From fragmentation to Structured Movements

‘Cross-movement solidarity’ is the most likely answer you would get if you asked a young person in development spaces on what needs to be strengthened. 

Working across various movements for the greater good. I continue to believe, and will keep repeating, that at every intersection, there is liberation. We have inherited an emboldened mandate to conceptualize and implement cross-movement work on the shoulders of those who came before us. There is now a growing desire to move away from isolative and siloed movements toward one that recognizes that human rights are fundamentally intersecting, and so our thinking around abolition, repeal, protection, and collective care must also be intersecting. 

But let’s be clear; sometimes organizing pushes people toward impossible compromises. Choosing between food and protest. Between “reasonable accommodations” and access to parliament. Between financial sustainability and impact. No one should ever have to choose between an empty stomach and meaningful impact, yet movements across the region and globally, especially those led by marginalized communities, are consciously or subconsciously forced into these decisions. And slowly, this reality weaves itself into organizational culture itself, the constant pitting against one another, agenda-driven storytelling, scarcity politics, and forgetting who we are beyond survival. Our bedrock begins to rot in belongingness itself, in the loss of communities and third spaces that are not commercialized or monetized. 

When groups that have historically been marginalized are competing against one another over limited resources, coalitions become difficult to sustain. Economics is always at play. Money is political. 

These tensions are not imagined. In March 2026, activists and organisations across SRHR, LGBTQIA+, feminist, PHIV, sex workers, and community-led movements gathered in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, for the Cross-Sector Convening on Strengthening Gender and Rights Movements in Africa: From Inception to Action, co-organized by the International Planned Parenthood Federation Africa Region, Pan Africa ILGA, and ILGA World 

Beyond strategy and political analysis, the convening was also a testament to cross-movement unity and solidarity. Organizers from movements that are often separated by funding streams, mandates, language, geography, and political pressures found themselves in shared conversation, reflecting not only on threats, but on care, survival, belonging, and what collective liberation could still look like in practice. In many ways, the convening was not only about responding to anti-rights actors, but also about reconnecting with one another beyond crisis.

Across movements, similar realities emerged: fragmentation, weak coordination, shrinking civic space, burnout, funding competition, and increasing pressure toward self-censorship. Participants spoke not only about visible anti-rights attacks, but also about the quieter normalization of anti-rights thinking within institutions meant to protect rights, through health systems, funding structures, media ecosystems, religious narratives, and everyday bureaucratic decisions. Others reflected on how solidarity itself becomes strained when movements are forced to compete for limited resources, visibility, and survival. 

Participants reflected on how anti-rights actors have built strong networks across religious institutions, political actors, media ecosystems, and foreign funding streams. While progressive movements are often pushed into reactive modes of organizing, anti-rights actors have invested in infrastructure, long-term narrative building, and sustained political coordination. They understand the importance of structure. This is the uncomfortable truth many of us are now being forced to confront: progressive movements need to catch up. 

Despite the increasingly hostile climate, movements across Africa are resisting. Coalition-building, rapid response mechanisms, strategic litigation, feminist organizing, queer organizing, mutual aid networks, and community-led approaches continue to hold the line across the region. But too often this work happens in challenging systems rather than through supported ecosystems of care and sustainability. Solidarity without material conditions eventually becomes performance. 

Participants repeatedly returned to the need for something more durable than symbolic alignment: shared infrastructure, coordinated rapid-response systems, political trust, safer organizing conditions, stronger communication across movements, and collective accountability capable of surviving beyond convenings themselves. Because what does solidarity mean when movements are underfunded, burned out, criminalized, digitally surveilled, and competing against one another for survival? What does collaboration look like when language barriers, regional divides, unequal funding access, and institutional power imbalances remain unresolved? 

Perhaps the shift we need is not simply toward “cross-movement work” as language, but toward structured movements. Movements capable of resourcing one another, sharing knowledge, building collective safety, coordinating politically, and imagining beyond emergency response. Movements that understand care, sustainability, accessibility, and culture-building as political strategy rather than secondary concerns. 

And perhaps this was the deeper offering of Abidjan itself: not merely a convening, but an attempt to collectively imagine beyond the horizon for our movements. A reminder that our North Star cannot simply be survival, but the building of movements structured enough to carry us toward collective futures.