I first met Joana Foster at an international conference on Violence Against Women, which took place in Brighton, England in November 1996. I took my son with me to the conference, and he fell ill. As I fretted over my son, Joana fussed over me.  After Brighton, Joana and I became firm friends. She was a mother-figure, auntie and friend. At the time we met, she had just become the Regional Coordinator for Women in Law and Development in Africa (WILDAF), one of the leading women’s rights networks in Africa. She was based in Harare, Zimbabwe. Anytime she was in London, which was often, because her daughter Helen lived there, Joana would get in touch and we would meet up.

In March 1998, Joana stopped over in London on her way to attend the annual United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York, the meeting known in the international women’s movement as CSW. I was going to attend the CSW that year as well, and we were booked on the same flight out of London. The day before, we met up for lunch at a restaurant near AMwA’s office in Holborn. As we walked down the street, we were comparing notes and sharing our frustrations dealing with our respective donor agencies. I was telling her about my experiences with a funder who had sat on our proposal for eighteen months only to turn around and give a ridiculous excuse for rejecting the funding request. I ended my rant with, ‘It is about time we started our own fund as African women’. Joana stopped in her tracks. ‘What fund’? she asked. ‘An African women’s fund’ I said. She laughed and said, ‘Welcome on board. We already have a fund’. Prior to that conversation, AMwA had been planning to start a fund for African women, as a logical step from the work we were already doing, running capacity building programs for African women and facilitating advocacy opportunities. Joana Foster and Dr Hilda Tadria had started working on the idea of an African women’s fund as far back as 1994, based on inspiration Joana had drawn from attending a workshop organized by the US based  Global Fund for Women. ‘African women can do this’, Joana said to herself, and she managed to convince Dr Tadria to join her. Both of them did some planning and consultations, but the timing was not quite right. Dr Tadria was working with the United Nations Economc Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Addis, and did not have much time for additional endeavors. Joana was Ghana Country Director for CUSO, a Canadian NGO at the time, then she left to become Regional Coordinator of  WILDAF in Zimbabwe. The idea of the fund for women in Africa was put on hold. After our March 1998 discussion, Joana, Hilda and I decided to join forces and the two separate ideas for a women’s fund in Africa became the African Women’s Development Fund. I left London in 2001 to move to Accra where we had decided to locate the fund, and Joana finished her term at WILDAF and returned to Ghana. I became the Executive Director of AWDF and Joana was the Chair of the Board.

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Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi is a Gender Specialist, Social Entrepreneur and Writer. She is the Founder of Abovewhispers.com, an online community for women. She can be reached at BAF@abovewhispers.com