In December, ArtGlo attended the UN Trust Fund’s first regional learning exchange summit in Nairobi, “We Rise 2023: UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women”. The summit was for grantees located in Africa and Latin America who had received funding from the UN Trust Fund under the EU/UN Spotlight Initiative for the past three years.
We Rise 2023 took place in the context of complex, overlapping, and protracted crises happening around the world. Since the start of these projects in 2019, civil society and women’s rights organizations have experienced and adapted to numerous global challenges, from the COVID-19 pandemic to natural and human-made disasters that had given rise to an increase in backlash to women’s rights as well as anti-rights movements and unprecedented levels of violence against women. As these impactful projects came to a close, the group of 55 organizations came together to exchange knowledge and learn from one another on what had worked to prevent and end violence against women and girls while building strong and resilient feminist movements.
ArtGlo has been implementing the Make Art for Women Activism (MAWA) project for 3 years and 3 months from 6th January 2020-31st March 2023. The overall goal of MAWA which also means was to end Violence Against Women and Girls and improve the lives of women and girls by challenging patriarchal social norms and mainstreaming women’s empowerment. The project aimed at addressing intimate partner sexual and physical violence, non-partner sexual violence, and the harmful practice of early and child marriages. The project worked closely with the local government authorities and 56 Civil Society Organizations (CSO), including networks in 5 districts in Blantyre, Phalombe, Mulanje, Chikhwawa, and Chiradzulu districts in Malawi, to identify CSOs who are well placed to advocate and mobilize for social change in their communities but often lack the capacity to do so.
Rodger Phiri, The ED for ArtGlo, representing the organization at the summit, focused on exchanging with activist organizations from both African and Latin American regions the best practices to enhance the effectiveness of ending violence against women and girls initiatives. He also shared about how Artistic approaches, coupled with Human Centered Design could best be utilized to address nuanced grassroots factors that could be difficult to unearth with other approaches. The ArtGlo ED facilitated a workshop on Data, evidence, and practice-based knowledge during the summit.
