Sawaba Fellowship
Sawaba Institute for Critical Consciousness Raising
The Sawaba Institute for Critical Consciousness Raising was established by Liberation Alliance Africa. Dreamed and designed in 2024 by Omolara Oriye and Oluwatobiloba Ayodele to create spaces for decolonial feminist praxis, nurture anti-imperialist feminist scholarship, critical consciousness raising and solidarity. Sawaba means Freedom or Redemption in the Hausa language. The name Sawaba was also associated with Hajia Gambo Sawaba, a fearless leader who campaigned for the liberation of women and children in Northern Nigeria when she was 17. The Sawaba Institute for Critical Consciousness Raising is designed to nurture curiosity, encourage rigorous theorisation and hold space for epistemic and epistemological agency and liberation.
What Does the Institute Offer?
The Sawaba Institute offers scholars, feminist organisers, queer rights organisers, lawyers, judges, grassroots activists as well as conscious people the tools to expand their world view and ask critical questions of normative institutions such as law, the state, family, and religion.
To interrogate dominant assumptions of notions such as power, gender, race, justice and identity — and create space for the reimagination of liberated frameworks, structures and systems that lead us to a decolonial. The Sawaba Institute’s impact will elevate individual and collective experiences of oppression into public and political discourse and encourage feminist movement-building across Africa and the diaspora. The Sawaba Institute will create spaces and build links for reflection and experience-based discourse. Liberation Alliance Africa will facilitate dreaming exercises and convenings with African feminist collectives to share knowledge, experiences and strategies. These convenings will strengthen connections and solidarity among feminist organisers and movements and sustain liberatory actions on the continent. The institute will support the elevation of individual experiences of oppression into public and political discourse and encourage feminist movement building across Africa and the diaspora.
The 2025 Sawaba Fellowship
Theme:
MEET THE 2025 FELLOWS
Edwige Renée Dro is a writer and a literary translator from Côte d’Ivoire working at the intersection of literary arts, linguistic justice and feminism. She has translated across various genres such as short stories, graphic novels, and children’s literature in English and French. As a writer herself, her short stories and essays have been widely anthologized. Edwige has been a jury member for prizes like the Caine Prize for African Writing, the PEN International Short Story Prize and on the advisory boards of organizations such as the PEN/HEIM Translation Fund, Culturescapes and the African Book Festival.
Edwige is an Africa39 laureate, a 2019 Miles Morland Fellow, and a 2021 Writing Fellow of the Iowa International Writing Program. In 2020, she founded 1949: the library of women’s writings from Africa and the black world in Abidjan.
Sunshine Fionah Komusana (she/her) is an Afrikan Feminist Lawyer, writer, researcher, and activist from Uganda. She currently works as the Decolonizing Wikimedia Co-Lead at #WhoseKnowledge? Her work exists at the intersection of tech and knowledge justice, including closing gender visibility gaps within open knowledge and interrogating why those gaps exist (the systems of historical and existing oppressions that create and sustain erasure and invisibility).
Her work within the African Feminist movement includes: reproductive justice programming, service provision for survivors of sexual violence; legal/policy analysis;feminist research, and convening/facilitating feminist spaces for thought, conversation, and movement building. Sunshine is also the co-curator of African Feminism, an online platform dedicated to documenting our plural African feminist voices, stories, and experiences. In no particular order loves tea (literally and metaphorically), concerts, and ice cream.
Céline Apollon is a Haitian-American and Pan-African feminist whose passion lies in using creative storytelling, research, and design methods to support initiatives within the realms of gender equity and justice. She has developed a love for generating global visibility of non-western art and culture to protect, honour, and celebrate their precious value in our world. Her work is focused on women’s economic security, with a focus on young women, caregivers, and survivors of gender-based violence (GBV) in locations including Botswana, South Africa, and Congo Brazzaville.
Céline’s work has been featured in the 19th and the Washington Post, and some of her clients include the Aspen Institute, Botswana Gender Based Violence Support and Prevention Centre (BGBVC), Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women and Children, UN Women, and the World Bank. She is a member of Black Girl Doc Mafia, a board member for Educate Young Girls nonprofit in Cameroon, and the in-house videographer for the Emmy award-winning Men’s Story Project.
She is a current John Lewis Fulbright Scholar based in Congo Brazzaville, and mobilizing a survivor-led, multidisciplinary movement called “CONSOLATION,” to co-improve and co-design safe spaces with and for survivors of GBV in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Umaimah Adan is a transnational feminist researcher, writer, and consultant currently based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her interdisciplinary work spans the fields of gender equity, peacebuilding, and climate justice, with a focus on the Horn of Africa. She holds a Master’s degree from the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto, where her graduate research explored the intersections of conflict, displacement, and environmental degradation in urban Somalia. Umaimah writes across genres and mediums through a critical feminist lens. She has worked across West and East Africa on projects addressing gender-based violence, education, and sustainability. Umaimah is passionate about decolonial knowledge production, cultural memory, and feminist solidarity.
