The Long Road to the Room: Visas, Voices, Bodabodas and Structural Realities in Strategic Feminist Spaces

We navigate a world seemingly alight with crises, demanding urgent feminist action and thought leadership. International convenings become critical nexuses for this work – spaces to connect, strategize, and hopefully, forge pathways forward. Yet, accessing these spaces, even participating fully within them, remains fraught with structural barriers, particularly for many of us connecting from the African continent. It’s a reality that adds layers of complexity to our efforts to engage globally.

 

Many international meetings see a handful of African feminists, artivists, and thinkers invited. We are often hardly involved in shaping agendas and bringing crucial perspectives. Outside of being invited to this spaces that are other major obstacles we must face. Firstly, there’s the notorious visa gauntlet, especially for events hosted in the global North. While we discuss dismantling oppressive global systems, brilliant and insightful comrades from the global South are frequently barred by opaque, costly, and often discriminatory visa processes. This isn't just bureaucracy; it's a geopolitical reality enforcing borders, silencing essential voices, and pre-determining who gets to be "in the room" during critical global conversations.

 

But let's peel back another layer, one often invisible even within conversations about inclusion. Even when meetings are held on African soil, they typically land in capital cities. Think Nairobi, Accra, Dakar. And while this might seem more accessible, it reveals another structural bias: the assumption that urban centres adequately represent the diverse realities of entire nations, let alone the continent.

 

For activists and feminists based in rural or remote areas, participating in these capital-city gatherings involves significant invisible costs that organisers rarely acknowledge, let alone alleviate. There's the cost of travel – often long, arduous journeys over difficult terrain. There's the time away from crucial community work, support systems, and often, family responsibilities. There's the potential digital divide, making pre-meeting preparations or hybrid participation challenging. These are burdens disproportionately carried by those outside the urban bubbles, expected to be absorbed personally merely for the privilege of participating in a meeting happening within their own country's borders.

"Lake Matatus" Lake Baringo, 
Eastern Rift Valley, Kenya.

 I find I need to constantly remind my comrades that Nairobi is not Kenya.

Here, in my home country, we have 47 distinct counties and a population exceeding fifty million people. Nairobi, the vibrant capital, hosts less than 10% of that population. So, when we celebrate having "Kenyan representation" based solely on participants from the capital, we must ask ourselves – how truly representative is that? Whose realities are centred, and whose remain peripheral? This isn't unique to Kenya; it's a pattern across the continent. If our goal is genuine inclusion, our lens needs to be far wider and more diverse, reaching beyond the tarmac roads and established NGO offices of capital cities.

It was with these multiple layers of access and exclusion swirling in my mind that I participated in a recent session at an international meeting. This particular conversation, though starting a bit late (perhaps mirroring the delay in truly tackling these issues head-on 😊), aimed directly at the heart of structural oppression, focusing on ableism, racism, and casteism.

A speaker delved into a discussion on ableism not as individual bias, but as a pervasive societal structure – an architecture dictating "normalcy" for bodies and minds, inherently discriminating against difference. This intersects cruelly with racism and sexism, creating compounded marginalisation. The conversation challenged the purely negative framing of disability, championing self-determination and recognising disability as part of human diversity. The discussion explored the bias of AI, the violation of reproductive rights for women with disabilities, and the haunting legacy of institutionalisation and eugenics. This intervention called for a collective responsibility to dismantle these disabling and limiting structures. The concept of the "temporarily able-bodied" served as a reminder of shared human vulnerability, pushing against rigid medical definitions and advocating for the power of lived experience in defining identity and need – a point especially poignant when considering who gets support in times of crisis, or who can navigate the physical and bureaucratic demands of meaningful participation.

The discussion broadened to race and caste dynamics globally, moving beyond Western frameworks to consider visibility and invisibility in different contexts, including across Africa. We reflected on the invisibilised experiences of navigating international spaces while facing racism or colourism. Caste systems were analysed as potent examples of how social hierarchies become embedded, limiting mobility and opportunity based on birth – another facet of structural discrimination.

Throughout, intersectionality emerged not as a buzzword, but as an essential analytic tool. Ableism cannot be understood apart from race, gender, or class. And class, crucially, intersects with geography. Those invisible costs borne by rural activists? That's class and geographical disparity manifesting as a barrier to participation, even before international borders come into play. Who can afford the bus fare, bodabodas, the days away from day-to-day work and the potential loss of income, just to reach the capital city, let alone an international venue to tick the box of representation and nod to an already pre-determined agenda and shape of the discussion?

Therefore, reflecting on that session felt multidimensional. The content—the deep dive into ableism, racism, and casteism—was critical. But the context—the reality of visa struggles limiting global South participation, compounded by the internal urban bias often silencing rural voices even within the continent—made the discussion about structural exclusion intensely personal and immediate.

Our calls for inclusion in global feminist spaces must be rigorously intersectional and geographically expansive. It’s not enough to secure a few seats at the international table if those seats are only accessible to urban elites. Criticising global North visa regimes is not enough if we don't simultaneously address the barriers preventing a rural activist from reaching her own nation's capital to engage. 

Moving forward requires a commitment beyond dialogue. We need feminist convenings, whether labelled "international," "regional," or "national," to actively interrogate their own accessibility at every level. This means considering venue locations critically, rotate the hosting roles and responsiblities, have adequate and appropriate budgeting for full participation support that accounts for internal travel and other hidden costs, investing in truly accessible hybrid technologies, challenging visa injustice collectively, and ensuring that agenda-setting genuinely reflects the diverse realities of all the communities we claim to represent.

Building truly inclusive, structurally sound feminist movements capable of responding effectively to today's crises demands this multi-layered approach. It requires us to look critically at the road to the room, the hidden paths some must travel, and the very design of the room itself. Only then can our collective voice be truly global, resonant, and powerful.