Young Arab Feminist Network hopes to build dialogue with older generations, non-feminists
By Heba El-Sherif / Daily News Egypt First Published: May 5, 2010
In the Arab world, young feminists are finding it hard to carve a space for themselves among an older, more experienced generation of female activists.
Last week, 20 participants from across seven Arab countries came to Cairo for a four-day meeting to kick off the first Young Arab Feminist Network (YAFN), an initiative fueled by a determination to seek gender equality, and a desire to “be taken seriously,” according to one Egyptian founder, Engy Ghozlan.
It’s 9pm and we just wrapped up Day 3 of our Cairo meeting of young Arab feminists. Every evening of our meeting was open to participant-led workshops on topics of their choice, theoretical or practical. Today, we had back-to-back workshops on progressive discourses on sexuality and the global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. Diversity is a key value of our network, which we will be ready to officially launch tomorrow. The strong need and excitement around the idea of our network is evident, but what is more noticeable is the stronger need to organize it with entirely new strategies and discourses. We managed to wrap up a structure, policies, bylaws, and lots of technical issues to get this network going. We’re excited about sharing the final results of our meeting with you all next week!
Fatma Emam from Nazra did a write up of reflections of the first day:
Many claims can be raised to disqualify young feminists, like they lack the needed information and experience, they are not well prepared to join the decision-making process, and they should be allocated according to the needs and priorities of the institutions they are working in. All of these claims are gathered to hinder the progress of young feminist attempts to change the status quo of the feminist movement. Read the full post on Fatma’s blog.
Today, a bunch of us arrived in Cairo, Egypt in preparation for our meeting to design and launch a network of peer support for young feminists in the Arab world. Exciting!
I have big hopes set for this meeting (organized and led by women under 30) and for a new wave of young feminism that is of and for our region. The first thing I want to share with you is that we set out from the beginning to be a network that depends very little on money. Read the full post here.
