Last week, we hosted an Imbizo (the isiZulu word for ‘gathering’) for our South African-based partners. 14 organisations from across eight South African provinces joined us.

This 2 day Imbizo focused on redeveloping our relationships with our partners, tackling some of the challenges they are facing and trying to help them develop their own campaigns. This move comes after the relaunch of the digital platform Afrikavuka.org which has seen a lot of growth since its inception and registered a record number of events on it’s official launch on Africa Day 25th May 2019.

We believe that the platform is a great space for our organisers to share their work and share some of their experiences with other organisers from across the continent. This has not been the case until now as most of them do not have their own funding for events and have minimal to no campaigns running in their own communities and this is why we saw fit for this to happen.

The Imbizo focused on co-creation and fostering collaborations, allowing organisers the space to determine with each other, how best they could move forward and share their experiences and tactics, as most of the organisations had the same kind of challenges. We had a very engaged and active group of 28 participants who were eager to learn and share their own experiences with other groups.

On Day 2, we focused mostly on campaign development and took the partners through their paces with campaign development exercises from the Mobilisation Lab Campaign Accelerator programme. This was done to help partners realise that they too could develop their own campaign in their communities. We also dug into the upcoming global climate strikes, by giving an introduction to it and encouraging them to register events and work closely with the youth.

This Imbizo was the first of its kind in South Africa for us and we hope we can do more with an even larger participants lists next year as part of not only growing the climate movement but also increasing the number of active organisations on Afrikavuka.org. Watch this space for more regional organising updates.