OWA Africa Summit

How partners from across the continent met and worked together towards a single goal.

The Open Wing Alliance (OWA) hosts an African Summit each year for partners within the continent to meet and connect. At this summit, we come together and share the successes and challenges from the year and discuss upcoming campaigns. The cage-free movement is growing within Africa. Safcei has worked in this space since 2016 and aims to collaborate with partners within the continent to secure cage-free policies with primary target corporates. The Africa Summit this year was primarily led by African partners who, before the meeting, decided on targets, timelines and goals for the coalition of partners.

In this post, I will share some takeaways from the summit and the work of Safcei in this space.

Founded in 2005, SAFCEI is a regional multi-faith organization committed to supporting faith leaders and their communities in Southern Africa to increase awareness, understanding and action on eco-justice, sustainable living and climate change. We emphasize the spiritual and moral imperative to care for living Earth..

Initiated by The Humane League, OWA brings 80+ member organizations together to create a unified front in our goal to end the abuse of chickens worldwide. We share campaign strategies, tactics, and resources worldwide in the march toward our shared objective. Our first step toward achieving this ambitious goal is eliminating battery cages from our world, and we're working towards achieving that vision, one cage-free policy at a time. In cases where the cage-free campaign is essentially complete in certain countries, OWA has started creating resources and giving grants to support movements that improve the lives of chickens raised for meat.

At the Africa Summit Safcei was selected to lead a continent-wide coalition to approach international multinational companies with no, partial or unimplemented cage-free policies.

Many of these corporates are well known by consumers within South Africa and play a significant role in continuing hen abuse. The aim of the coalition is to work collaboratively across countries and leverage members' skills in different organizations. The movement being relatively new in the space, Safcei is well-positioned to lead on such an initiative due to our experience in this area.

SAFCEI began working with OWA in 2016. In the first few years of our programme, we secured commitments from McDonald's, Famous Brands, Hotel Verde and City Lodge Hotel Group. We aim to continue our work and receive commitments from many more corporates within South Africa. We hope to do this with support from our international and regional partners, our faith leaders and Earth Keepers Network.

We look forward to sharing more about this coalition and the actions being taken against resistant corporates.

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By Georgina Blumears, SAFCEI's Cage-Free Eggs Campaign Coordinator.