Three Days in Harare: RFLD’s Reflection on the NAFASI Annual Consortium Meeting

Across three days in Harare, RFLD’s three-person delegation came away from the first annual NAFASI consortium meeting with a sharper sense of what the remaining 31 months actually demand — and of what it means, in practice, to build a continental coalition in a contested digital landscape. What follows are the substantive takeaways the delegation returned with.
Reflection · Harare, 23–26 June 2026
There is a particular value in the annual consortium meeting that is harder to capture in a workplan: the value of putting the people who deliver the work in the same room and watching what happens. Five months into NAFASI implementation, the meeting in Harare was structured to balance strategic alignment with shared presence. RFLD was represented in Harare by a three-person delegation: Heuleche Tognonmegni, Abigael Olaleye, and Ashifie Gogo. The takeaways below summarise what shifted in the room.
Coordination is the work. The mock shutdown crisis coordination drill that Munya Dodo of Moto Labs ran across all partner members made it visible: NAFASI’s value lies as much in the protocols between organisations as in any single activity any one of them delivers. The drill simulated a real-time digital emergency and asked the room to coordinate. The thing that surfaced — and that the consortium will continue to work on — is how much of the next 31 months depends on inter-organisational responsiveness rather than individual organisational capacity.
Gender is the design, not the layer. RFLD’s presentation on Gender Mainstreaming in NAFASI Programming reframed gender not as an additional consideration but as a measurement architecture applied to the very threats the drill had just modelled. The deliberate sequencing — coordination exercise followed immediately by methodological one — clarified that gender mainstreaming in NAFASI is not a thematic add-on but the lens through which the work is designed in the first place.
African-owned infrastructure is the precondition. Paul Munatsi of Digital Society Africa made the case that data sovereignty and cloud independence are prerequisites — not afterthoughts — for resilient civic space. Given the dependency dynamics the consortium will work against, the argument landed with particular weight. It is the structural condition NAFASI’s resilience programming rests on.
A walk through the woodland to close the day — together, offline, and present. The programme note made the intention explicit. The walk delivered on it.
Governance and financial discipline set the operating standard. The Sub-Granting and Financial Management session, led by Magamba’s Finance and Admin Team with the NAFASI Grants Officer, set out the compliance and disbursement architecture and an anti-corruption training that left no ambiguity about the standards the consortium will hold itself to. The open discussion of governance and decision-making, led by the NAFASI Programme Lead with input from DefendDefenders, RFLD, and Magamba, set the consortium’s internal democracy.
The story has to work in three languages. The Story We Want To Tell session — a Communications and Campaigns drill led by the NAFASI Storytelling Assistant — clarified that NAFASI is a continental story told in three regional voices, and the storytelling architecture has to work across English, French, and Portuguese without collapsing into the lowest-common-denominator phrasing that erases what is specific. RFLD’s communications team left with a clear understanding of how the francophone narrative threads will articulate with the consortium’s anglophone centre of gravity without being subordinate to it.
Civic infrastructure needs offline presence. The woodland walk that Magamba had built into the programme — a deliberately unstructured passage through the woodland — was not incidental. NAFASI exists to defend space, online and off, and the programme designers had read their own mandate carefully. Civic infrastructure is built by people who can also be present to each other in non-screen time.
Commitments are now on the table. The Pillar Sessions allowed each partner to work on the activities mapped to its strategic responsibility — for RFLD, the Feminist & Francophone Bridge work concentrated in Pillars 01 and 03. The Commitments Café, led by Aurra with all partners participating, was where each organisation tabled concrete commitments and timelines for the consortium to hold it accountable to. Memory Bandera’s Outro & Next Steps summary captured the protocols that emerged.
Four things, primarily, came back with the delegation. A reaffirmed governance architecture that the consortium can navigate without ad hoc consultation on every operational question. A harmonised workplan for the year ahead that aligns RFLD’s five activities with Magamba’s and DefendDefenders’ corresponding workstreams. A clarified financial and compliance framework for sub-granting and disbursement. And a working relationship across three organisational cultures that, by the time of the farewell dinner, had begun to operate as a single working body.
One of the things that became visible across the three days was what each Implementing Partner brings as a distinct institutional identity — and what RFLD brings is specific. The organisation is a pan-African afrofeminist network with four registered country offices in Porto-Novo, Dakar, Accra, and Banjul, a member network of 670 organisations across 35+ African countries, and active programme delivery in 15+ countries. It holds ACHPR Observer Status No. 553/2017 and engages all 55 African Union member states through continental policy hubs including DƆNÙESÈ, the Maputo Protocol Hub, and the ACDEG Hub. Its methodology — codified through the Gender Mainstreaming Tool — is owned, not licensed.
That identity translated into a particular kind of presence in the room. The RFLD delegation was not at NAFASI to participate; it was there to deliver against a mandate that no other Implementing Partner can substitute for. The francophone and lusophone reach, the afrofeminist methodology, the continental diplomatic access, and the Women Human Rights Defender protection capacity — these are the four corners of RFLD’s identity force.
The cultural visit to Studio Moto, the Moto Republik tour, and Harare’s cultural landmarks was the moment at which the consortium took the temperature of the place that anchors its lead applicant. Magamba Network is a creative-civic organisation rooted in Harare’s artistic ecosystem, and seeing that ecosystem in person clarified for the RFLD delegation what is possible when civic, technical, and creative work share a single roof. It is an architecture that NAFASI will draw on across the continent.