What feels like clarity today was once just a young girl's quiet attempts to understand her surroundings and the feelings she had no words for.
I am a development economist, pan-African feminist peacebuilder, writer, and organizer working across community, institutional, and global policy spaces. My work explores how power, resources, and political systems shape everyday life in conflict-affected contexts, and how feminist organizing, collective leadership, and locally grounded peacebuilding can open pathways toward more just and sustainable futures. Through organizing, engaging institutions, research, and facilitating dialogues, I contribute to efforts that connect grassroots realities with broader global conversations on peace, governance, and social transformation.
The Roots of my Work
My feminist consciousness was shaped early by the women I grew up around. My mother was part of the Katiba Banat, a small group of teenage girls and young women who joined the armed liberation struggle during Sudan’s long civil war. As I grew older, I came to understand the courage it took for them to make choices that disrupted social expectations and to endure the stigma many faced for stepping beyond what was considered acceptable for girls.
I was raised within the extended sisterhood my mother shared with other women who had lived through war, displacement, and the challenging work of rebuilding their lives. Their friendships were built on mutual care, humor, and resilience, and they became my earliest teachers in collective strength and solidarity. At the same time, witnessing the emotional, relational, and financial strains inside a polygamous household exposed me to the layered ways patriarchal power shapes women’s lives. These experiences stayed with me as unresolved questions that I later understood to be about dignity, justice, and the meaning of freedom for women.
Today, as a mother of three daughters, those questions feel both personal and urgent. In many ways, I am my mother’s daughter, carrying forward her courage and working to contribute to more just futures for the generations to come.
Organizing, Economic Justice, and Feminist Community
Over time, these early experiences shaped my path into feminist organizing and peacebuilding. Much of my work has focused on supporting girls, young women, and grassroots women leaders navigating conflict, displacement, and economic uncertainty. I am particularly interested in how women build collective strategies for survival and autonomy, and how community-based economies can become spaces of dignity, political voice, and social transformation.
In 2020, I co-envisaged Ma’Mara Sakit Village (the Village), a women-led social enterprise and feminist community initiative rooted in South Sudan. The Village grew out of years of working within formal NGO structures, including co-founding Crown the Woman and a deepening understanding that the kind of change I was seeking could not be held within short-term, project-driven approaches. It was imagined instead as a long-term organising home, a political and relational space where girls and women build solidarity, strengthen leadership, and cultivate community-based economic and cultural practices that nurture long-term collective power. No matter where my work takes me in the world, the Village keeps me grounded in the radical imagination of a more just future.
Leadership Across Global Systems of Peace and Power
As my organizing practice deepened at home, my work gradually expanded into international peacebuilding. In 2018, I began working across different regions and organizational settings, exploring how systems of security, governance, and humanitarian response can be more accountable to the communities they serve.
Over several years in senior programme leadership roles within an international peacebuilding organization, I worked with security and peacekeeping training institutions to incorporate more relationship-focused approaches to mission engagement, civilian protection, and community interaction. This included supporting the development of gender-responsive and trauma-informed training practices, as well as facilitating dialogue processes that brought community leaders and security-sector actors into ongoing engagement. Through this work, I became increasingly interested in how institutional cultures change and how trust, responsibility, and human dignity can be prioritized within systems that often seem disconnected from everyday realities.
At the same time, I found deep inspiration in working with youth peacebuilders from conflict-affected regions across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Facilitating learning and mentorship spaces with these young leaders reinforced my belief that sustainable peace is shaped not only by policy frameworks but also by relationships, imagination, and collective courage.
In recent years, my global engagement has increasingly focused on feminist resourcing and the broader questions of how movements for peace, justice, and gender equality are sustained over time. Building on my experience working within peace and security institutions, I have become more deeply involved in governance, advisory, and strategic spaces that aim to guide international funding ecosystems toward locally led, feminist-informed approaches to crisis response and long-term social change. A growing focus in my work is engaging not only with how peacebuilding is practiced but also with how it is resourced, legitimized, and prioritized within global systems of power.
Alongside this institutional and movement-level engagement, writing and research remain central to how I make sense of these evolving spaces. Through feminist analysis and public dialogue, I continue to challenge narratives that portray women and girls, especially in conflict-affected settings primarily through vulnerability, instead foregrounding their leadership and capacity to shape political futures.
Why this Space
The demands of work, organizing, motherhood, and everyday life often leave little room to sit with my thoughts and put them into words. This website is, in part, my way of reclaiming that practice, a space that pushes me to write in real time, to reflect, and to think through the questions that emerge from my experiences.
In this space, I write primarily with young South Sudanese feminists in mind, young women who are thinking, questioning, organizing, and imagining different futures for our country. When I first found my way into feminist thinking and activism, I often wished there were more spaces where these ideas were being written and shared openly. This space is a small attempt to create the kind of intellectual and political community I once searched for. Writing and making my thoughts accessible is one way of thinking alongside young South Sudanese feminists, sharing ideas, and contributing to the growing body of feminist thought emerging from South Sudan. At the same time, the writing here engages readers interested in questions of gender, culture, and political life in South Sudan and across the region.