Solidarity in Action: Newsletter Sheds Light on Rural Women’s Assembly Summer School
The Ethics Lab at the University of Cape Town, one of the implementing partners of the Global Health Solidarity Project, has released an insightful new publication titled the “Solidarity in Action Summer School Newsletter”. The newsletter captures the voices, experiences, and reflections of women from across Southern Africa who participated in the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA) Summer School held in February 2025.
Drawing on rich personal narratives and in-depth case studies, the newsletter highlights how solidarity is lived, felt, and practised among rural women in the region. It offers a glimpse into the Summer School’s central aim: to unpack the nature of solidarity as both deeply embedded in the RWA movement and inherently complex in its application.
Key reflections from the gathering, compiled by Donna Andrews from the Ethics Lab UCT:
- Reviewing undertakings of solidarity is important and necessary as it is not a set of mechanical actions but instead deeply complex. From the RWA case studies, it was clear that solidarity requires multiple navigations between people and of circumstances, a deep understanding of context and ways of being and seeing.
- When solidarity action is swiftly undertaken, it is in part, as mentioned by the Rita Edwards Collective, because there are infrastructures of solidarity built over time. These infrastructures are augmented due to a pedagogy of acting-reflecting-learning-doing-building. It is useful to make this method more apparent and explicit within RWA as its solidarity actions and pooled resources are not centralised but entirely left to the discretion of RWA members, thus ensuring autonomy and agility to be in solidarity that reflects the demands on the ground.
- The enactments of solidarity as illustrated by the case studies, as well as the personal narratives, reveal that solidarity is employed regularly in the movement. It is a key feature of RWA. The preparatory process towards the school and the school itself was an important step for RWA to give analytical expression to its solidarity work. Uncovering RWAs repertoire of solidarity will be an important step in its documenting process.
- The school was an important methodological opening for RWA to not only share when they act in solidarity but to be more deliberate in documenting solidarity and begin to share with other movements their lessons, experiences and observations. Importantly, participants would like to not only share at a country membership level but ideally replicate the school. In many ways, this is because “acting in solidarity” when not made visible might appear “natural” but it is however something engendered. Understanding the context of this is vital for RWA.
- The impact of severe climate change as well as gender based violence is a focus of solidarity for RWA. A closer unpacking of the solidarity actions could offer useful approaches and alternatives fostered by rural women in Southern Africa to overcome these structural problems and the acute asymmetry borne on rural women in the region.
- Solidarity is not charity. This is not to say that charity is not of consequence but rather that doing solidarity involves intentional action aimed at structural change and making visible the reasons for systemic problems. Charity is aimed at temporary relief and does not aim to change the fundamental circumstances of a situation. There were important discussions in this regard in the school. At the case study level, solidarity was repeatedly illustrated. At the personal narrative level, some participants reflected that perhaps their actions might have been charity instead of solidarity.
- Centring RWA’s experiences of solidarity is important as it underscores and makes visible that solidarity is not learnt from textbooks but is shaped and evolves through doing. If you have been part of solidarity action and practiced it, you know solidarity when you see it. The work of scholars is to help deepen our understanding, bring to the fore the riches of various practices of solidarity in different contexts and strengthen concepts.
- The meaning of solidarity is informed by different perspectives, positionality and context. Conceptualisation of solidarity is not neutral, as shown during the school. Solidarity is historically and contextually informed. In many instances in the region – solidarity is resistance – it has been linked to childhood recollections of anti-colonial processes, independence struggles and anti-apartheid movements.
Download the full newsletter here to read the complete stories, case studies, and reflections from this groundbreaking gathering.
- Log in to post comments