Bringing African Women's Rights into the Modern Age

For eleven years, renowned feminist and gender-equality advocate, Dr. Hilda Tadria has worked with girls and young women as well as boys through her organisation MEMPROW (the Mentoring and Empowerment Programme for Young Women), which she founded with her husband in 2008. Part of the programme's success has come about through encouraging them to tell their stories and move on. As a result, they have bloomed with self-confidence and positive self-esteem. When Dr. Tadria was asked (many times), "How have you done it in your personal life, working with the challenges of trying to change entrenched negative norms and thinking about women?" this memoir, STAND, was born. She realised that sharing her own life experiences, which include standing up for her rights and those of other women and challenging the accepted gender norms around a woman's place and patriarchal negative norms, was a responsibility.

STAND was written to share her feminist journey and experiences. It describes how she has been challenged and stood firmly for her rights. It explores the forces that enabled her to defy patriarchy, a system that sets up women to collude in self-oppression or to fail. To Dr. Hilda Tadria, it does not matter whether these young women and girls have all that it takes to stand or not. This is a book for all those women who, like her, are struggling to stand for their rights and gender justice. And it is for those on the edge, who are trying to take a firm stand, to help them be aware of the systemic ways in which women are oppressed, so as not to fall off.

Born in Kigezi, South West Uganda, Dr. Hilda Mary Kabushenga Tadria is Social Anthropologist, a renowned passionate feminist and gender-equality/social justice advocate and activist who finally retired from institutional based service in April 2020 when she exited the role of Founding Executive Director of the Mentoring and Empowerment Program for Young Women (MEMPROW). Hilda is also a co-founder and Board member of the African Women's Development Fund (AWDF), a fundraising and grant making organisation that supports African women's work. In 1985, while still at Makerere, she founded Action for Development, an organisation that is still vibrant and active in protection of women's rights in Uganda.