About Malkia Africa Network
Who We Are
Malkia Africa Network is a pan-African hybrid think tank that advances women's rights by combining structured field evidence with rigorous policy research and advocacy.
We are not a service delivery organisation or a conventional research institution. We are an evidence-to-policy engine — engaging directly with the real contexts where women's rights are claimed, denied, and negotiated, then converting those insights into policy analyses, reform proposals, and advocacy that changes the rules.
We operate within the Atlas Network global partnership, grounded in individual liberty, rule of law, limited government, and free markets as foundations for a just society for African women.
1500+
Women reached
What Makes Us Different
The Dual Credibility Advantage
Most Policy Research Institutions
Produce rigorous analysis but remain distant from the field realities they study.
Most Civil Society Organisations
Are field-present but lack analytical infrastructure to convert community experience into policy-grade evidence.
Malkia Africa Network does both — deliberately and structurally.
Our Field Lab gives us real data from the environments we aim to change. Our Policy Arm converts it into analysis and reform proposals that withstand scrutiny from policymakers and peer researchers. When we engage a parliamentary committee, we bring both rigorous analysis and documented human evidence — making our research impossible to dismiss.
The Two-Arm Model
How we structure our work
The Policy Arm Our Primary Identity
The Policy Arm is what Malkia Africa Network fundamentally is. It produces rigorous analyses, policy briefs, legislative recommendations, and reform proposals. It maintains relationships with policymakers and reformers through which evidence is converted into change.
The Field Lab Our Evidence Instrument
The Field Lab maintains structured engagement with women practitioners, entrepreneurs, advocates, and community leaders. Its purpose is systematic collection of real-world evidence that makes our policy research credible and grounded. Every activity serves a defined research question.
The Connection
The two arms are not parallel. The Field Lab feeds the Policy Arm: field observations become validated evidence, then policy analysis, then reform proposals that reach decision-makers who change systems. This is the pipeline. This is how we work.
Our Story
Malkia Africa Network was founded in Kampala, Uganda, by women who understood that the most persistent barriers to women's rights in Africa are failures of law, policy, and governance — and that the best evidence for those failures comes from the women who navigate them daily.
The name 'Malkia' means 'Queen' in Swahili — reflecting our conviction that African women are not subjects of development programmes, but sovereigns whose rights are systematically constrained by unjust systems. Their lived experience, properly documented and analytically processed, is the most powerful evidence for reform that exists.
We do not conduct field engagement to empower individuals. We do it to document and validate real barriers that inform our policy research. The women whose experiences we capture are our evidence contributors — and the primary intended beneficiaries of the systemic change our research drives.
Today, we operate across three countries and three research domains, with confirmed Atlas Network partnership and a growing presence in Africa's liberty-advancing policy ecosystem.
Our Values
Field Grounding Without Mission Drift
We engage real contexts to strengthen our research while maintaining strict boundaries to protect our analytical independence. We are a think tank that uses field evidence — not an NGO that does research.
Analytical Rigour
Every policy claim is traceable to a defensible evidence base. Our observations are validated, our analyses peer-reviewed where possible, and our proposals technically sound and implementable.
Individual Liberty
We believe the freedoms of property, enterprise, expression, and association form the foundation of a just and prosperous society for African women. This shapes our entire research agenda.
Policy Relevance
We produce evidence that decision-makers can act on. The test of our work is not publication — it is whether it reaches people with the power to change the systems it analyses.
Dual Accountability
We are accountable to both the rigor standards of our research community and the lived reality of the women whose experience informs our evidence. This dual accountability is our institutional identity.
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