Meet The Founder

Hello there! My name is Françoise Moudouthe, and I am the founder of Eyala. Thank you for visiting our corner of the internet!

Who am I, really?

At the core, I am three things: Feminist, African and obsessed about making authentic connections (especially with other African women and gender non-conforming people). Those have been guiding my career choices for over a decade.

Since January 2021, I’ve been working as the CEO of the African Women’s Development Fund, a pioneering women's fund that provides African women's rights organisations with vital access to financial resources, capacity-building support, and movement-building opportunities.

Besides, I chair Eyala’s Strategic Advisors’ Circle and provide guidance to the Eyala team. I am also a Board member of the Malala Fund, of Womankind Worldwide, and of the West African citizen think tank WATHI.

Prior to that, I worked as a consultant, focusing on strategy, advocacy and movement-building for gender justice. In parallel, I established and ran Eyala, which brings us together today.

Earlier in my career, I contributed to setting up Girls Not Brides, the global civil society partnership to end child marriage, and spearheaded its growth in Africa.

My feminist life motto is a quote by Wangari Maathai: “Human rights are not things that are put on the table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for and then you protect.”

What drove me to create Eyala?

Early in my career, I realised the extent of the daily violations that are inflicted on women's rights, bodies and dignity in Africa. I felt drained by emotional encounters with survivors of violence and frustrating meetings with politicians, but I drew strength from working with outstanding African feminists.

These women and queer feminists inspired my quest to understand the politics behind the policies I was advocating for at work, and to fight the patriarchy in all aspects of my life. For years, I yearned to hear about their journeys of activism: What was driving them to activism? How did they apply their feminist politics outside of the conference rooms? And what happened when they failed to do so?

Yet too often, our conversations remained technical and constrained by uninspired meeting agendas about numbers, policies and theories of change. Eventually, I became frustrated and told myself “if you don’t find the space for the conversations you want to have, then you have to create it.” And so, in July 2018, Eyala was born!

I set out to have honest, intimate and pressure-free conversations with African feminists about who they were beyond the work they did. I found so much growth and healing in these conversations. The questions I asked them, I always asked of myself. In one way or the other, each of the interviews you can read here has made me more intentional about living a feminist life.