Local organizations receiving funding are, by default, expected to transparently share intimate details about themselves (When were you founded? Who is on your board? Who are your donors? What do your policies look like?… For fear of seeming difficult to work with, local organizations will not risk asking equally pertinent questions about the potential partners that they intend to collaborate with.
In 2020, a 90-year-old woman, Madam Denteh, was publicly lynched to death in the Savannah region in Ghana after being accused of witchcraft. The video of the lynching went viral and attracted police and national security investigations, resulting in the arrest of some of the perpetrators. Like in many parts of the world, a belief in sorcery and witchcraft still exists in Ghana, and accusations of witchcraft are followed by social stigma and discrimination. While both men and women have been accused of witchcraft, the accused are disproportionately women. In some cases, they have been murdered and mobbed following allegations of witchcraft against them.
Systems thinkers are notoriously bad at describing what it is they do, and what they mean. So I am going to try and give the simplest possible explanation that was taught to me recently. A system is a group of things (people, organizations, networks etc.) that are seen by someone as interacting together to do something.
Working in civil society in Mozambique is a challenge. Not only is the country classed as repressed by the Civicus Monitor, but the northern province of Cabo Delgado has been subject to an armed insurgency since October 2017, claiming thousands of lives and displacing an estimated half of the province’s population.
In 2021, Ugandan civil society was being beaten on multiple fronts. As the pandemic forced lock-downs, the country faced simultaneous crises in health, general elections, and the economy.
