What Young Feminists Want: Building Intersectional Solidarity for Stronger Movements
Author: Lydia Ume, Communications and Engagement Lead at CHEVS
Across Africa, feminist and LGBTQI+ movements are facing intensifying anti-rights and anti-gender attacks. Governments, backed by well-funded conservative actors, continue to pass regressive policies that strip marginalised communities of their rights and dignity. These attacks are part of a broader, coordinated backlash against movements advocating for gender justice, bodily autonomy, economic justice, and human rights.
A recent investigative report uncovered a significant increase in spending within Africa by US-based anti-rights and anti-gender organisations between 2019 and 2022, with a surge of approximately 50%. This aligns with findings from another report that traced the influence of far-right groups in promoting harmful anti-LGBTQI+ policies and conversion therapy camps in Africa. To these groups, Africa is "the last frontier for conservative Christianity," and their actions are justified under the pretext of safeguarding "Africa's family values." However, these regressive and damaging narratives are dismissive of Africa's rich queer history and disregard the rupturing impact of colonial-era homophobia while masking a neocolonial agenda that has exploited the continent's political instability and fragile democratic systems for decades.
Young feminist and queer activists at AWID Forum, 2024.
Responding to the challenge, CHEVS and FRIDA hosted a session at AWID to build a young feminist-led momentum against anti-gender and anti-rights backlash. Themed From Silos to Solidarities, the session aimed to document, highlight and re-imagine the significant role young feminist activists have and continue to play in countering anti-rights and anti-gender backlash and its impacts on the lives of women, LGBTQI+ persons and other marginalised groups. Despite operating in different spaces—whether advocating for sexual and reproductive health rights, fighting for queer liberation, climate justice or resisting digital surveillance—this gathering of young feminist and queer activists emphasised a critical truth: our struggles are interconnected, and our movements must be, too. Yet, our movement efforts remain siloed, limiting the potential for collective action. This fragmentation weakens our ability to respond to intersectional oppressions, which disproportionately impact those at the margins, including LGBTQI+ persons, sex workers, and disabled people.
Feminist movements remain chronically underfunded, with less than 1% of global development funding reaching grassroots, youth-led, and LGBTQI+ organisations. At the same time, philanthropic organisations have been shown to actively fund anti-gender organisations, including donors who claim to support feminist policies and LGBTQI+ rights. This lack of solidarity and resources, combined with shrinking civic spaces and escalating anti-rights backlash, makes it even harder to sustain our movements and defend hard-won progress.
What Do Young Feminist and Queer Activists Want?
Alongside young feminist and queer activists from around the globe, we voiced what we need to continue our work effectively at the AWID convening: safe spaces for collaboration, flexible funding, authentic inclusion, unified resistance to harmful narratives, and a decolonial approach to movement-building.
1. Safe Spaces for Strategy and Solidarity
“There is an urgent need for convening more inter and intra-regional spaces where young feminists can strategise more on monitoring, learning and sharing from each other, as we address anti-rights backlash, define our priorities and resource from within for technical and strategic growth.”
Young feminist and queer activists need more civic spaces to convene, strategise, and build collective power. These spaces are essential for monitoring threats, sharing knowledge, and coordinating responses to the growing anti-rights movement. Without them, we are left reacting to backlash rather than proactively shaping the future of our advocacy. Convenings are not just about strategy. They provide care, mutual support, and the solidarity needed to sustain our movements in the face of increasing repression.
Access to these spaces is shrinking. Convenings in Africa remain too few, and those that exist are often inaccessible due to high costs or restrictive visa policies that limit participation. Passport inequality prevents many young activists from reaching global and even regional spaces where decisions about our futures are made. If we are to resist coordinated attacks on our rights, we need investment in accessible, well-resourced convenings within our own regions—spaces where young feminists and queer activists can organise, heal, and build the movements we need to win.
2. Flexible and Unrestricted Funding for Sustained Resistance
“Young people who are already underfunded and overwhelmed are actively resourcing and responding to the shrinking civic space and the erosion of our rights. Beyond responding to backlash, we are engaging in feminist espionage against the opposition, researching and developing better strategies to sustain our movements across the LGBTQI+ and feminist space. What is lacking are spaces where we can talk to each other, share learnings, and mobilise together for more impact.”
Funding remains one of the most significant barriers to sustaining young feminist and LGBTQI+ movements. The Black Feminist Fund reports that feminist groups and organisations barely have the resources to carry out their work despite being at the forefront of movement building. Without stable and flexible funding, our ability to coordinate, scale, and sustain these efforts is severely constrained.
Philanthropy must move beyond restrictive grants and outdated funding models that reinforce colonial power dynamics. Flexible, long-term funding allows movements to build resilience, adapt to emerging threats, and invest in deep, transformative change rather than short-term projects. Decolonised funding practices rooted in trust, solidarity, and self-determination ensure that young feminist and LGBTQI+ activists have the autonomy to lead their own movements.
3. Centering Youth Voices in the Global Anti-Backlash Response
“There needs to be more intentional inclusion of youth voices and action in the global response to the anti-rights movement, and this should not be tokenised.”
Global decision-making spaces often claim to include young people, but this inclusion is often superficial. Young feminists and queer activists are frequently tokenised, with our leadership sidelined instead of integrated into decision-making structures. We are not the future of the movement; we are the present, actively resisting oppression and reimagining just, equitable futures. The anti-rights movement, well-organized and well-funded, targets us specifically, and we must be equally strategic in response.
To effectively counter these forces, young people must be not just included but centred in discussions on human rights, gender justice, and policy-making. This requires dismantling exclusionary power structures, redistributing resources, and prioritising young feminist leadership. A feminist future cannot be built without young leaders and a fundamental shift in how leadership is defined and upheld. Meaningful intergenerational solidarity demands accountability, and that power is shared, not just passed down.
4. Uniting to Dismantle Harmful Narratives
“There is a new wave of religious fundamentalists who are uniting with the common agenda of stripping away our rights and freedoms, and this is what empowers the mobilisation of the anti-rights movement. They are united across religious divides and under the ‘family agenda’. We also need to unite across our different issues, movements and regions, especially as young people, to collectively build and respond to the backlash through all channels, with one common agenda.”
Besides using rhetoric like “family values,” “protecting women and children,” or “gender ideology”, anti-gender groups are co-opting feminist and human rights language to push harmful narratives. From claiming to defend women’s rights while attacking reproductive justice to positioning themselves as protectors of free speech while silencing queer and feminist voices. They push anti-LGBTQI+ laws under the guise of "safeguarding culture" while manipulating discussions on gender-based violence to exclude trans and nonbinary people from protections. Their strength lies in coordination, adaptability, and the ability to frame oppression as moral righteousness.
We cannot afford to counter this in silos. As young feminist and queer activists, we must build stronger coalitions across movements, regions, and struggles. A fragmented response leaves gaps that anti-gender forces exploit. Whether through digital advocacy, grassroots organising, policy interventions, or strategic litigation, we must actively dismantle their narratives and expose their contradictions together. The fight for our rights is interconnected, and only through collective action can we effectively counter these harmful narratives.
5. Decolonizing and Strengthening Movements in the Global South
“The Global South is usually the lab rat for anti-rights oppression because we are politically minoritised, operating with colonial legacies, and this reflects the unequal power dynamics existing between the Global South and the rest of the world. It is important for donors and all actors from the West to remember that oppression spreads, and this makes what is happening in the Global South everybody’s problem. If we do not collectively strategise and support the pushback from the region, it will trickle down to other parts of the world, as we are already seeing with the current political situation.”
The Global South has historically been used as a testing ground for policies that undermine human rights, a situation exacerbated by the lingering effects of colonialism and global power imbalances. What happens in the Global South will, and already does, have ripple effects worldwide. This includes the spread of oppressive ideologies and practices but also the potential for new forms of resistance and social change to emerge and inspire similar movements in other parts of the world.
International actors, including donors, need to recognise that the resistance movements in the Global South are at the forefront of a critical struggle and require consistent and long-term support. Strengthening and supporting Global South movements demands shifting power to local activists, trusting Indigenous strategies, and providing necessary resources without constraints to sustain the resistance.
Beyond Silos: Building Collective Power for Systemic Change
As we mark Women’s Month and the 30-year review of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, it is crucial to assess how far we have come and, more importantly, how we move forward in a world where gender justice remains under threat. In commemorating the legacy of feminist resistance, we must ask: How do we ensure that no one is left behind?
The path forward requires intentional cross-movement collaboration. We cannot afford to fight in isolation when our adversaries are working together across borders, leveraging vast financial and political resources to erode rights. The feminist principle of solidarity must guide our actions, recognising that liberation is a shared struggle, not a cause for select groups.
This Women’s Month, CHEVS calls for a renewed commitment to intersectional feminist organising, including:
Sustained Funding for Intersectional Movements
In 2022, only 1.6% of global LGBTQI+ funding reached West Africa, despite the region facing some of the harshest anti-LGBTQI+ laws. To build power, funding must be flexible, long-term, and directed toward youth-led, feminist, and queer movements that are already driving change on the ground.
Strengthening Digital and Policy Advocacy
With digital spaces increasingly weaponised against activists, we must invest in digital security, counter-narrative strategies, and policy engagement that safeguard online and offline rights.
Radical Cross-Movement Organising
The From Silos to Solidarities discussions emphasised that feminist, LGBTQI+, labour, and environmental movements must work together, recognising that our struggles against patriarchy, capitalism, and neo-colonialism are deeply intertwined.
Collective power is our most effective tool against the rising anti-rights movement. By convening young feminists across regions, developing strategies to counter harmful narratives, and advocating for policy change, we ensure that youth-led movements have the resources, networks, and visibility needed to thrive.
This requires sustained support. Funders and allies must recognise that resourcing young feminist and LGBTQI+ movements through an intersectional and decolonial lens is possible and essential for a just and feminist future. When one movement wins, we all move forward.
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About the Author
Lydia Ume is the Communications and Engagement Lead at CHEVS. With over six years of experience at the intersection of media, technology, and culture, she leads strategic communications and narrative resistance to amplify gender justice and LGBTQI+ movements in West Africa. She holds an MSc in Media and Communication from Pan-Atlantic University.
