The Our Voices, Our Futures (OVOF) consortium elevates voices from across the Global South, aiming to amplify those of structurally silenced women, including the LBQTQIA+ people within their communities. This initiative is unique among myriad interventions targeting gender equality and women’s rights because it specifically aims to achieve the inclusion of structurally silenced women within broader feminist movements, where fragmentation has led to the historical exclusion of structurally silenced women even, at times, from feminist movements themselves.
Over the past four years, the OVOF project has worked to shed light on the deep-rooted biases, inequalities, discrimination and violence that structurally silenced women and LBQTQIA+ people endure. More importantly, the project amplifies their inclusion in online public spaces and on legal and policy levels, through movement building, strategic use of technology to support open and safe online spaces, feminist holistic protection to enable advocacy for rights and policy change, and the creative use of arts, media and culture as influential tools to challenge social norms, shape public opinion and counter restriction of expression. Through amplifying these stories, the consortium aims to gather evidence of widespread violence, forging a path for collective strategies that safeguard the rights, dignity and futures of those living on the margins.
This special edition of GenderIT brings together five powerful stories from OVOF project partners in Bangladesh, Kenya, Uganda and India, spotlighting the lived struggles of structurally silenced women and people. These stories capture not only the harsh realities of gender-based violence – violence that magnifies existing inequalities – but also the fierce resilience and community-driven movement building aimed at advancing gender justice.