Client: African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF)
Project: Feminist Research and Advocacy Bootcamp
Duration: 5-day bootcamp, followed by a 24-month action plan
Location: Madagascar
Competencies: Training Design, Strategic Facilitation, Influence Communication, Leadership Development.
Delivering a Pan-African feminist advocacy
The African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF) sought to reinvent feminist advocacy. We catalyzed their narrative power.
This project exemplifies Aether Strategies’ expertise: blending strategic communication with a deep understanding of development, peace, and sovereignty issues in Africa. We don’t just create campaigns; we cultivate ecosystems of change.
autonomy.
June 2025, Madagascar.
Challenge
Solution
Result
Challenge
Unlocking voices, decolonizing action
Across the continent, feminist movements, especially those in Francophone and Lusophone regions, face a wall. Confronted with economic injustice and resource plunder, their voices are often stifled by a double burden: linguistic marginalization and the imposition of Western advocacy models disconnected from their realities.
AWDF identified a critical need: how to equip over ten member organizations from the continent and diaspora without reproducing the very frameworks that erase them? The challenge wasn’t just to provide new techniques, but to create a space to forge authentic tools of liberation, rooted in African memory and wisdom. It was about transforming advocacy from a bureaucratic task into an act of sovereignty.
Solution
A transformative bootcamp, from memory to movement
Our agency, Aether Strategies, designed and facilitated a radically different initiative in Madagascar: a “Bootcamp on Research and Advocacy.” Our approach merged intellectual rigor with emotional truth, strategy with spirit. We established ethics as our infrastructure and community as our compass.
Over several days, we guided participants through an immersive journey:
1. Deconstructing narrative power: By analyzing concrete examples, like the representation of the Congo in global media, we exposed the symbolic violence of colonial narratives and their lingering impact.
2. Reclaiming the narrative: We centered the training on storytelling as a strategic tool, using writing workshops, memory rituals, and poetry to empower participants to rebuild their own stories.
3. Grounding advocacy in lived experience: Rather than discussing abstract concepts, we explored the concrete victories of their communities. Each session started from their experiences to build funding and campaign strategies that truly belonged to them.
Our methodology created an ecosystem of trust where every voice mattered, and every story carried political weight. We transformed a training into a “lineage of liberation.”
Result
A pan-African network reimagining the future
The impact of this bootcamp extends far beyond simple capacity building. We catalyzed the birth of a movement more conscious of its power and heritage.
Concretely, participants are now equipped to identify and challenge dehumanizing representations, to position Pan-African cooperation as a strategy for narrative healing, and to design campaigns that speak with power, not just to power.
A two-year strategic action plan was co-created, including digital labs, a collective feminist media archive, and inter-organizational mentorships. This is the seed of a sustainable network capable of building alternatives to dominant systems.