Our Voices Our Futures (OVOF)

The Our Voices Our Futures (OVOF) consortium comprises CREA as the lead organization, and the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), UHAI-EASHRI – East African Sexual Health and Rights Initiative, and WO=MEN, along with strategic partner IM-Defensoras. The OVOF consortium amplifies the voices and increases the visibility of structurally silenced women to enable them to take their rightful place in civic spaces and participate freely across the online space, physical public space, and legal and policy space.

OVOF aims to amplify and ensure access to women and people who are structurally silenced due to their identity (such as lesbian and bisexual women, and trans persons), their chosen form of labor (such as sex workers) and their activism (women’s human rights defenders or WHRDs). This structural silencing is systemic and by design, as global civic space is being actively narrowed and intentionally eroded by state actors as well as by non-state anti-gender and anti-democracy forces.

Started in 2021, OVOF members and their partners in the six focus countries have been working in a number of ways to advance OVOF’s vision. For example, the OVOF advocacy working group has been intimately involved in developing and amplifying the Indispensable Measures to Ensure the Holistic Protection of WHRDs, in collaboration with WHRDs and their organizations. We have built the capacity of activists and practitioners globally on digital rights and developing a feminist approach to digital technologies, through our Feminist Tech Deep-dive series. Our partners in South Asia are working with LGBTIQ artists to tell their stories, documenting evidence on indigenous women, and amplifying the voices and demands of structurally silenced women and girls through women-led news media production.

Strategies

OVOF aims to defend and expand civic space, through:

• Direct lobbying and advocacy
• Engaging artists, cultural workers and media workers
• The strategic use of technology
• Movement-building efforts
• Supporting feminist movements and organizations to adopt Feminist Holistic Protection measures

OVOF Newsletters

Newsletter Edition 1 (July 2024)

Newsletter Edition 2 (January 2025)

Partner Organizations

OVOF is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (under their Power of Voices grant).