Preparing your experience
Preparing your experience
How Nawi positions itself within a living ecosystem—centering working women, weaving care into operations, and building tables where knowledge, power, and imagination meet.
The Nawi Model outlines how Nawi positions itself in the ecosystem to deliver its work on advancing Pan-African feminist macro economic level thought and practice. At its core, the model centers the historical subject of the collective`s work: working women. These women, whose lives and labor are often marginalized in mainstream macroeconomic analysis, are the primary constituency and the driving force behind our work.
Using a decolonial approach, Nawi derives socio- economic questions from the lived realities of working women, rather than imposing top-down analytical frameworks. This approach ensures that macro-level economic analysis is not divorced from everyday life but rather is rooted in the experiences, struggles, and insights of African women who engage in formal and informal labor and the economy writ large.
Think Tanks - for advancing policy-relevant feminist research.
Unions - to align with organized labor in representing working women`s interests.
Feminist/Women`s Rights Organizations - to connect gender justice with economic justice.
Economic Justice Organizations - to strengthen the intersection between feminist and broader economic rights work.
Universities and Academic Institutions - to contribute to research, teaching, and feminist knowledge production.
Policy-relevant feminist research.
Organized labor for working women’s interests.
Connect gender justice with economic justice.
Bridge feminist & broader economic rights.
Research, teaching, knowledge production.
The Nawi Collective is defined by the following four interconnected threads that form the fabric of our existence. We recognize the necessity of upholding all four simultaneously to ensure we remain impactful and true to our core mission.
Nawi`s work is grounded on a people-centred approach. Our people include a core team also referred to as the Nawi Mothership. This team comprises full time staff who are responsible for leadership, finance and operations and program management. The collective also includes Nawi Associates who bring their technical and creative skills and lived experiences as Pan-African feminists, promoting continuous learning and mutual growth. The associates are African feminist working in various areas, creatives, policy analysts and archivists. A reference panel which acts as a sounding board also makes up the collective. We place care, dignity, transparency and accountability at the heart of our work. We design organizational systems and financial planning processes that reflect and uphold our value system while promoting long-term sustainability. We are committed to dignified pay, cultivating safe and supportive spaces for working women, and curating a culture of care and mutual accountability that sustains our collective wellbeing and feminist practice.
Nawi`s programmatic approach blends conceptual thinking, creative expression, technical expertise, and everyday lived experience. Through action learning and collaborative processes, what we call "building the tables" we actively shape narratives and public discourse. Our work mediates the production of knowledge and influences how that knowledge is understood and used. By promoting open-access knowledge and expanding our collective knowledge base, we make learning and information widely available. By making space for creative exploration, we amplify alternative histories and narratives that challenge dominant frameworks and open possibilities for more inclusive, transformative futures.
Nawi`s approach to partnership and collaboration is first and foremost grounded in a pan-African feminist political ethos. We also engage in strategic partnerships with funders, non-traditional actors, and are keen to incubate emerging African feminist and women`s rights organizations, giving them a home as they navigate their start up. Our collaborations are guided by cultural compatibility and a shared ethical commitment to liberation. With our partnerships and collaborations, we aim to stay the course with intention and clarity. Our collaborations are designed to enhance deep, sustained engagement and encourage longitudinal thinking supporting partners not just in the moment, but across time, as they work toward transformative change. We endeavour to build relationships that support long-term, impact-driven work.
Nawi’s work is centred around engaging diverse publics and audiences that are critical to advancing macro level economic change using a pan African feminist analysis. These include working women at the forefront of lived experiences, the policy and advocacy community shaping public discourse, other African feminist organizations driving collective action, and funders committed to resourcing transformative work. By connecting across these groups, we ground our work and plug in to the policy space.