The pandemic has had adverse effects on the world, but women have been overwhelmingly impacted. Over the last year, already existing structural inequalities that disproportionally affect women have been further entrenched within African communities. Interventions to mitigate the spread of the pandemic such as lockdowns resulted in the increase of womn’s care giving roles as they were forced to stay indoors. In some households, women became more prone to abuse from partners or other relations.
Governments’ focus on addressing the health aspect of the pandemic left the power structures that would leave womn’s daily lives adversely affected unaddressed. Conversely, feminist philanthropic institutions centred their efforts on mitigating the gaps caused by government interventions. Women’s funds and women’s right organizations have offered technical, solidarity and financial resources to address outcomes such as gender-based violence, mental health services for womn especially those with disabilities and the LBTQI, healing and wellbeing interventions, access to water and sanitation kits among others.
Africa Philanthropy Network and Urgent Action Fund-Africa are excited to team up to spotlight the great impact feminist philanthropy has had on transforming the realities of women during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim is to document feminism centred approaches and principles that have been essential in addressing the impacts of COVID-19, to hopefully encourage the widespread adoption of feminist approaches to undoing structural inequalities perpetuated by crises. The product will be in the form of interviews with women’s funds and womn’s rights organizations, as well as videos, illustrations and published articles.
We’ll be sure to update you as the project unfolds!
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