Agenda will be holding a Feminist Dialogue on 25th November 2011, at Diakonia Centre, Durban, with the objective to bring women’ and women’s organisations together to discuss the problems that women of Durban share as a result of gender violence and to focus on the project of building gender equality in the city.

As we celebrate 16 Days of No Violence Against Women in 2011, the Durban-based feminist journal will highlight the importance of the city as a shared built environment where women and men co-exist, work and live, and ask questions on how we can make the cities safer places where women are not vulnerable to assault or rape. The manager of eThekwini Safer Cities Unit has been invited and will brief the meeting on what the Unit does to prevent violence against women in its crime prevention and monitoring programme and stimulate discussion on how women’s lives can be made safer by the city as the local authority. The informal economy development project, Asiye Etafuleni, has been invited to discuss how women informal traders have worked towards making a women-friendly environment in the Warwick Markets and to create livelihood opportunities, emphasising not so much security, but collective needs of the urban poor in a hostile environment, on the fringes of the formal economy. The Dialogue will seek some answers to the question – how can African cities respond to the challenge of responding to the critical need to end violence against women, how can urban environments be turned into spaces that are woman-friendly.

Taryn Powys, a Commission for the Commission for Gender Equality has been invited to brief the Dialogue on how CGE and the newly established Ministry of Women, Children and People with Disabilities will work together as part of the gender machinery established under the South African Constitution to build a society that upholds gender equality.

One of the objective’s of the Dialogue is to identify themes for future issues of Agenda and to create a space for women to debate, share ideas, learn from each other, discuss common problems and to build women’s solidarity to overcome gender bias, prejudice and injustice.

Agenda will introduce four issues of the journal during the Feminist Dialogues: “The Politics of Water’, ‘Marriage Safe or risky Place?’, ‘Gender and rurality’ and ‘Feminism Today’.

For more information contact:
Lou Haysom – Managing Editor of Agenda
031- 3047002 cell 073 9523502