Hosted by the Stephen Lewis Foundation, the Ask Her Talks 

A trailer of the talks is now online. The full talks will be available soon.

The series includes a paper co-authored by Lori Michau, Jessica Horn, Amy Bank, Mallika Dutt and Cathy Zimmerman on Prevention of violence against women and girls: Lessons from Practice. The paper draws on field-based activist experience, intersectional feminist analysis and emerging evidence to suggest a framework for future prevention programming.

Article summary: This Series paper describes programming to prevent violence against women and girls, and emphasises the importance of systematic, sustained programming across the social ecology (ie, the delicate equilibrium of interacting social, institutional, cultural, and political contexts of people’s lives) to transform gender-power inequalities. Effective prevention policy and programming is founded on five core principles: first, analysis and actions to prevent violence across the social ecology (individual, interpersonal, community, and societal); second, intervention designs based on an intersectional gender-power analysis; third, theory-informed models developed on the basis of evidence; fourth, sustained investment in multisector interventions; and finally, aspirational programming that promotes personal and collective thought, and enables activism on women’s and girls’ rights to violence-free lives. Prevention programming of the future will depend on all of us having a vision of, and a commitment to, gender equality to make violence-free lives for women and girls a reality.

Download and read the article in the publications section here.

View the full Lancet series here  including free access (with registration) to the full articles.

After his success during the 2011 Panorama with The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 about the Afro-American civil rights movement, Göran Hugo Olsson returns with a retrospective view of Africa’s independence movements. Based on Frantz Fanon’s famous book, ‘The Wretched of the Earth’, the film describes the uprisings that led to Africa’s decolonisation. Once again, Olsson concentrates on archive material filmed in Africa by Swedish documentary filmmakers and television journalists between 1966 and 1984. Footage of liberation movements in Angola, the Frelimo in Mozambique and the struggle for independence in Guinea-Bissau are juxtaposed with documentary images of Swedish missionaries in Tanzania and a strike in a Swedish mine in Liberia. Musician Lauryn Hill brings to life Fanon’s polarising texts which structure and provide commentary on the film’s visual material. A glimpse of today’s smouldering conflicts along the old colonial borders shows that, even 50 years after Fanon’s death, Africa is still having to deal with the consequences of centuries of European raids and interventions.

The podcast of the session that Jessica Horn facilitated at Africa Writes 2014 at the British Library is now online! Have a listen to the moving, challenging and skilled poetry and analysis of Warsan Shire, Belinda Zhawi, Ribkha Sibhatu and Chinwe Azubuike on Mixcloud.

A broadcast covering the event is available here.

 Read the full article here .

Read the opening article by series co-editors Jessica Horn (Comissioning Editor, Our Africa) and Simidele Dosekun “Feminist Africa: Putting Africa’s feminist thinking on the intellectual map”. The series will publish excerpts from Feminist Africa’s incredible resource of fresh and broad thinking from feminists shaping how we think about the continent and the world. 

Speaking about African women’s rights and tech activism at the Make Every Woman Count conference, celebrating the 3rd anniversary of the African Women’s Decade, London, 18 January, 2014.

Photos (c) New Internationalist

In celebration of the New Internationalist‘s 40th Anniversary, Jessica Horn spoke on a panel of academics, activists and researchers about the meaning of transnational solidarity, the power of political imagination, and the need for activism with heart. Fellow panelists were Dan Smith (Secretary General of International Alert and Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Manchester University), John Hilary (Executive Director, War on Want), Mariemé Jamme (Tech entrepreneur and founder, Africa Gathering), Nitasha Kaul (Economist and writer), Asad Rehman (Senior Climate Campaigner, Friends of the Earth), and Jonathan Glennie (writer) with chair Hannah Pool (journalist and events curator).  

The event was held on 31 October 2013 at the Amnesty International Human Rights Action Centre in London, UK. 

Watch the full video in the Media section.