Dr Fikile Vilakazi

Dr Fikile Vilakazi has more than 27 years of work experience. She has been working in the fields of youth, women, gender, entrepreneurship development, indigenous healing and sexuality at different times in all these years. Her areas of focus included training, public education, advocacy, traditional and energy healing. She had an opportunity to do student support and mentoring, field work, outreach programs, community mobilization, and building partnerships, manage and direct programs.

She has six years of that period dedicated to fundraising, directing an organization, providing strategic direction to processes, organizational development including human, financial and technical resource management, monitoring and evaluation. Her experience has mainly been with student movements, community based and non-governmental organizations, coalitions and government. In that time she has been exposed to different approaches and paradigms namely (1) integrated approach to development, (2) human rights based approach, (3) gender mainstreaming, (4) feminist approach and ideology (5) indigenous knowledge systems and post-colonialism.

She is also a spoken word artist and a traditional singer and praiser. She has also founded various organizations, collectives and coalitions and sits in various boards of national, regional and international organizations and networks. She is a qualified sangoma, known as gogo Solomon Shabangu by initiation empandeni yamaJoye, bondabezitha, umthunzomuhle, ekhaya likababa uNkunzemnyama insizwa kaSangweni. She currently lectures political science and public policy in the International and Public Affairs Cluster of the School of Social Sciences, University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. She has a PhD with the University of KwaZulu Natal in Gender Studies and is an alumni of the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland in the doctoral field of social and public policy.