Month: January 2025

Do you know the work of our member organization Tin Hinan, composed of Indigenous women from the Sahel? We interviewed Saoudata Aboubacrine, Secretary-General of the organization, who shared with us the association’s history, its main areas of work, and the strategies they use to overcome challenges in the fight for land and territorial rights. To learn more about Tin Hinan, visit their website.

Can you briefly tell us the history of the organization?

The Association for the Advancement of Nomadic Women (Tin Hinan) was founded in 1994 in Burkina Faso to assist Malian and Nigerien refugee women from pastoralist communities. It was officially registered in Burkina Faso in 1997, in Mali in 2003, in Niger in 2005, and in Canada in 2016.
Tin Hinan is a non-profit organization that gradually shifted its focus toward community development while continuing to provide aid during crisis or natural disasters.

What are Tin Hinan’s main areas of work?

Tin Hinan works for integrated local development, humanitarian assistance, and advocacy on behalf of women, girls, pastoralist and Indigenous populations, and other vulnerable groups. Our main areas of work are:

1. Strengthening recovery and resilience capacities of vulnerable communities and populations through:

• Facilitating better access to means of production and livelihood.
• Promoting an environment conducive to creating a value-added chain for agricultural produce.
• Protecting the environment and combating the effects of climate change.
• Supporting biodiversity protection by strengthening community capacities, raising awareness, and identifying and valuing useful plants.
• Promoting local and family economies, particularly in rural areas, through improved access to microfinance.

2. Promoting human rights, especially for vulnerable groups, through:

• Promoting access to, retention in, and success in schooling for children, especially girls.
• Developing human rights education and strengthening women’s organizations.
• Empowering grassroots communities through literacy and technical training.
• Promoting access to information about health services, especially for women and children.
• Combating gender-based violence (GBV).

3. Strengthening community capacities for socioeconomic empowerment through:

• Improving skills in technology use, production management, labeling, and commercialization.
• Training womenand youth organizations in community life, conflict resolution, social cohesion, and peacebuilding.
• Communication, advocacy, awareness-raising, and sharing of knowledge and experiences.

4. Providing technical services, such as:

• Supporting food security programs for the municipalities of Timbuktu, Ber, and Salam from 2009 to 2012 in partnership with Swiss cooperation, through a capacity-building project on gender, human rights, advocacy, and communication funded by the Fonds Commun Genre (FCG).
• Partnering with the UNHCR in Burkina Faso from 2012 to 2017 to assist Malian refugees.
• Collaborating with the African Development Bank (AfDB) to develop a gender profile.
• The organization also provides assistance to refugees, displaced people, and disaster-affected individuals through emergency relief and community development support activities.

The organization also provides assistance to refugees, displaced people, and disaster-affected individuals through emergency relief and community development support activities.

5. Networking:
Our organization is based in three Sahel countries (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso) and in Canada, and it is a member of several networks of pastoralist organizations across the Sahel and the world. With the support of Foundation for a Just Society (FJS), Tin Hinan created a platform for pastoralist women with members in various regions and countries. The organization is part of many networks, such as:

• Pastoralist Women of the Sahel in Movement/OAFA
• Feminist Land Platform (FLP)
• Burkina Feminist Collective (CFB)
• International Land Coalition (ILC)
• Burkina Faso National Women’s Coalition (CNF), in partnership with WANEP
• CSO Platform for Sustainable Development and REDD in Burkina Faso
• Alliance for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities for Conservation in Africa (AICA)
• World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples (WAMIP)
• International Indigenous Women’s Forum (FIMI)
• African Indigenous Peoples Network (AIPN)
• International Climate Fund Observers Network (SAN)
• Committee on World Food Security (CFS)
• Slow Food Foundation through the Katta Sentinel in Timbuktu and Gao

Tin Hinan also follows climate change negotiations, having participated in COP21, which led to the Paris Agreement, and has since been a regular participant in various climate COPs. The organization has also taken part in biodiversity COPs and COP16 on desertification in Riyadh.
The organization is also a founding member of a cross-border Sahelian peace network of women (from Mali and Burkina Faso), created as part of a project supported by the European Union in partnership with Handicap International (FORCE), aimed at improving the involvement of women in peace initiatives. It was developed from 2014 to 2016.

What are the main challenges Tin Hinan faces, and how do you resist and organize?

Tin Hinan is an organization of pastoralist and Indigenous women operating in the Sahel, a region impacted by insecurity and the effects of climate change. Faced with these challenges, they have developed remarkable adaptation and resilience strategies.
The target communities are primarily women and girls. Despite its vulnerabilities, the association remains active and committed to its various areas of work at local, national, regional, and international levels through the areas of work mentioned above.

How does the Feminist Land Platform contribute to Tin Hinan’s work?

The Feminist Land Platform (FLP) plays a vital role in supporting Tin Hinan’s work. As a member of FLP and other networks, Tin Hinan benefits from field partnerships and advocacy efforts at regional and international levels.

Through the FLP, Tin Hinan has strengthened the capacities of women, girls, and communities in Tin Heiti, Timbuktu region, to access land. The role of women and girls in land conservation and biodiversity preservation has been emphasized, and enriching exchanges between these women and other groups within the Pastoralist Women of the Sahel in Movement Network. These interactions also involved representatives of national institutions, civil society organizations, and experts in environmental and biodiversity conservation, who continue to be our technical and financial partners.

In collaboration with the FLP, and with the support of the Ford Foundation, Oxfam International, and Burkina Faso’s Ministry for Women’s Promotion and Solidarity, Tin Hinan participated in the 67th session of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York in 2023, alongside other Platform members.

During the IUCN Regional Forum in June 2024 in Nairobi, FLP member organizations from Africa, including Tin Hinan, held a meeting and participated in activities with IUCN and AICA. This event allowed FLP Africa members to share positive experiences, challenges, and perspectives on the Platform’s work across Africa.

In conclusion, the work of the FLP demonstrates the solidarity of women’s and girls’ organizations from the Global South, strengthens local engagement, and fosters dialogue at all levels. This space also enables its members to collaborate with other actors, creating opportunities for broader partnerships.
 

Are you familiar with the work of Fórum Mulher, our member organization from Mozambique? We interviewed Nzira de Deus, the organization’s executive director, who spoke about Fórum Mulher’s history, its main areas of work, and the strategies they use to tackle challenges. For more information, visit the organization’s website.

Can you tell us a brief history of Fórum Mulher?

The Fórum Mulher is a feminist network established in 1993, comprising around 100 member organizations with representation in all provinces of Mozambique through provincial hubs, local organizations, and community-based groups. The network aims to promote gender equality and women’s human rights in Mozambique. We work from a feminist perspective, acting as a mediator between civil society and the State in matters of government policies and in strengthening organizations that fight for women’s rights.

Our commitment is to advocate for transformative change in sociocultural principles and practices that subordinate women, addressing hierarchical power relations between women and men, striving for achieving respect for human rights, and improving the position of women in society. The movement respects and values cultural, ethnic, political, and religious diversity.

Fórum Mulher envisions a fairer and more supportive society that recognizes feminist values, gender equality, and human rights for women in all dimensions. Our mission is to contribute to consolidating a network of organizations that, together with national and international strategic partners, promote structural cultural, economic, political, and social changes necessary to achieve equality in rights and opportunities for women in Mozambique.

Over the years, Fórum Mulher has focused its actions on Information, Lobbying, and Advocacy, with an emphasis on disseminating information about women’s human rights, publicizing legislation and public policies, and conducting campaigns to influence positive changes in laws, public policies, and institutional reforms. We also have strong engagement in Institutional Capacity Building. Focusing on gender and human rights training, integrating topics such as Gender-Based Violence, Sexual and Reproductive Rights, Gender and HIV/AIDS, Leadership, and Institutional Development, we aim at strengthening women’s organizations and associations.

Fórum Mulher is composed of an assembly of 93 members who meet at the General Assembly, ordinarily once a year and extraordinarily whenever necessary. The Board of Directors comprises three elected members who meet quarterly and are responsible for managing the institution, reporting to the General Assembly on the organization’s performance and situation. The Fiscal Council includes four elected members tasked with overseeing all organizational actions. The Advisory Committee is a consultative body made up of members considered central to the organization and who have held leadership roles in Fórum Mulher’s governing bodies.

What are the organization’s main areas of work?

Fórum Mulher has three strategic pillars:

1. Women’s Human Rights, composed of the following thematic subareas:
a) Gender-Based Violence, focusing on violence against women and girls, including femicide, public violence, sexual violence, and state violence. Fórum Mulher led political advocacy efforts for the approval of the Domestic Violence Law Against Women in 2009, following 15 years of awareness and dialogue with the government and parliament. More recently, in 2019, it achieved the approval of the Early Unions Law, aimed at condemning the forced union of girls under 18 with adult men, a patriarchal practice present in Mozambican society.
b) Economic and Labor Rights. Under this topic, Fórum Mulher focuses on rural and peasant women, advocating for their rights to land and natural resources, while contributing to their fight for dignified work and motherhood. For instance, our advocacy efforts led to an extension of maternity leave from 60 to 90 days during a labor law revision. Currently, Fórum Mulher is involved in revising the Land Law and strengthening the Mozambican Forum of Rural Women. In our fight for economic rights, we support alternative and ecologically sustainable agricultural practices, such as agroecology, through experimentation fields and conservation of native seeds.
c) Sexual and Reproductive Rights and Women’s Health. The organization aims to challenge the institutionalized control of women’s bodies through social norms and religious cultures that perpetuate discrimination in accessing their rights, basic health services, and fully exercising their sexual and reproductive rights. It has denounced patriarchal discourse around female sexuality, which instrumentalizes women’s pleasure and fuels sexual violence. Notably, in 2019, it successfully advocated for the decriminalization of abortion in Mozambique, worked on campaigns to correct obstetric fistulas, and organized training sessions on sexual and reproductive rights for young people.
d) Women’s Leadership and Political Participation. Fórum Mulher works to amplify women’s voices in their daily struggles for human rights, encouraging them to recognize themselves as political and rights-bearing agents and to participate in decision-making spaces in their communities. Simultaneously, it seeks to ensure women’s formal participation in national decision-making processes, empowering them to become active political agents driving national development. It advocates for meaningful participation beyond membership status, emphasizing a deep awareness of the ongoing struggles.

2. Network and Movement Building. This pillar includes actions to restructure and organize the Fórum Mulher network-movement, coordinate collective interventions, increase knowledge production, share experiences among members, foster thematic debates, and regularly document and share lessons learned within the network and with national and international organizations.

3. Institutional Strengthening. In this third pillar we have been working on feminist political education through the “Fórum Mulher Feminist School,” which aims to elevate political awareness and broaden the horizons of women in general and of the organization’s members. Fórum Mulher seeks to align discourse and practice across all actions to protect the rights of women and girls by reinforcing our feminist and anti-capitalist identity. We also promote technical training to equip our members with knowledge and tools to enhance their capacity for action, improve the quality of their interventions across various topics, and expand our potential for impact.

What are the main challenges Fórum Mulher faces and how do you resist and organize?

One of the greatest challenges we have faced in recent times has been the political repression against organizations and advocates working in the field of human rights, coupled with the difficulty of addressing the climate and humanitarian crises without the necessary resources and technical capacity. Another major challenge is the reduction of funding for national organizations that defend human rights, particularly women’s rights. Unfortunately, this has negatively impacted the sustainability of the achievements made and the institutional capacity to respond to the difficult context we are facing.

To overcome these challenges, we have sought to implement combined actions for economic empowerment and sustainability, such as training women in income-generating activities through a feminist business incubator, promoting urban and rural agroecological practices, and offering training on gender and feminism to institutions that request it. In parallel, we continue to respond to funding opportunities as they arise, striving to improve our fundraising capabilities.

Additionally, our campaign “Land: My Life, My Future” aims to amplify the voices of rural women, empowering them to know their rights and encouraging their active participation in decision-making spaces. Through this initiative, women can assert their rights to land ownership within their families, communities, and at the national level, while tackling challenges such as land grabbing by large corporations and the privatization of collective natural resources.

In Mozambique, 80% of women work on the land, but only 20% hold formal ownership titles. This is why one of the campaign’s main focuses is the recognition of women’s land rights. This lack of formal recognition also drives us to strengthen women’s self-organization and promote their participation in public policy discussions.

For rural women, land is not just a means of food production but also an essential part of their lives, representing a profound cultural and personal connection. However, they face barriers both institutionally and within the family environment. Due to cultural and social norms, the patriarchal system often denies women the right to land ownership.

Thus, the campaign operates at multiple levels — from the family and private spheres to the community and national levels. Among the concrete results achieved so far are an increase in land registrations in women’s names, the amplification of their voices in political discussions, the creation of initiatives such as the Rural Women’s Forum, and the registration of various women’s associations. The campaign is also connected to broader movements, such as the Kilimanjaro Campaign, in which women climbed Africa’s highest mountain to demand their land rights.

How does the Feminist Land Platform contribute to this work?

The Feminist Land Platform (FLP) is a space that allows us, as a feminist network, to learn from comrades in other territories, find solidarity, and amplify our voices as a global network. We understand that the struggle we are fighting is not only ours but also shared by many other women, and we come together to jointly confront the capitalist and patriarchal forces that seek to take away our rights. Through the FLP, we can access spaces that we might not have been able to reach on our own.

One significant benefit of participating in the Platform is the opportunity to strengthen our connection as an African region and jointly participate in discussion and decision-making spaces such as the African Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC). In these forums, we have had the chance to share our vision as a grassroots movement and influence regional policies that impact women’s daily lives.

Moreover, we had never had the opportunity to document our journey in the struggle for women’s land rights and the creation of the Mozambican Forum of Rural Women. With the FLP, we were able to analyze our path, organizational process, mobilization, and interventions. Documenting our history helps us value what ours is and protect our lands and territories with greater strength. We have been able to see our capacity for leadership and collective work and how these efforts have an impact on national, regional, and international levels.

Another important point is that during the process of revising the National Land Policy, the FLP supported us in analyzing the policy proposal from feminist perspectives, sharing the foundational principles that should guide our analysis based on the experiences of member organizations like Espaço Feminista (Brazil). We felt greatly supported by the network, as we needed guidance and knowledge about the experiences of other countries. Sharing the Portuguese language with our Brazilian comrades has made a huge difference for us, as it facilitates understanding of terms and reflections. The process of revising the Land Law is not yet complete, and we want to continue relying on the support of our colleagues to resist attempts to privatize land and reduce opportunities for women to claim their rights to land and territories.

We would like to continue with trainings in agroecology and feminist incubators associated with agroecological gardens and documenting our journey. We need to keep organizing, mobilizing, and bringing our demands to political dialogue spaces to share our priorities. We count on this feminist network to continue learning from our comrades and moving forward together, inspiring peasant struggles in defense of life and Mother Earth.

We keep on marching for our land, our life, and our territories. The struggle continues.