Our Levers For Systemic Change
At AFWAG, we believe that creating lasting gender equity requires a collective effort that draws on the strengths of diverse organisations and leaders across Africa. We partner with these organisations to co-create pathways to success, embracing their unique strengths and contexts. Our work is organised around three pillars. Each is distinct. Together, they create conditions for Africa’s gender equity ecosystem to sustain itself.
Our approach focuses on:
Leadership Development
Grassroots gender justice leaders carry deep community knowledge, proven solutions, and years of hard-won experience. Through HAULF (Her Africa Ubuntu Leadership Fellowship) and HAESI (Her Africa Early Stage Incubator), we walk alongside them in ways that go beyond skills training.
Every leader’s journey is different. We co-create with them, backing their visions for their communities rather than fitting them into a fixed programme. We invest in their strategic clarity, their peer connections, the platforms that make their expertise visible, and in their wellness and wholeness as people doing demanding, meaningful work.
What changes:
- Leaders move from working in isolation to leading at regional and national levels
- They influence policy, secure sustainable funding, and become recognised experts
- They sustain themselves with peer support, clarity, and purpose for the long haul
- Their strategies get documented so others across the network can learn from them.
Network Weaving
Grassroots leaders often work in silos, duplicating efforts and lacking access to collective wisdom. We build infrastructure for continuous peer learning, collective action, and connection to the funders, policymakers, and ecosystem players that proximate leaders need, and that need proximate leaders.
Through our pan-African network, leaders access peer-to-peer learning, communities of practice, and a Learning Portal with over 1,000 resources created by and for network members. When shared priorities demand collective action, around maternal health, policy reform, or economic justice, the network moves together. Member organisations co-design and lead programmes collectively, achieving outcomes no single organisation could produce alone.
What changes:
- Leaders move from isolation to connection, with peers, with power, and with resources, their work deserves
- Solutions developed in one context get adapted and scaled across countries
- Organisations coordinate regional advocacy that influences policy across borders
- Grassroots leaders gain platforms where their expertise shapes funding priorities and movement strategies
- The network coordinates collective implementation when shared priorities demand it
Organisational Resilience
Proven community impact is only the beginning. For that impact to last, the organisation behind it needs to be as strong as the work it does, with the governance, financial systems, and strategic foundations to weather uncertainty, transition leadership, and grow beyond any single grant.
We work alongside organisations through peer learning models, connecting them to others who have navigated the same challenges and come out more durable. We provide targeted support in governance, financial management, strategic planning, fundraising, and leadership sustainability, co-designing the approach around each organisation’s specific context and stage.
What changes:
- Organisations move from grant-dependent survival to long-term financial sustainability
- Governance systems that outlast founding leaders
- Strategic capacity to attract multi-year investment
- Communities maintain access to critical services because organisations have the resilience to endure
- What each organisation learns about building durably gets shared across the whole network
