The Feminist Leadership, Movement Building and Rights Institute – East Africa
Kampala, Uganda
October 2025 (Date to be Confirmed)
Application Deadline: 24th May 2025
CREA’s Feminist Leadership, Movement Building, and Rights Institute – East Africa is a residential programme designed to strengthen feminist solidarity, leadership, advocacy, and strategies for building collective power for social transformation. The Institute engages feminists from across the region to build a substantive understanding of our present with all its challenges and possibilities. It interrogates concepts and structures that have a bearing on our strategies by embedding patriarchy and gender in concepts of nation, identity, religion, polity, and development. To make meaning of what feminist struggles have transformed and how new forms of patriarchy are part of existing inequalities.
About the Institute
The Institute is designed on the premise that feminist leadership can be strengthened and have a greater impact when women’s rights activists and advocates have greater conceptual clarity and strategic approaches that go to the roots of inequality rather than dealing with its symptoms alone. The Institute aims to encourage and enable participants to:
Interrogate concepts such as nation, identity, power, and development, which affect our struggles and strategies by reshaping the discourse and practices of patriarchy and gender.
Explore different forms of leadership through feminist journeys, histories, and standpoints across generations.
Build new and collaborative modes of resistance in the face of emerging configurations of power.
Institute Pedagogy
A team of feminist activists, practitioners, and academicians from East Africa will lead the Institute using classroom instruction, group work, theatre, simulation exercises, literature, films, music, and case studies. The process of learning is based on four core pedagogic principles:
- The Institute emphasises linking theory to practice.
- Participants will learn to critically analyse policy, research, and their own programme interventions using a rights-based approach.
- The Institute is not a training or workshop and attempts to recast the idea of collective and experiential ways of learning.
- The Institute emphasises learning led by world-class faculty.
Location
Locate our everyday, ‘micro’ individual and organisational practices in the macro context of the larger women’s movement and of other struggles for gender equality and justice.
Reflection
Deepen curiosity and self-reflexiveness among participants by facilitating conversations that traverse geographies, generations, and diversity of concerns and political standpoints.
Expansion
Build solidarity across borders by bringing into focus the shared sense of being South Asian. This includes a deeper understanding of our common heritage and historical interlinkages as well as ruptures and differences. The idea is to explore together what constitutes South Asian feminist practice – both as an assumption and as an aspiration.
From this, participants will be able to critically assess women’s movements in South Asia and explore concrete strategies to strengthen links between women’s movements and other social justice movements to advance women’s human rights more collectively.
Faculty
Core Faculty
Solome Nakaweesi is an African Feminist activist, active participant, and analyst within the women and human rights movements in Uganda, Africa and Internationally. Solome has a proven track record in kick-starting, reviving, managing, and running successful organisations, institutions, and social movements that engage with cutting-edge human rights and development work. She has been at the forefront of many progressive social movements and agendas in Africa and Internationally. Experienced in transformational leadership theory and practice; has had the rare courage of being at the forefront of tackling taboo issues on a number of core human rights issues (like race, diversity, gender, class, sexuality, and sexual rights), and standing in solidarity with marginalised women and men. As such therefore she played a fundamental role in supporting the (re)emergence of progressive social movements and organising in the Africa Region, Eastern Africa Sub-Region.
Dipta Bhog is a creative facilitator, who has over three decades of experience working on issues of gender and education, women’s rights, and development. She is a founder member of Nirantar, a Centre for Gender and Education in New Delhi. Identity and caste are new areas of interest, while in the past she has worked with rural women and grassroots women leaders, building on their leadership and organisational strength. She helped set up Khabar Lahariya, the first rural and Dalit women-led newspaper in 2002.
She conceptualized and coordinated a study titled, Textbook Regimes: A Feminist Analysis of Nation and Identity, in partnership with four leading Women’s Studies Departments in four Indian state universities, that analyzed language and social science textbooks from elementary and secondary schools. She has developed a curriculum, textbooks, creative reading material, comic books, and digital installations to communicate feminist ideas and insights. Recently, she conceptualized The Third Eye, a feminist learning portal, working on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and technology.
Paromita Chakravarti is a professor in the Department of English, at Jadavpur University (JU) and has been director, of the School of Women’s Studies, and a convenor of the Cell against Sexual Harassment at JU. She teaches drama, women’s writing, queer, and film studies and has worked on gender representation in school textbooks, sexuality education, women’s higher education, women and HIV and AIDS. Closely associated with the women’s movement in Kolkata, she is active in the queer, sex worker, homeless and single women’s movements. She has introduced one of the first postgraduate courses in Queer Studies in the Department of English at JU. Her book, Women Contesting Culture, co-edited with Prof. Kavita Panjabi was published in 2012. Dr. Chakravarti is also the founder member of the NGO “ebong alaap” which works on critical pedagogies and serves as a board member of “Anjali” an NGO that works on mental health.
Visiting Faculty
The course will also have facilitation from activists, academicians, practitioners and researchers carrying expertise in different subjects as visiting faculty members.
Who we are
Founded in 2000, CREA is a feminist human rights organization based in New Delhi, India. CREA works at community, national, regional, and global levels and is one of the few international feminist organizations based in the global South. CREA focuses on building feminist leadership, strengthening movements, expanding sexual and reproductive freedoms, promoting rights-based approaches to reducing gender-based violence, and advancing the human rights of structurally excluded1CREA uses the term ‘structurally excluded’ to draw attention to the ways in which societal architecture prevents certain people from enjoying the full spectrum of rights and from meaningfully and effectively participating in their communities and decision-making spaces.
Our work focuses on preventing individual harms, dismantling the structures that construct and sustain those harms, and creating pathways to justice for persons excluded because of their real or perceived genders, sexualities, identities, or chosen forms of labor.
At present, CREA works with structurally excluded women and girls, persons of diverse sexualities, genders and sex characteristics, persons with disabilities, and sex workers. CREA will continue to practice and advocate for broader inclusion and solidarity.
people.
Application Criteria
FLMBaRI East Africa is for activists, service providers, community organizers, researchers, and human rights practitioners, working on issues of sexuality, sexual and gender diversity and diversity of sex characteristics / LGBTIQ rights, sexual rights, sexual and reproductive health and rights, rights of persons with disabilities, HIV/AIDS, public health, violence against women / gender-based violence, health, and/or gender, nationally, regionally or globally. 30 participants will be selected to attend. Participants should be embedded in human rights and/or feminist movements or civil society, or be working closely with them. Full-time students are not eligible. All applicants must be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and Yellow Fever and willing and able to undertake travel to Uganda. Only individuals from East Africa or working in an East African Context are eligible to apply. We invite members of structurally excluded groups working in the East African context to apply, regardless of their current location (Travel grants are not assured to applicants applying from outside the East African region). Participants with Disabilities are encouraged to apply.
Application Deadline and Selection Process
Application Submission is due on or before 24th May 2025. Applications will be evaluated and reviewed by CREA staff carefully. Applicants shall hear from CREA latest by September End. We will only contact applicants who have been selected to attend. Early applications are given priority.
Logistics
The Institute will be held in the month of October 2025 (dates TBC), for 8 full days. Participants will be expected to be present throughout the entire duration of the Institute.
Travel & Accommodation
CREA will cover boarding and lodging and participants’ international and local travel expenses. Accommodation is on a twin-sharing basis. All your local travel and visa fees will be reimbursed on the submission of the receipts. (Travel grants are not assured to applicants applying from outside the East African region).
Note: The process of selection will begin with the application of participants. You are requested to send the filled-in application form as early as possible.
For any queries, you can mail to flmbari-ea@creaworld.org