What does it mean to sustain a popular education programme with over 60 women, where caregiving responsibilities and political demands seem to collide?
Last July, WoMin began Women Learning Liberation (WLL), our 18-month political education process across six African countries including Cameroon, Guinea Conakry, Ivory Coast, Madagascar, Uganda, and South Africa. We are working with women already on the frontlines. Through their collective work of organising, marching, healing, teaching and more, they carry the weight of multiple, intersecting crises in their bodies and in their communities.
Their commitment to the future they so fiercely want to protect is undeniable and if we were serious about engaging women meaningfully, we had to recognise that movement building cannot happen without care work at its center.
As the climate crisis deepens and extractivism expands, these women are among those displaced or forced to fight for access to clean water, fertile land, and basic survival. They are powerful and tireless organisers in their communities. They provide food, fetch water, care for the sick, and ensure safe shelter, while fighting for justice from their governments and corporations.
From the very beginning, we knew that childcare had to be a central consideration as we wanted women to gather every 2 months. It would be naïve to assume that, over a year and a half, no one would give birth or have caregiving responsibilities.
The women we work with nurture life, birthing the next generation, only to watch their children inherit the same cycles of exploitation and injustice. It is, in part, because of them, that they are so committed to the struggle. They organise not just to survive, but to build a radically different future. A future rooted in justice, care, and collective liberation.
African Feminism revisited
In her book, The Joys of Motherhood, Buchi Emecheta exposed how colonialism fractured the communal roots of African childcare. Colonial structures and urbanisation turned care into isolating labour for women. It taught women that to mother, is to suffer alone. Her character Nnu Ego, gave her life to motherhood, only to be forgotten and abandoned by both the husband and the child. Emecheta was not only writing fiction – but she was also sounding an alarm and telling us that motherhood without community becomes a grave.
In traditional African societies, children were raised communally – much like how land was held. It was not just the work of the biological parents to raise them, but rather a shared responsibility among grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and neighbours where everyone played an active role in their care, education and development.
Children were introduced to community values through storytelling, songs and work alongside elders. And mothers were supported from pregnancy to birth, through sacred rites and multigenerational care networks that honoured their role and ensured their physical, emotional, and spiritual wellbeing.
When we design feminist spaces that elevate the activist while erasing the mother – her labour, her needs, her body – we don’t challenge patriarchy, we merely reproduce the same capitalist-colonial violence with a feminist vocabulary. It reinforces the false division between productive and reproductive labour, that says mothers can’t work and workers can’t be mothers.
Care work is movement work
In WoMin, we see childcare not as an individual burden but as a collective responsibility, like what Buchi Emecheta was inviting us to reflect on. As African ecofeminists, we recognise that care work is movement work, and we welcome mothers into political spaces because we understand that transforming how we care for children is part of transforming society itself.
We see how childcare is linked to our relationship with nature because both caregiving and ecological stewardship are about sustaining life, nurturing interdependence, and resisting extractive, violent systems. This is why we welcome mothers and their children in our political education gatherings.
“[having children around] Contributes to fostering inclusion and encouraging women’s full participation in our spaces, knowing that they will receive the support and assistance they need. It’s important we create such spaces to make visible “the care” as part of challenging the patriarchal conception that invisibles care or hides it, and put forward that women can be mothers and activist/organisers and movement builders.” – WLL Facilitator, Ivory Coast
This is a central part of our feminist praxis: creating spaces of belonging, modelling collective responsibility, and planting the seeds of liberation in the next generation.
Bringing childcare into African ecofeminist popular education
In WLL we recognise that Popular Education emerges from the everyday life and the lived experiences of the rural, peasant woman that carries her child with her to the market, the community meetings, the assemblies, the river. And as such, we can’t ask women to choose between motherhood and activism.
“We, mothers are often torn between [the children’s] safety during training and the fact that it is calmer to have them with us during those days. That was the case for me at the last training session with my 7-year-old daughter, who I had with me. She’s the last one who’s still with me every day. First of all, it’s for her safety, but it also helps me concentrate and feel calm during the training, and I feel fulfilled because I feel reassured about her safety and very available to her compared to when I leave her with someone else while I’m away.” – Participant, Cameroon
We look at our herstories and understand that the fight for liberation can be waged with a child on one hip and a raised fist in the other.
We acknowledge childcare as core political infrastructure, where we reclaim care as part of our collective responsibility and our shared herstory as African mothers, aunties, elders. In the learning spaces we create, mothers, children, and caregivers are recognised as part of the movement – not left on the margins.
If liberation is our goal, part of our work in challenging colonial, capitalist and patriarchal ideas around caregiving within the home and the burden it places on women, is to put forth our vision.
Our movement spaces must look like the future we envision bringing together women from different walks of life to exist peacefully, in harmony with Nature, caring for themselves and for each other, connected by shared values of justice, care and solidarity.
