Tanya is a feminist activist and a Senior Program and Impact Lead at the Atlantic Institute. In this role, she supports the work of fellows across the seven programmes by co-creating spaces and platforms for collective thinking around solutions which are not ahistorical and lift the socio-economic dimension.
Previously, she worked as an independent gender and human rights consultant for non-profits in Southern Africa, providing a range of services from designing bespoke training sessions on gender equality in the mining sector to address the gender norms and forms of socialisation that impede women from doing what is considered 'men's work' and to form strategies on how to tackle gender-based violence nationally.
Tanya has written about violence against women for Huffpost Women, published research reports on the linkages between policy and sexuality with the Institute of Development Studies in the U.K, and is currently a voluntary Founding Board Member of Vuka Zimbabwe, an NGO that exists to unlock the potential of Zimbabwe’s youth through training and skills development.
Tanya holds an MPhil in Justice and Transformation from the University of Cape Town, as well as undergraduate and honours degrees in Social Anthropology and Media Studies. In 2019, as part of her Atlantic Fellowship, Tanya completed an MSc in Inequalities and Social Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
As a feminist activist who has worked in the non-profit sector over the last eight years, I have come to realise that women’s economic empowerment is critical to our enjoyment of other fundamental human rights. This was crystallised when I met a number of small-scale rural women miners who are currently earning a good living in this male-dominated industry, a contrary picture to the one I have become accustomed to seeing of unemployed women in rural areas struggling against great odds to survive.These oppositional images have led me to one salient insight; that putting financial and material resources in women’s hands can have a more immediate and transformative impact on their lives than other pathways to realising gender equality.Tanya Charles