“We live in different African countries, but the challenges and the conditions of life are almost the same,” says Sylvain Saluseke, the operations team lead at Afrikki.
Sylvain and fellow activists are using those shared experiences to build a future that’ll benefit them all, their communities and entire nations.
In 2016, three African youth activist groups—Y’en a Marre of Senegal, Le Balai Citoyen of Burkina Faso, and LUCHA of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—received an Amnesty International award for their work, called the Ambassador of Conscience. Their meeting proved fated: each organization had been working to advance democracy and human rights in their own country, but when they were brought together, they decided to collaborate. Afrikki, the pan-African platform for citizen movements, was born. Today it includes about 50 member movements.
Sylvain grew up in the DRC; today he remains an active member of LUCHA, one of the leading pro-democracy movements in his country. Afrikki’s members all hail from their own grassroots groups, seeking to grow together and strengthen each other.
From the beginning, Afrikki’s leaders had their work cut out for them. All three countries of Afrikki’s founding organizations are relatively fragile democracies; just this year, Senegal elected a young, progressive president after years of corruption, violence and suppression of activism. Burkina Faso saw its first-ever democratic transition of power in 2015. The DRC’s elections in 2023 were plagued by allegations of fraud.
The leaders of Afrikki wanted to gather a wide swath of activists to learn from each other’s successes and failures to strengthen the movements in each country. They wanted to raise funds to effectively support activists responding to emergencies in their countries while avoiding the slow-moving bureaucracy of traditional philanthropy.
“Afrikki was never meant to become another movement,” says Sylvain. “It’s a platform in support of movements across Africa, and what they do individually in their own spaces.”
AJWS has been supporting Afrikki from its earliest days, funding which Sylvain says has been transformative.
“Without AJWS, we would probably not been able to continue this journey. AJWS was one of the very first funders that came into the space and said, ‘We see you, how can we help?’ Not ‘We see you, this is how we want to help you.’ That in itself was a game changer for us.”
From the beginning, Afrikki set out upon two missions: First, to create a space for African activists to gather, and second, to facilitate a longer exchange program for immersive learning to take place.
The first of these programs became the Popular University of Citizen Engagement, or UPEC. In 2018, during this first week-long conference, movement leaders from around the continent gathered in Dakar, Senegal, to meet and collaborate. Activists who had been exchanging ideas online were finally able to come together and build connections, “so that we don’t feel as if we’re working in a vacuum,” shares Sylvain.
In 2020, when the second UPEC took place, organizers focused on ensuring the participation of women-led and gender-based movements—and discussing the role of women in pro-democracy movements, which are too often male-dominated spaces.
The second pillar of Afrikki’s programs, the exchange, came about to deepen the connection.
“We wanted to take a few people from different countries—not just at the leadership level, but at the activist level—and have them sit in a remote area in the slums, learning and studying and sharing their experiences,” says Sylvain. “This way we can create a human-to-human connection, not just between movements, but between people.”
The most recent Afrikki cohort, which ran in Tanzania this year, gathered 20 young activists for nearly a month. In addition to learning from and with each other, Afrikki ensured there was intergenerational exchange—bringing thought leaders, civil society leaders, past presidents and more to share their experiences. And in working to uplift the next generation of activists and leaders, Afrikki is building bridges between established organizations like Y’en a Marre, LUCHA and Le Balai Citoyen with newer groups.
Looking into the future, Sylvain sees a long way to go to ensure that the movements that comprise Afrikki can all hold their governments accountable and keep each country’s democracy strong.
“Social movements need to deconstruct the notion of power, because we are being forced to think that power lies within the elite that are running our countries,” he says.
But he has hope in youth activists, who ultimately hold an immense amount of power, even if they’re unaware of it.
“Movements must speak out, asking ‘Why are there no bridges? Why don’t we have health care? Why didn’t we eat yesterday? Why are we being killed every day?’ These are not questions that should be left to politicians to ask. We have to make the politicians see that they are there to implement solutions.”
Young people, says Sylvain, have this power. “We are helping them express it and push it forward.”