Our Work
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| FEMNET work with women's rights organizations in 37 countries in Africa |
As an all encompassing Network for women's organisations and individual rights activists, FEMNET has in her current Strategic Plan (2011-2013) prioritized on five focus areas for intervention in order to achieve greater impact and ensure efficient use of available resources. The Five Focus Areas and their specific strategic objectives are:-
Focus Area 1: Women in Leadership and Governance
FEMNET facilitates processes towards enabling collective action by the African women's movement/ and women's rights organizations to influence the level of representation and quality of participation of women in leadership and governance.
Focus Area 2: Women's Economic Empowerment and Rights
FEMNET facilitate activities towards the promotion of African women’s economic empowerment including:- increasing access to information and productive resources; ensuring African women’s effective participation in changing macroeconomic policy frameworks to be more gender responsive; engendering trade arrangements between African countries and other regions; and contributing to the discourse on development cooperation and new aid modalities (the Aid Effectiveness agenda) from a gender perspective.
Focus Area 3: Women's Sexual and Reproductive Health including the protection of their Rights, bodily integrity and dignity
FEMNET facilitates processes towards enabling African women’s organizations to influence national legal and policy frameworks towards the protection and promotion of the bodily integrity and dignity of African women including prevention of all forms of violence against women and girls (VAW/Gs) and the spread of HIV/AIDS and women’s right to sexual and reproductive health. The purpose is to ensure that society fully values and appreciates women and the role they play in the development of our continent.
Focus Area 4: Women and the Media, Freedom of Information and use of ICTs
FEMNET facilitates processes to strengthen the role of African women in the media, promote their participation in the lobbies for freedom of information (FOI) and the use of ICTs for the advancement of women’s rights and empowerment in Africa. Communication is essential for collective organizing, transfer of skills and knowledge, movement building and mobilizing a large constituency to speak out on issues affecting women in Africa.
Focus Area 5: Institutional Strengthening of women's organisations and networks in Africa
FEMNET seeks to enhance the institutional and organizational capacities of women organizations and networks in Africa to effectively engage in the development processes in the region. FEMNET focuses on movement building as a strategy for increasing the number of women organizations working towards achieving the desired change in the short, medium and longer term period.
These Strategic Objectives will be implemented using three main approaches:
Communication and Networking approach: The communication approach seeks to support member organizations to contribute to the body of knowledge on women rights, gender and development in Africa, enhance their capacities to access relevant information and data to inform their interventions and facilitate membership experience sharing and dissemination of information that cuts across the 5 focus areas.
Advocacy approach: This approach seeks to identify innovative ideas, opportunities and strategies that can be used by member organizations and FEMNET partners to advocate for women's human rights at national, regional and international levels.
Capacity Building approach: This approach seeks to strengthen the leadership capacity of member organizations and other key stakeholders, build institutional capacities to mainstream gender considerations in policy formulation, planning and programs implementation processes and enhance their capacities to organize around women's rights issues guided by African feminists values and principles.