CAFRA is a regional network of feminists, individual researchers, activists and women’s organisations that define feminist politics as a matter of both consciousness and action. We are committed to understanding the relationship between the oppression of women and other forms of oppression in the society, and we are working actively for change.

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The history of feminism in the Caribbean can be located in women’s tradition of resistance during African-Caribbean enslavement, continuing through East Indian and other bonded labour, and the women’s movements of the early 20th century and the present.

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The international women’s movement of the 1960’s and the 1970’s had a catalytic effect throughout the Caribbean. Women increasingly recognized that they had to organize autonomously to fight for their rights and to articulate and struggle for their vision of the Caribbean. As the women’s movement in the Caribbean developed, it increasingly recognized the necessity for regional co-operation and net-working. The work being done by women’s groups in different geographic areas, in a wide range of languages, bore enough similarities and faced enough common problems to justify co-operation.

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CAFRA emerged as an autonomous umbrella organization out of this scenario. It was formally funded on 2 April 1985 at an all-day meeting in Barbados of forty feminists and women activists from the region.

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Our activities to date include projects, programmes on Women in Caribbean Agriculture; Women and the Law; Women’s History and Creative Expression; Women, Development and Sustainable Livelihood; Women’s Health and Reproductive Rights; Women and Environment, Trade, Gender and Youth.