Laila Amili: Mutlifront Activist, Passionate Pan-African

Rabat – From August 29 to 31, pan-African activists from across Africa and the Diaspora will gather in Arusha, Tanzania, for the All-African-Movement Assembly (AAMA) conference promoting justice, peace, and dignity.

AAMA organized a first validation conference in August 2016 in Arusha, gathering 272 people from 40 countries from across the continent.

The pan-African movement is built on five pillars: fighting for more civic and political action; promoting women’s rights and individual freedoms across the continent; advocating for the right to equity and dignity; promoting democratic and corruption-free governance; and calling for climate and environmental justice.

Morocco’s Lingering Gender Injustices

Laila Amili, president of Mains Libres (Free Hands), a Moroccan association fighting for girls and women’s rights, joined the AAMA two months ago. She’s a socialist, a founding member of the Arab feminist network Tha’era, and a climate activist.

In conversation earlier this week with Morocco World News, Amili spoke passionately of her new challenge: working to build a bridge between the pan-African movement AAMA and Moroccan associations.

“We hope to promote African solidarity to build the future we want as Africans: the right to peace, social inclusion, and prosperity for Africans all around the world,” Amili said.

For the Moroccan activist, sharing different experiences from different African actors would be a way to build progress for women’s rights. In Morocco, much of Amili’s activism revolves around fighting against underage marriages and domestic violence, as well advocating for greater female visibility in leadership positions.

It’s been three years since Mains Libres first launched its fight to forge substantive changes in the Moudawana, the Moroccan family code. In particular, the group has ceaselessly called for both the criminalization of child marriages and the protection of divorced mothers’ rights to keep their children.

Under Article 175 and 176 of the current Moroccan family code, a divorced mother loses child custody if she remarries and her child is over 7 years old.

For Mains Libres, Amili said, “the child should stay with her mother until 15, even if she decides to remarry.”

And when legislative change does occur, as was the case in 2018 with the parliament’s adoption of Law 103.13 about violence committed against women, Amili insists that effective implementation should follow. Legislative change is only meaningful if it actually leads to tangible impact or perceptible changes in the everyday lives of the women who have long borne the weight of gender inequality.

Embracing Africa

“I see that these struggles are common in most African countries,” Amili said. “That’s why a lot of people are willing to join AAMA and participate in African solidarity.”

She recalled that after the first AAMA regional convention in Rabat on July 28, 2022, more Moroccan associations expressed keen interest in pan-African cooperation. This was a notable, emphatic, and overdue break from a long tradition, Amili argued, pointing out that Moroccan activists previously tended to work a lot with Arab or European countries. Now is the time to value and participate in pan-African solidarity, she insisted.

The AAMA summit in Tanzania is even more relevant amid the slow post-COVID across Africa. For Amili, one main reason for the event’s particular significance is the opportunity to discuss with fellow pan-African activists the far-reaching consequences that the pandemic has on the lives of many women across their continent, especially those who were already living in a precarious financial situation.

According to a March 2021 information note from Morocco’s High Commission for Planning (HCP), women were by far the hardest hit by the COVID-induced unemployment in the North African country.

The World Needs Solidarity

In addition to the devastating socio-economic disruptions brought about or further exacerbated by the COVID crisis, people – especially women – from the Global South are also the principal victims of the emerging ecological challenges.

“Us, people from the South, are the ones who are suffering more and more, because of poverty and increasing drought,” Amili said. “Poor people are the main victims of climate change.”

Amili is also the secretary general of the Moroccan coalition for climate justice, a gathering of 230 associations. Having participated in numerous international climate conventions in that role, she deplores the lack of women in leadership decisions.

One of the priorities of the Moroccan climate coalition is to heighten awareness about climate justice to make it “real” and not only written on official papers, said Amili.

Over the past months, one of Amili’s many activities – or duties – as the president of the coalition has been to travel to rural, marginalized areas to raise awareness about the climate and share vital information about environmental challenges with underserved communities whose lives and livelihoods have long been upended by rampant changes that they do not know of, let alone understand.

For Amili, the world can meet several of the challenges it faces if enough people are taught – or learn – to nurture a certain disposition toward empathy and solidarity when making sense of global challenges.

“We need solidarity for peace, human dignity, and human rights,” she said. “One hand can’t build anything, it’s with two, three, or four hands that we can achieve our goals.”