Feminist Research Activities

BWR conducts feminist research with a current focus on two of the most urgent and under-documented issues at the intersection of gender and structural harm in Rwanda and the broader East African context: Climate Justice and Gender-Based Violence, with particular attention to Technology-Facilitated GBV.

The research agenda is not academic in the ivory-tower sense, it is movement-driven and programmatically anchored. BWR’s feminist research methodology centers the voices, experiences, and knowledge of the women and girls most directly affected by the issues under study, rather than treating them as passive subjects of external analysis. This is a deliberate political and methodological choice: in a landscape where research on African women is frequently conducted by outsiders, for outsiders, BWR insists that the evidence base shaping Rwanda’s gender policies and programs must be built from within communities, by people accountable to those communities.

On Climate Justice, the research examines how environmental degradation and climate shocks structurally amplify gender inequality intensifying GBV under conditions of resource scarcity and household stress, eroding women’s economic rights by destroying land-based livelihoods, and compromising sexual and reproductive health and rights when health infrastructure and community support systems break down. This evidence directly informs BWR’s cross-cutting climate and conflict-sensitive programming approach.

On Technology-Facilitated GBV, BWR is building primary evidence on a phenomenon that is growing rapidly in Rwanda’s increasingly connected society but remains severely under-documented in the sub-Saharan African research literature. As mobile phone penetration and internet access expand, so do the vectors through which GBV is perpetrated, online harassment, non-consensual image sharing, digital stalking, and technology-enabled coercive control. Without rigorous local evidence, policymakers have no reliable basis for legislation, law enforcement has no framework for response, and survivors have no institutional recognition of the harm they experience. BWR’s research directly addresses this gap.

The outputs of this research feed into three distinct channels: BWR’s own program design and adaptation; national and local policy advocacy, where evidence is used to hold duty-bearers accountable and push for gender-responsive legislative and institutional reform; and the broader ecosystem of Rwandan and East African feminist organizations, coalitions, and networks  including RWAFEM, the Rwanda CSOs Coalition on CEDAW, and the East African Women Human Rights Defenders network, that rely on credible, locally produced evidence to strengthen their collective advocacy positions.

The funding case: Feminist research from the Global South on context-specific, emerging issues is among the most underfunded categories in the gender equality sector. Yet it is foundational,  without it, programming is built on assumptions, advocacy lacks teeth, and policy reform stalls for want of evidence. A funder investing in BWR’s research program is not funding one study; they are funding the evidence infrastructure that makes every other program BWR runs more effective, more defensible, and more impactful at the systemic level.