Fadekemi Akinfaderin, Fòs Feminista

Fadekemi (Kemi) Akinfaderin is  Fòs Feminista as Chief Global Advocacy Officer, leading the organization’s Global Advocacy for Change Unit. Kemi is a feminist thought leader and connector in sexual and reproductive justice movements who has an intersectional feminist voice and deep experience in movement building and trust-based grantmaking. Based in Abuja, she leads and coordinates political advocacy strategies and actions across national, regional, and global spaces and accompanies feminist activists to engage in these spaces.

Kemi brings more than 25 years of experience working in partnership with women’s rights organizations, feminist funds, and feminist and social justice movements in Africa and globally. Throughout her career, she has been a bold voice for sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice and has built close relationships with feminist and women’s rights organizations and leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Kemi came to Fòs Feminista from the Equality Fund, Canada, where as the Program Lead for Women’s and Feminist Funds, she created a grantmaking strategy to flow $CAD 14M to feminist funds and movements in the Global South. Kemi was the pioneer Director for knowledge management and institutional capacity strengthening at PROSPERA, the International Network of Women’s Funds. She was the African Representative in the Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Justice Alliance (RESURJ) for over 10 years. She began her career as a sexual and reproductive health and rights activist in her early twenties, as the co-founder of Education as a Vaccine (EVA), in Nigeria.  She has served as a technical advisor for the Government of Nigeria at key international multilateral negotiations, including the United Nations Commission on Population and Development and the Commission on the Status of Women. She has also served as a special assistant to Secretary- General Kofi Annan’s Special Envoy on HIV and AIDS in Africa.

She holds a BA in Chemistry and Molecular Biology/Biochemistry from Wesleyan University and a master's in public health from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University.