This study aimed to understand what Healing Justice means to Womn Humans Rights Defenders (WHRDs) and feminist activists in different African contexts, and to explore how and in what circumstances pathways to collective healing could be supported as an approach to feminist movement-building.

Healing justice is an emerging political organising framework that aims to address the systemic causes of injustice experienced by marginalised peoples due to the harmful impacts of oppressive histories, intergenerational trauma, and structural violence.

It recognises that these damaging factors generate collective traumas, which manifest in negative physical, mental–emotional, and spiritual effects for activists and their movements. Following the transformational intentions, healing justice is anticipated to incorporate a diverse range of healing and political organising practices. These should be contextualised, which provided the rationale for this research project on the relevance of Healing Justice to feminist activism in Africa.

In 2019 Urgent Action Fund-Africa (UAF-Africa), a feminist pan-African funder, launched the Feminist Republik (FR) to support Womn Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) across Africa. Following extensive deliberation, the potential of healing justice to guide this support was identified. In 2020, UAF-Africa commissioned and funded this research project on Healing Justice in Africa, which was collaboratively managed by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) and UAF-Africa, in partnership with the Feminist Republik.

To achieve these goals, researchers from IDS convened 3 African research teams in DRC, Senegal, and South Africa. These research teams conducted interviews with WHRDs, feminist activists, and healers (including medical doctors and psychologists). These were supplemented by additional interviews in the UAF-Africa sub-regions, with 47 interviews completed in total. Finally, two learning events were convened with participants from the Feminist Republik and with wider UAF-Africa stakeholders (including feminist healers, academics, and activists) to deliberate on and deepen insights.

An IDS working paper – Contextualising Healing Justice as a Feminist Organising Framework in Africa – is the first academic output from this research. It presents a provisional healing justice framework, built through iterative analysis of the evidence generated There are two key ‘branches’ of this emergent healing justice framework

1. Healing justice involves understanding and addressing the systemic injustice and intergenerational harm experienced by African WHRDs and feminist activists in context.
2. Healing justice involves changing the nature and practices of feminist organising and movement-building work.

This framework suggests the importance of (i) transforming the cultures, spaces, and relations of feminist activism; (ii) transforming feminist-movement work through incorporating collective healing practices; and (iii) transforming organisational structures and support provided to movements. This could generate more nurturing and inclusive environments for feminist activism, and, ultimately, guide pathways towards more sustainable and effective feminist organising. The proposal is to next build on this research through a further participatory action research project to learn how best to operationalise this framework in context.

Watch the launch for the Working Paper below