Africa Contact

Active Solidarity with Active People in Africa

Africa Contact is a solidarity movement with roots in the anti Apartheid movement. The fight against Apartheidis over but there is still a lot of inequality in the region. That is why we work in solidarity with people-driven movements in Africa and support their mobilization and fight for economic, democratic and social rights.

Our Vision: We envisage a World with social and economic justice for all, where everyone enjoys equal rights and freedoms.

Our Mission: Our mission is to continue our support of people’s movements in Africa, and in solidarity and partnership with them contribute to a different and improved political climate, which enfranchises those presently excluded from the political decision-making processes.

Our Work
We work within two main areas: (1) capacity building and empowerment of grass-roots movements in Africa, and (2) political lobbying and campaigning in partnership with people and organisations that share our vision and values.

Our capacity building of grass-roots movements is based on respect and solidarity. We are strongly focused on helping improve the mobilisation and organisation of our partners so that they are included in political and economic processes, facilitating their taking responsibility and control of their own future, thereby securing social and economic justice as well as their rights and freedoms.

In our political lobbying and campaigning work, our mission is to express the views of our partners in Africa, and thereby change public opinion and contribute to fair and just governmental policies. In doing so, we use the knowledge and skills of thirty years of partnerships with African organisations, as well as bringing African partners to Denmark to actively take part in our work.

Read about our projects and partners in Africa here

Organization
We are a member-based organization with over 500 individual members and many collective members (such as trade unions) that represent more than 1.5 million people.

Our secretariat has 4 employees that are supported by approximately 75 volunteers who work on partnership projects in Africa. We currently have 11 projects. The volunteers are involved in  working groups on:

Small-scale fisheries
Health Rights
Land Rights
Democratic mobilization in Swaziland
Democratic mobilization in Malawi
Democratic mobilization in Zimbabwe and political violence
Solidarity with Western Sahara
Information and policy work

We also cover themes such as trade policies, privatization of water, land-grabbing and Apartheid.

Our history
Africa Contact was founded in 1978 by a number of Danish political parties, trade unions and other organizations in order to unite the efforts against colonialism and suppression in Southern Africa. Following the liberation of Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, our work increasingly broadened in focus to include the fight against apartheid in South Africa and Namibia. For many years, Africa Contact worked for an economic and cultural boycott of the white apartheid regime in South Africa.

With the end of apartheid, we started supporting democratic and people-drive movements in the rest of Africa and have since applied a rights-based approach and work with social and economic rights.

Information
For more information on Africa Contact please download our 2013 strategy below or contact us directly on

Africa Contact
Blaagaardsgade 7B, st. th
DK2200 Copenhagen N
Denmark
Phone: +45 35 35 92 32
E-mail: SAK@afrika.dk
Skype: sakontakt