In this section: Dr Lesley Ann Foster, Nicole Fritz, Pregs Govender and more …
Dr Lesley Ann Foster
Founder and Executive Director
Masimanyane Women’s Support Centre
Tel+27 43 743 9169
www.masimanyane.org.za
Lesley Ann Foster is the founder and executive director of the Masimanyane Women’s Support Centre, an East London-based non-profit organisation focusing specifically on gender-based violence, the gendered nature of HIV and Aids, and sexual and reproductive health and rights.
As part of her work in the mid-1990s as PA to the CEO of the Independent Business Enrichment Centre she organised national conferences which introduced her to the issues of women who had been abused and were trying to find or create ways of earning an income. She established Masimanyane as a way of helping victims of domestic violence and abuse to become financially independent, and hence able to break out of their violent relationships.
Foster is currently building a shelter for battered women where they will receive counselling and legal advice and be trained in formal business skills. The organisation is the first of its kind in the Eastern Cape. Foster was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 for her work at Masimanyane, and in 2009 won the inaugural Southern Africa Social Entrepreneurship award for women social entrepreneurs.
Nicole Fritz
Executive Director
Southern Africa Litigation Centre
Tel: +27 11 403 3414
www.southernafricalawcenter.org
In April 2008, a Chinese ship, the An Yue Jiang, stopped in Durban with a cargo of 70 tons of weapons, including three million rounds of ammunition, 1 500 rockets and 3 500 mortar bombs and launcher, bound for Zimbabwe.
Nicole Fritz, as executive director of the Southern Africa Litigation Centre (Salc), arranged an urgent interdict to stop the ship from reaching Zimbabwe, and legal action was successfully launched to have the arms offloaded at Durban harbour and handed over to the sheriff of the court. The ship eventually escaped under cover of night, but the campaign begun in South Africa gained momentum throughout the region.
Fritz gained a BA summa cum laude at the University of Natal, an LLB at the University of the Witwatersrand, completed with distinction, and a post-graduate diploma in international legal studies at the University of Antwerp in Belgium. In 2001 she obtained an LLM as a Hauser global scholar at New York University’s School of Law.
She taught law briefly in New York and at the University of Pretoria before undertaking her current role in 2005. Salc, a joint initiative of the International Bar Association and the Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa, promotes the rule of law throughout the region.
Pregs Govender
Gender Activist
Tel: +27 21 650 2970
Pregs Govender, political activist, trade unionist and teacher during apartheid, has dedicated her career to women’s liberation and justice. Govender led the Women’s National Coalition which mobilised about two million women to influence the country’s new Constitution.
As ANC MP, she initiated South Africa’s Women’s Budget and chaired Parliament’s committee on women as well as debates on the gendered impact of HIV/Aids. She resigned from Parliament in 2002 after being the only MP to vote against the arms deal. In 2007-2008, she chaired the Independent Panel Review of Parliament. She is a member of the eightperson Panel of Eminent Persons working on a global Human Rights Agenda, and early in 2009 she was appointed to the Human Rights Commission.
Govender’s best-selling autobiography Love and Courage: A Story of Insubordination was published in 2007. She received a Ruth First fellowship for courageous writing and activism, and the Inspiration Award from the Association for Women’s Rights in Development in 1999. In March this year, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape.
Rhoda Kadalie
Executive Director
Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust
Tel: +27 21 461 3783
www.impumelelo.org.za
The Impumelelo trust rewards innovative government and civil society initiatives that improve social service delivery in the eradication of poverty. Executive director Rhoda Kadalie served a term on the Human Rights Commission in the 1990s, conducting investigations into human rights violations in prisons, on farms and in children’s places of safety.
She spent many years as a lecturer in anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, where she founded the Gender Equity Unit, and holds an MA from the Institute for Social Studies in the Netherlands.
Kadalie, who lived in District Six as a small child, directed the suburb’s land claims unit in the 1990s for the Commission on the Restitution of Land Rights. She has received honorary doctorates from the University of Uppsala, Sweden and from UWC and is a member of the advisory board of the Ash Institute for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University.
Kadalie is a columnist for Business Day, Die Burger and Beeld. Her book, In Your Face, was published by Tafelberg in April 2009.
Jacqueline Loffell
Advocacy Coordinator
Johannesburg Child Welfare Society
Tel: +27 11 298 8500
www.jhbchildwelfare.org.za
Jacqueline Loffell is an independent consultant employed part-time as advocacy coordinator for Johannesburg Child Welfare. Her key responsibility is the coordination of the organisation’s efforts to influence legislation and social policy relevant to children and families. She has served as a social worker in the field of child and family welfare for more than 30 years.
She obtained her PhD from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1997, with a thesis on social work intervention in child sexual abuse. She was a member of the South African Law Commission’s project committee on the review of the Child Care Act, which undertook the groundwork for the development of the new Children’s Act. She works on a number of networks concerned with child and family well-being, and with the strengthening of the social welfare sector.
Janet Love
National Director
Legal Resources Centre
Tel: +27 11 836 9831
www.lrc.org.za
The Legal Resources Centre (LRC) is South Africa’s largest public interest law firm, providing free legal services to the poor on matters ranging from the plight of refugees to constitutional issues. National director Janet Love holds a BA in political science from the University of the Witwatersrand and two postgraduate diplomas, including one in economics from the University of London.
Although she is not a lawyer, Love served on Parliament’s constitutional committee in the 1990s. She joined the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto weSizwe, in the late 1970s. In 1987, after eight years in exile, she was appointed communications officer for a major ANC campaign, Operation Vula, inside South Africa. When multiparty negotiations began for the creation of an appropriate climate for democratic elections, she was a member of the ANC’s negotiating team.
Love spent five years as head of strategic analysis and support in the currency department of the Reserve Bank. She took up her post at the LRC in 2006, and was elected onto the ANC’s national executive committee in 2007.
Prudence Mabele
Executive Director
Positive Women’s Network
Tel: +27 12 320 6121
www.idex.org.za/pwn
When the Olympic torch was passed from runner to runner on its way to Athens in 2004, one of the torch bearers was Prudence Mabele, who has been living positively with HIV for 20 years. She was a founder member, and later executive committee chair, of the Aids Consortium and established the Positive Women’s Network in 1996 to supply counselling and support networks for women with HIV. It was one of many South African initiatives she has been involved with, among them as a founder member of the South African National Association of People Living with HIV/Aids, the Legal Aids Network, and as a representative on the South African National AIDS Council.
In addition to travelling through Africa as a member of a Commonwealth-sponsored programme to increase the visibility of HIV and youth, she consulted for the United Nations Development Programme devoted to the greater involvement of people living with HIV/Aids.
She has worked with the business sector and with international NGOs, calling for greater financial, legal and workplace protection for people living with HIV and Aids. She has been involved in the national strategic plan on HIV and Aids and was runner-up in the UNAids and Aidscap award for excellence in writing on women and Aids.
Anneke Meerkotter
Executive Director
Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre
Tel: +27 11 403 4267
www.tlac.org.za
Human rights lawyer Anneke Meerkotter is executive director of the Tshwaranang Legal Advocacy Centre, focusing on HIV/Aids, gender-based violence, and sex work. She holds BProc and LLB degrees from the University of the Western Cape and was admitted as an attorney of the High Court in 2002.
She has worked as a researcher at the Community Law Centre at UWC and coordinated its South African Young Sex Offenders Programme, while lecturing in law at UWC. She headed the legal unit at the Aids Law Project.
In 2006, she became head of the legal services unit at Tshwaranang, and two years later, she was made executive director. Meerkotter serves on the board of the Sex Worker Education and Advocacy Taskforce (Sweat) and is a member of the South African National Aids Council’s law and human rights sector working group.
Lesley Ann van Selm
Managing Director
Khulisa Crime Prevention Initiative
Tel: +27 11 788 8237
www.khulisaservices.co.za
Lesley Ann van Selm has dedicated the past 12 years of her life to building Khulisa, an organisation she conceived and developed and which is increasingly recognised as a vital player in South Africa’s efforts to reduce violent crime.
From her earlier experience in marketing, creating new organisations for the new South Africa and
understanding the importance of inter-cultural dialogue, Van Selm has tested and implemented new strategies and methods for working both with juvenile offenders, to prevent recidivism, and at-risk youth in poor communities, creating options other than gangs, drugs and crime. The programme is shaped and critiqued by the inmates and run by ex-offenders.
Van Selm, Khulisa and individual Khulisa programmes have received numerous national and international awards for their achievements and innovations. A former Ashoka fellow, in March 2009 she won the Pinnacle Award at the Southern Africa Social Entrepreneurship (SASE) awards. She was also nominated as Women of the Year from 2003 to 2006.
Carrie Shelver
Programmes Co-ordinator
People Opposing Women Abuse (Powa)
Tel: +27 11 642 4345
www.powa.co.za
Carrie Shelver is a feminist activist who has worked in the sector dealing with violence against women and human rights for over a decade. Shelver is a part of a group of feminists who founded the One in Nine Campaign and continues to play an active role in the campaign, whose name derives from a study noting that eight out of nine rapes are not reported.
She serves on the board of the Curriculum Development Projects Trust, a NGO that utilises creativity and the arts for education and healing. Prior to working in the women’s sector, Shelver worked within the lesbian and gay sector. Her academic background is in adult education, politics and applied linguistics.