghana.
Challenge
Solution
Result
Challenge
The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), a cornerstone of support for women’s rights on the continent, identified a major strategic challenge for its partner organizations. They were operating in an increasingly complex and hostile environment:
1. On the digital and narrative front: An intensification of state surveillance, online harassment, and targeted disinformation was silencing feminist voices. Dominant narratives, often inherited from colonial and patriarchal logics, distorted or erased their struggles.
2. On the financial front: Traditional funding models replicated unequal power dynamics. Organizations were forced to comply with external agendas, extractive metrics, and frameworks that stifled their political autonomy, threatening their sustainability and community grounding.
The challenge was twofold: how to enable movements to tell their own power safely, and how to empower them to fund their own liberation with dignity?
Solution
An integrated, decolonial pedagogy
Aether Strategies designed and facilitated two transformative training series, not as separate events, but as the two pillars of a single strategic arch. Our approach was grounded in a feminist, Pan-African, and decolonial pedagogy.
We created a learning space where theory and practice, the political and the spiritual, strategy and care were inseparable.
1. “Telling Power” Stream (Communication and Collective Security): We equipped activists to reclaim control of their narratives. The sessions combined:
– Narrative Sovereignty: Workshops to deconstruct dominant narratives and build powerful counter-narratives rooted in lived realities and African cultural memory.
– Digital Security as Collective Care: Practical training on encryption, threat modeling, and protection protocols, approaching technology not as a mere tool, but as a political battlefield.
2.”Funding Liberation” Stream (Movement Resilience): We reframed resource mobilization as a political act. The modules allowed participants to:
– Decolonize Philanthropy: A critical analysis of colonial legacies in funding to dismantle the logics of dependency.
– Build Economies of Solidarity: The valorization and structuring of endogenous models like tontines, mutual aid (Ujamaa), and community support as viable and ethical alternatives.
Result
Movements equipped for autonomy
This collaboration yielded concrete and systemic results, strengthening the infrastructure of feminist movements across the continent.
• A Pan-African Feminist Action Plan (2025-2026) was co-created, aligning dozens of organizations on shared priorities for advocacy, sustainability, and digital justice.
• Collective security was strengthened. Organizations are now equipped to develop and implement cybersecurity protocols based on an ethic of care, protecting their members and data.
• Funding models were reclaimed. Participants shifted away from extractive logics towards resource mobilization strategies that anchor autonomy, dignity, and community power.
• Decentralized regional hubs were initiated in West, East, Central, and Southern Africa, creating a durable infrastructure for mutual aid, political education, and cross-border solidarity.
• A “training of trainers” framework was established, ensuring a multiplier effect that builds capacity at the grassroots level and guarantees the sustainability of knowledge.