About the Women's Leadership Centre
Established in Windhoek in 2004, the Women’s Leadership Centre (WLC) is a Namibian-based feminist organisation that envisions a society in which all women actively engage in shaping the politics, practices and values of both public and private spaces. The WLC facilitates the voice, visibility and leadership of Namibian women through participatory research, information sharing, education, creative expression, advocacy, and the publishing of critical feminist texts that we distribute within Namibian society.
We promote feminist leadership among women who are from some of the most marginalised, excluded and discriminated against groups in our society on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, geographic location, culture, age and sexual orientation.
Our overall strategy is to educate women, in particular young women, on their rights as guaranteed under national laws and policies as well as the international instruments ratified by the state. We provide safe spaces within which the young women can relate these to their own lives, develop a critical feminist analysis of why these rights are not yet realised in our patriarchal state and society, support one another in processes of healing from the multiple violations most of them have experienced, and empower themselves personally and collectively to assert their rights and work towards social justice as equal citizens of their country.
We believe that social transformation towards a just world is possible through changes at the personal, social and institutional/political levels, based on the values of honesty, integrity, accountability, transparency and professionalism; caring, nurturing, empathy and respect; and equity, equality, participation, solidarity and sisterhood. This is our theory of change.
Our approach is to strengthen feminist critical consciousness, ‘power within’ and courage among young women – the personal sphere, and support them in creating a more enabling environment in the social sphere and the institutional/political sphere. We understand feminist critical consciousness as the capacity to recognise the diverse and intersectional nature of our oppression as women, as well as our power and agency to transform our own lives and the lives of people in our communities and society.
