Introduction to The Weavers’ Forum 2026

The Weavers’ Forum 2026 is a space bringing together African feminists, activists, economists, artists, thinkers, movement-builders and practitioners from across the continent and the African diaspora.

I’ve created a pop-up studio for Speaking Through My World to document this important feminist space. Through dedicated episodes, I’ll be sharing some of the conversations, reflections and knowledge emerging from the Forum, bringing the voices and ideas from this room beyond these walls.

This is the Introduction to The Weavers’ Forum 2026.

Let’s weave...

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome to Speaking Through My World with Rosie Wtene, part of the Feminist Frontlines Initiative, where we use the microphone as a tool for justice. This is a space where my three passions of women, Africa, and the arts meet in conversation. Through storytelling, healing, reflections, and courageous dialogues, we amplify voices, preserve her story, and explore the issues that are shaping our lives, communities, and our continent. Thank you for listening. Let's speak through my world. I have arrived at the Weavers Forum 2026. From across the African continent and the African diaspora, women have gathered here. We traveled from different countries carrying different histories, her stories, experiences, disciplines, and political realities. We're made up of feminists, activists, economists, artists, academics, legal scholars, cultural practitioners, movement builders and thinkers. Some have come from within the continent, others from as far as the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. I'm here to learn, listen, strategize, unlearn, and learn some more. And then build. And more importantly, I'm here to document. I've created a pop-up studio to record content for my podcast, Speaking Through My World, and the Feminist Frontlines Initiative. Throughout the week, I'll be using this space to record conversations with feminist thinkers, practitioners, and movement builders while documenting the ideas, experiences, and knowledge emerging from the Weavers Forum. It's an opportunity to bring these conversations beyond the room and into a wider public space, creating an audio record of the voices, reflections, and feminist thinking that are shaping this moment. You see, for me, feminist frontlines, her roots, her remedy, is not just about healing and care. It is also about our stories, our lived experiences, our knowledge and our agency. Because too often powerful feminist conversations happen in rooms like this and then disappear when everyone goes home. So I'm here with my microphone, not simply to just interview people, but to create an archive of feminist thought, experience, and possibility. Because documentation is also political. It says we were here. We thought about this, we challenged this, and we imagined something different. Before I share what happened in day one, it's important to understand where the space comes from. Across our continent, women underpin economies through the labor of social reproduction, the essential and often exploited work of sustaining families, communities, and the workforce. Women care. We cultivate land, we raise children, care for the elderly, we work in formal and informal economies. Women organize, we build movements, we feed those economies. We also hold families together, and yet so much of our labor remains underpaid or unpaid, invisible or undervalued. We contribute enormously to economies whilst remaining largely marginalized from the macroeconomic space where decisions about those economies are made. This contradiction is at the heart of the Weavers Forum. The Weavers Forum grew out of what began as a collective of feminists discussing economic issues. The original idea emerged from a discovery treat where a group of feminists began asking what it would look like to create a dedicated space for African feminists to think about economics from our own political and lived realities. A curated council was subsequently formed, and feminist activists, thinkers, and practitioners came together to shape the vision. What emerged is not simply another conference, but rather an attempt to create a political economy through an African feminist lens. A space to co-create knowledge, to forge solidarities, build movements and alignment, to question the economic systems we've had to inherit, and more importantly, to imagine alternatives. So why weave? The word weave is deliberate. You see, to weave is to bring separate threads together to create something new. It requires patience, connection. It requires recognizing that a single thread may be fragile, but many threads woven together can create something stronger. This is the thinking behind the Weavers Forum. To rethink, to learn, to unlearn, to find alternative ways of organizing, to imagine different ways of living, working, and of course, resting. It is also to ask whether we can create an African feminist economy that is not just rooted in extraction and exploitation, but rather rooted in care, justice, dignity, and collective sovereignty. This is why the Weavers Forum feels particularly significant in this moment in time. We're not simply asking how women can participate more fully in an existing economy, but rather we are asking whether the economy itself needs to be reimagined. Follow my journey over the next couple of days, where I will be giving insight into the various panels, what happened, and of course, conversations with the feminists in the room.