the haiku

Jessica Horn is a feminist thinker and builder - sharpening our understandings of the root causes of gendered injustice, and co-designing interventions that stimulate systemic change towards tangible shifts in people’s embodied lives. She has worked for two decades supporting activist organisations, funders and the UN to deepen analysis, shape policy and funding, and refine interventions to defend women’s rights to health, bodily autonomy and freedom from violence and build scenarios for feminist futures.

Jessica is a founder member of the African Feminist Forum, and have served on the boards of Mama Cash, Urgent Action Fund Africa, Comic Relief International Grants Committee and the Fund for Global Human Rights. From 2015-2020 she worked as Director of Programmes at the African Women’s Development Fund, Africa’s largest women’s fund, where she led a step-change in the organisation’s strategy and programming to accompany a four-fold increase in budget.

Her writing is published in academic, media and popular platforms including The Lancet, Feminist Africa, The Guardian, Al Jazeera and Africa is a Country.

Jessica is a graduate of the Armand Hammer United World College, Smith College and the London School of Economics.

the prose poem

Embodiment: I am shaped by a school of feminist activist philosophy that argues that all oppression, and hence all change is embodied. Our bodies are the landscapes through which narratives of constraint and defiance are voiced, are articulated, are felt, made real, made intolerable. Our bodies are canvases for aesthetic reflection, creation and damage, the necessary “raw material” of any creative production –and all activist work.

All of my work in feminist organisations and philanthropic institutions has been framed by a concern to affirm women’s rights to health, bodily autonomy, freedom from violence and affirming our right to positive, pleasurable embodied lives. This includes expanding our understandings of collective care and emotional wellbeing and mental health . I am currently a Commissioner on The Lancet Commission on Gender and Global Health.

Storytelling:  I realised early on that words are power. I write and speak- as a researcher, analyst and social commentator, but also as a poet. My voice is part of a movement. Given that I also create space for other African women to write, and was co-founder and Commissioning Editor for OurAfrica, a platform to profile African women’s analysis on openDemocracy. I have also led processes of documenting African feminist history and thought in the Voice, Power and Soul book and film series, AIR’s publications, and the visual documentary project .the temple of her skin.

Storytelling is lineage for me. My father is a pioneer in theatre for development, and my maternal grandfather Timothy Bazarrabusa was both part of writing Uganda’s story through the development of the constitution, and a fiction writer and poet in Rutoro- practicing his belief in growing literatures in African languages.

Me= We: I am a child of an era in history when people affirmed Third Worldist autonomy, feminism and principles of collectivism– the idea that ‘me’ was not possible without a ‘we’.  This has grounded my sense of social responsibility, and inspired my interest in and commitment to researching, funding and contributing activist labour to feminist social movements. My empaako (praise name in my mother’s language) is Akiiki- the one who upholds the community with love.

Pluriversality: My work is animated by a deep interest in the lush forest of African women’s knowledges around health, healing, transformation and human existence across time. I have ancestry in western Uganda and New York, and childhood experiences on university campuses in Lesotho-a nerve centre for anti-apartheid organising- and the Fiji Islands where I lived through two military coups. I learn languages fast, which helps as I have lived on 4 continents and travelled to 56 countries. My praxis is informed by the pluriverse.

Innovation: All these multiple strands of vision prime me to see beyond convention. In my 20s and 30s I served as midwife to many “firsts”- coordinating Amanitare the first African regional feminist network on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights, organising the first African Feminist Forum, co-designing the first African fund led by and for LGBTI rights UHAI, conducting the scoping to create the first young feminist fund- FRIDA, building AIR a practice-based African feminist initiative focused on reconceptualisng trauma, and launching the AWDF Futures initiative charting African futures from the vantage point of women.