YOUNG WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
About Us
ABOUT THE YOUNG WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE (YWLI) Founded in 1999, YWLI is a feminist centre of excellence for nurturing the leadership of adolescent girls and young women/ feminists in all their diversities between the age 11 to 35 years. YWLI provides spaces and opportunities for adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) to engage in setting their own agenda and in determining how the world around them should change. YWLI envisions a society that enables the self-actualization of adolescent girls and young women, powered by transformative feminist leadership. YWLI's mission is to nurture the leadership of adolescent girls and young women/feminists and create spaces for their participation in policy processes. This mission centralizes the voice, power and influence of and by AGYW. Over time, the mission of YWLI has expanded, from the initial goal of breaking the barriers preventing young women from leading and living lives of equality to nurturing adolescent girls and young women’s leadership to address those barriers.
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YOUNG WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
We have continued to create spaces for feminist conversations and open new frontiers for AGYW engagement in policy processes. ● We have developed from information sharing and networking to becoming a hub where AGYW can access information and organize for action depending on what their call for advocacy is. ● YWLI’s scope of analysis and action has broadened to include support for grassroot feminist groups and movements led by young feminists and girl-led initiatives ● YWLI creates spaces for co-creation with young feminists while at the same time engaging them through a deep understanding of feminist organizing. ● YWLI challenges conventional, patriarchal structures to build new ways of thinking about AGYW role in leadership, organising, living and knowledge creation. We do this through creation of unconventional feminist spaces that encourage learning, enquiry, participation and fun. YWLI strategic engagements are guided by feminist values and an intersectional approach to dismantling patriarchy. YWLI uses the theme voice, power and influence to amplify the collective actions of AGYW in their different areas of engagement. We have experience of highlighting the need for shifting narratives guided by feminist (power) analysis. We challenge societal norms that render AGYW as powerless and deny them opportunity to enjoy their rights. Through feminist analysis AGYW claim their power to challenge impunity, harmful gender norms, oppression, and violence against women & girls and embrace gender equality. YWLI is currently working on the following strategic areas: i) Sexual and Reproductive Justice (SRJ): YWLI works on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) for AGYW and makes an emphasis on sexual and heath rights (SHR) and justice as these are aspects that are often ignored when dealing with the situation of AGYW. Our SRJ approach encompasses movement building and a commitment to apply intersectionality in understanding body politics and other multiple dimensions of factors and politics affecting AGYW. Our work recognizes structural inequalities including gender power dynamics. YWLI contributes to long-term systemic change by transforming our ways of thinking, working, and living while co-creating with grassroots communities and groups of AGYW most impacted by sexual and reproductive oppression. ii) Campaign and Policy Advocacy: YWLI is at the centre of mobilizing, collaborating and supporting young feminists in addressing gender-based violence affecting AGYW in all diversities nationally and regionally. We have been at the forefront in championing an end to all forms of violence and forms of Intimate partner violence including violence in family settings. In 2021 YWLI conceptualised and is running a campaign dubbed #MyDearBody aimed at ending all forms of violence with an emphasis on ending femicide. Based on this campaign we have managed funds to support feminist grassroots group regionally. 1 YWLI emphasizes on rights and justice as most of SRHR violations experienced by AGYW are downplayed based on assumptions that AGYW should not be vocal on matters of their desires, bodily autonomy, life-saving services and choices in life, thus it has been grounds to violate them. iii) Young feminist organising: YWLI offers opportunities for participation in policy processes, advocacy capacity development and accountability to ensure AGYW are at the forefront in ensuring policies are responsive to their needs. Through policy engagements, young feminist activists enhance their knowledge for advocacy to ensure policies linking health and rights are inclusive and responsive to the priorities articulated by young women and girls. In the next phase of YWLI’s strategic plan, we are working towards turning YWLI into an effective campaign organisation for AGYW issues. This means building and strengthening our capacity in campaign and advocacy that is grounded in feminist realities in Kenya. We remain steadfast in our belief in feminist principles and values, guided by the charter of African Feminist Principles and we use feminist approaches in challenging power dynamics that continue to push women and girls to the periphery. iv) Feminist Leadership development: YWLI has provided capacity strengthening and training, and further created spaces for continued feminist conversations on various topics for AGYW such as leadership, adolescent girls Sexual Health and Rights (SHR), organizing and giving them the opportunity to have conversations which strengthens their ability to influence and challenge oppression and speak freely about access to their rights. v) Economic Justice: Progress for women’s human rights is hampered by insufficient Domestic Resource Mobilization (DRM) through taxation due to a broken international financial architecture that enables illicit financial flows and tax abuse by multinational corporations and wealthy elites. This exploitative economic system is further upheld by women’s labor, including un(der)paid care work which undermines women’s economic rights. Tax is considered technical and has led to the structural and systemic exclusion of the critical voices of women and feminist analysis in the international financial architecture debate, as well as hampering women’s equal access and control over financial and natural resources. YWLI has continued to mobilize a critical mass of young feminists to ensure they understand the connection between tax, economic and economic justice to women’s economic stability, to campaign and advocate for economically free and independent young feminists through policy briefs and lobbying for support from the governments.Faces Powering YOUNG WOMEN'S LEADERSHIP INSTITUTE
