What we do

The South Feminist Manifesto project aims to craft a powerful and cohesive manifesto that reflects the collective aspirations and demands of feminists across the Global South. Its purpose is to prepare South Feminists to respond to the multiple present and future struggles with a clear analysis, vision, agenda and strategies in their own spaces as well as in ‘mainstream’ progressive spaces in the Global South and the Global North. It further seeks to create autonomous spaces for articulating solutions to global crises and reshape the landscape of feminist organising across different regions in the Global South.

The South Feminist Manifesto is informed by SFF’s Five Pillars and building upon the momentum and engagement generated during the SFF Dialogues held in 2022. 

While acknowledging the movements across the Global South on various fronts, SFF’s observation is that this revival of South-South cooperation not only overlooks feminist concerns but in instances is alarmingly bordering on anti-feminist and anti-gender rhetoric. The South Feminist Manifesto aims to challenge this problematic trend, with the five SFF Pillars – confronting hegemonies, building a new knowledge base, reimagining development, strategies for change and resistance, and reclaiming South-South internationalism—serving as an initial guiding framework to shape the development process and open it up for broader consultation and discussion, ensuring that the manifesto reflects the diverse perspectives and experiences of feminists from the Global South.

The South Feminist Manifesto development process will include research and tracking emerging trends, to understand the crises confronting the world, create a space for agenda setting, and come up with solutions and strategies for feminist practice looking into the future. It will draw on the distinct legacy of Third World feminism, offering a critique of cis heteropatriarchy, racism, colonialism, and neoliberal capitalism and proposals for their dismantling. 

The Political Education programme is a space for intergenerational learning with feminists, LGBTQIA+ activists and movements from experiences, failures and successes of campaigning, mobilising, agenda-setting, public policy gains and losses to inform future South Feminist work. Through a series of virtual teach-in-series drawing on a network of South Feminist scholars and activists as speakers, it seeks to increase understanding of the power dynamics of neocolonial systems and institutions in service of South Feminist agenda setting, strategies and alternatives. It further aims to re-politicise agendas and popularise South feminist analysis, agendas and narratives. Through each teach-in we promote an in-depth understanding of a topic using a South Feminist political economy lens.

The teach-in-series are further supported by political education materials and curricula.

Watch the Political Education sessions.

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We track and provide analytical coverage of global public policy debates, global institutions, geopolitics and social movements that have an impact on South Feminist Futures. We seek to prepare South Feminists to predict and respond to the multiple struggles ahead by exposing false solutions, popularising feminist policy analysis, and developing a South Feminist response and policy proposals.

The issues tracked and covered are informed by SFF’s 5 pillars and contribute to the long intellectual tradition of Third World feminism, which has made invaluable contributions to the critique of not only patriarchy, but also its relationship to racism, colonialism, and neoliberal capitalism. Among key concerns are women’s and queer rights; social reproduction and care; ideologies; labour; displacement and dispossession; technology and surveillance capitalism; climate; land rights and the agrarian crisis; hyper-globalisation, debt, trade and investment; public goods and services; the commons; and South-South cooperation and a multipolar world.

Our goal is to facilitate knowledge sharing, collective strategizing, and agenda setting for feminist, queer and women-led organisations, movements, networks, activists, and academics from the Global South, and BIPOC in the North (South-in-North).

The Knowledge Hub is a space of collected and curated resources produced by feminists from the global south, to support south feminist activists. It includes a constantly updated database of materials that include academic and non-academic books, articles, audiovisual, art, learning tools and other resources organised into collections of related material and searchable according to language and other filters. 

The Knowledge Hub is designed to ensure that South Feminist theory, histories, research, analysis, ‘diagnostics’, information and data, and expressions in their various forms are centred in our activism and movement building. It is a counter to neoliberalism’s efforts to marginalise and neutralise endogenous knowledge production on South Feminist historical anti-colonial struggles for self-determination which forms the foundation of our theories of change and plays a critical role in re-energising and re-politicising South Feminist action and movement building.