Feminist Voices Zimbabwe is a non-profit organisation with the mission of co-creating feminist realities through community, conversation, and building knowledge that comes from women and queer people’s authentic lived experiences.
Founded by Tinatswe Mhaka, the organisation seeks to strengthen advocacy through documentation and storytelling. They envision a world where stories, conversation and creative expression are used to challenge worldviews.
At the centre of their vision as an organisation, is the power of community. They seek to create safe spaces that will allow women and queer people to embrace a freedom they’re not often afforded in Zimbabwe’s conservative make up.
This brings us to their latest initiative, SAFE. Recently launched at a dinner in Harare, the project aims to utilise the power of storytelling to explore the ways girls in the LGBTQIA+ community and all their identities in Zimbabwe are navigating various contexts of violence in all facets of their lives.
The research will shed light on what violence is, how it manifests in the everyday lives of LGBTQIA+ girls. SAFE will look into the intersectionality of identities, how they relate to experiences, and how they can collectively build resistance towards these forms of violence for strategies relating to safety and security of girls within this community. The SAFE project represents a groundbreaking initiative and it will be accompanied by Feminist Voices Zimbabwe’s first crowdsourcing tool/application, designed to assist sexual and gender minorities in navigating public safety while disrupting conventional channels of disseminating information.
Through the SAFE project, Feminist Voices Zimbabwe hopes to empower individuals to document incidents, ascertain the safety levels of public spaces service delivery institutions, and access crucial resources. They also hope to achieve a nexus of SOGIESC organisations to offer their services and support through the platform.
As an end result the initiative will provide the opportunity to collate and analyse data, facilitating the mapping and research of anti-queer sentiments. This will aid in the safeguarding of queer rights in specific places. While the SAFE application itself is still in testing, other elements of the initiative will begin being rolled out this week .
Feminist Voices Zimbabwe’s SAFE project comes at a time when there has been a reemergence of anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric from the government, something that was a main theme under the late former president Mugabe. While Zimbabwean laws don’t outlaw homosexuality itself, queer Zimbabweans are still harassed by law enforcement and they regularly face violence in their communities.
SAFE adds to the much needed advocacy and security of the LGBTQIA+ community, that has been ongoing since the first organisation advocating for the queer rights of Zimbabweans GALZ, was established in 1980.
Since it was founded, Feminist Voices Zimbabwe has ran initiatives like 100 Stories of Us, 80,000 Too Many, and they hosted a Pride Fair in 2023.
