Mission
Our mission is to nurture the leadership of adolescent girls and young women/feminists and create spaces for their participation in policy processes. This mission is guided by feminist principles and values as well as an intersectional approach to dismantling patriarchy.
Vision
We envision a society that enables the self-actualization of adolescent girls and young women, powered by transformative feminist leadership. Our mission centralizes the voice, power, and influence of and by AGYW.
OUR JOURNEY
Our Journey
Founded in 1999, YWLI is a feminist center of excellence for nurturing the leadership of adolescent girls and young women/feminists. The founding of YWLI revolved around the lack of space for young women to participate in the women’s movement, the assumptions that young women had no knowledge and were therefore not interested in the women’s rights agenda and the lack of representation and participation of young women in public spaces. All of these were based on the assumed lack of leadership capacity for young women to lead women’s organisation and/ or define an agenda for the women’s movement in Kenya. Thus, YWLI’s founding came out of an embryonic process that provided a life-determining link between personal empowerment and feminist leadership development.
Our Goal
YWLI’s goal is to nurture the leadership of adolescent girls and young women/feminists and create spaces for their participation in policy processes. This mission centralizes the voice, power and influence of and by adolescent girls and young women (AGYW). Over time, the mission of YWLI has expanded, from the initial goal of breaking the barriers preventing young women from leading and living lives of equality to nurturing AGYW’s leadership to address those barriers.
How we do our work
- We have continued to create spaces for feminist conversations and open new frontiers for adolescent girls and young women’s engagement in policy processes.
- We have developed from information sharing and networking to becoming a hub where adolescent girls and young women can access information and organize for action depending on what their call for advocacy is.
- YWLI’s scope of analysis and action has broadened to include support for grassroots feminist groups and movements led by young feminists and girl-led initiatives
- YWLI creates spaces for co-creation with young feminists while at the same time engaging them through a deep understanding of feminist organizing.
- YWLI challenges conventional, patriarchal structures to build new ways of thinking about adolescent girls and young women’s role in leadership, organising, living and knowledge creation. We do this through creation of unconventional feminist spaces that encourage learning, enquiry, participation and fun.
Our Partners
