₦airaland Forum

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African women have also been pioneering in business. Aspiring young female entrepreneurs today have several role models they can follow such as Ghana’s Esther Ocloo, who pursued the idea of formalising local women’s credit associations and became a founding member of one of the first microcredit banks, Women’s Worlds Banking, in 1979.

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, African countries have almost equal numbers of men and women either actively involved in business start-ups or in the phase of starting a new firm. And in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia, women are reportedly more likely to be entrepreneurs than men.

These changes are evident not only at the grassroots but, to an extent, at the highest levels. Female representation in boardrooms worldwide is very poor, but Africa’s rate of 14.4% is only slightly behind Europe (18%) and the US (17%), and ahead of Asia, Latin America and the Middle East.

Finally, a younger generation of activists is emerging throughout Africa today and redefining feminism from an African perspective. One sees this not only in the work of the African Feminist Forum, which first met in 2006, but also in the work of figures such as novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who issued a clarion call to women in her video We Should All be Feminist, adapted from her 2013 Ted Talk, in which she explores what it means to be an African feminist. Her book length essay by the same title is found on bookshelves in major cities around the world, and the Swedish Women’s Lobby has given it to every 16-year-old in Sweden to help them think about gender equality.

Feminist discourse meanwhile has become commonplace throughout the continent on websites, blogs, journals, and social media. New feminist novels like Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya), Kintu by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi (Uganda), and Americanah by Adichie (Nigeria) have offered new ways of imagining women.

There are clearly still enormous hurdles for African feminists to overcome in fighting for gender equality. But as they have over the past half a century, Africa’s women activists of today are reshaping not only African feminist agendas in tackling these challenges, but global ones as well.

culled from: http://tushmagazine.com.ng/african-feminism-changed-world/

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