AFROINNOVA II
Diasporic Futures: The New Doors of Return
The Contemporary Black “I” in the WorlD
First gathering of the Community Innovation Group
for the Advancement of the African
Cali, 10-13 August 2022 | Diáspora 2022-2023
Background.
AFROINNOVA spearheads the power of community innovation by connecting leaders, initiatives and experiences from across the African diaspora. Created by Visible Hands (Manos Visibles) in 2015, the group recognizes the critical need for Africa and its descendants to rise up as a new global power:
Africa the people, Africa the place.
Our first and second cohorts of experts have and will form:
A Network of capabilities, strategy, conceptualization, negotiation of ideas and transnational collective learning
A Space for cultivating leadership, renewing approaches and generating a collective understanding of the African DIaspora and its context
A Pathway to construct new narratives, so that our people may see and define their struggles differently
A Brokerage for resources and catalyst for transnational processes
The Task of this cohort:
Speaking as, speaking out, speaking from, speaking with,
speaking to make us visible as a global power.
Meet Afroinnova
Click here get to know each member of the group . You’ll find bios and more here. You can also meet our previous cohort here, and find their more than 10 working papers created from 2015-2018.
About Visible Hands
12 years of building leadership in Colombia and beyond.
Colombia holds the third largest African diaspora population outside the continent, after Brazil and the U.S. As an NGO based in Colombia, our power rests in uplifting Afro-Colombians, and our ability to inspire the country, the continent and the entire diaspora. Africa is critical to rewriting our own history, and that of our collective future. At present, Manos Visibles has a network of 15,000 leaders and 500 organizations, and we’ve developed 20 programs across Colombia.
AFROINNOVA is our international strategy and platform, meant to nurture and build leadership and strategic connections around the world, and to change power relations in Colombia and beyond.
The Black I: Context
(The two Africas: the continent and its descendants)
The world is ending. It ends for me, for us, many times.
The global landscape of racial equality is quickly shifting. From the killing of Marielle Franco in Brazil in 2018 to the murder of George Floyd in the U.S. in 2020, mass protests from Nigeria to Colombia, the devastating effects of COVID 19 and more recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’re shown time and time again that Africans, Afro-descendants and people of color are too often the very last to receive human protection and dignity. Even so, we have made some progress. And we will continue our fight.
With this cohort, we want to discuss what comes next. AfroInnova is about bringing the brightest possible group of diaspora creatives together for social change and economic empowerment.
Reflections from AFROINNOVA I
“(...) who control the images, control the self-esteem”.
- Abiola Oke, OKAY AFRICA, Cartagena 2016
“We have resources, we have power. How do we leverage that?”
- Philip Thompson, Former MIT Professor, Vice Mayor of NYC
“A platform like this can help us to look beyond what is in front of us, to think big, to identify groups or individuals that may trigger this transformation, and present a more balanced, more complex reflection of Africa in its diaspora and vice versa. The power of the African diaspora must be recognized and find common areas of action to improve, grow and change.”
- Susana Edjang, former U.N. advisor, Mason Fellows Harvard, Collateral Benefits
“Our asset is us.”
- Zakiya Carr Jonhson, Staff Member at United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Founder Black Women Disrupt, Former Director Gender and Diversity U.S. State Department
Diaspora Sounds
