From human rights to music: How Esra’a Al Shafei is building safe spaces for the marginalised
Esra’a Al Shafei is a renowned Bahraini human rights activist combining digital and on-ground activism to deliver rights and protections to the marginalised in the Gulf countries. There are no easy parts to what she does, as a result her identity is hidden to protect herself and her family. She speaks to Inspiring Open’s Betty Kankam-Boadu about her life and work.
At nine years old, Esra’a Al Shafei became aware of the injustices in her society when she witnessed the mistreatment of a migrant worker. In the Gulf Cooperation Council countries also known as GCC where she is from, it is open knowledge that migrants who move there for work end up becoming literally enslaved and this slavery is normalized. She knew how unfair that was and wanted to be a part of the solution even at that tender age.
When she started using the internet as a teenager, she quickly realised the power it holds to share and collect information across the world and that was “empowering” for her.
Coming from Bahrain a country that commits human rights violation as well as the suppression of freedom of expression, the opportunity to reach more marginalised people and hear their stories directly rather than read them from the mainstream media fascinated her and that is when she began building platforms.
Al Shafei has since built many platforms over the years but the ones that have really defined her work are Migrant-Rights.org, Mideastunes.com and Ahwaa . These platforms like the ones she has built in the past are to give voice, community and freedoms to the marginalised people in the Gulf region to live freely and express themselves.
When almost everybody told her the exploitation of migrants on whose backs the GCC build was not her problem to fix, she thought otherwise.
Migrants workers are refused legal aid, healthcare and even their wages. Some are not allowed to go back home because their passports are seized and some lose their lives.
In a move to do something about this, Al Shafei built Migrant-Rright.org in 2010 to document information on the abuse of migrant workers. Over the years the platform has “expanded to connecting migrant workers with on-the-ground resources for relief support, urgent care and whatnot. So that’s something that really emboldens, for me, the power and impact of online collaboration and networking.”
Being a member of the LGBT+ community in a place like the Gulf is not the safest. In order for people who identify as such have a convivial environment where they “felt invited to share very deep stories, meaningful stories about how they deal with their identity, and reconcile that with their faith, with their society, with their culture, with their upbringing,” Al Shafei created Ahwaa. She admits this was one of the hardest initiatives to tackle because of the sensitive nature of the subject.
“It was very challenging, because this was a literal life and death situation also, for a lot of the people, and it required complete and utter anonymity. And how do you build a platform that embraces anonymity, without it being turned into a troll factory? So, that was something that was very difficult, because we wanted to build a place that had that sense of intimacy, that sense of community, at the same time without really knowing who you are,” She says.
Ahwaa now has about 11,000 users and the platform thought not perfect or bulletproof has been significant in building a community for LGBT+ people while giving them a sense of anonymity.
When people think of the Gulf, they think about so many stereotypical things perpetrated by the media but not music. Al Shafei says music from the tribes in the Gulf that tells of their struggles, hopes and pain most often are not mainstreamed. She wanted to share this music which is considered underground to the rest of the world and that birthed Mideastunes.
“The platform became possible as a result of a local Bahraini band called Smouldering and Forgotten. And they were one of the first bands that would sing heavy metal and black metal in classical Arabic, which was very unique. And this moulding of different cultures that I thought was just very interesting, and also very underappreciated and underrepresented online. I built Mideast Tunes to bring these voices together. And when I built it, it stayed up for about three weeks. And I realised, well maybe new artists want to join themselves rather than me finding them and curating it on my own. We created a join button, and the next day we had 40 artists, the one after that 80, 100,” She said.
Now, Mideastunes is a home for thousands of independent artistes who didn’t feel at home on other platforms.
Keeping these platforms running and maintained has not been easy for Al Shafei from out of her own pocket to support from some external funders, sourcing funds for technologists coming from the Global South is not a piece of cake. Developers from this part of the world still struggle to access funding despite their excellent capabilities.
“I don’t have a reason for why that is,” Al Shafei says. “Because I feel that we have proved very much our capabilities for many years, and sometimes even 10 years you’re building something, and you are trying to raise even as little as $10,000, which in the context of these types of platforms is not much. You see a small civil society organisation that just popped up in San Francisco or in DC, and immediately they get $25-million to do something that is not as widespread or international or needed. And it’s very wasteful, but it’s also not equitable, it’s not accessible, and it’s nowhere near fair the way that philanthropy today functions.”
To help alleviate this challenge she has co-founded Numun Fund which focuses on funding initiative from the Global South and other parts of the world ignored by corporate, philanthropy organizations.
Al Shafei’s digital activism would not have been possible without the access to open software and resources.
Everything that I’ve ever built has been through accessibility of an open framework and that just made it that you can also be creator and not just a consumer. And for me, that’s really the beauty of Open. In many different shapes and forms. It’s just having an open framework, an open platform, an open philosophy to everything that you do, celebrates that diversity and that collaborative spirit that really gets highlighted in the type of platforms that you see today,” She says.
She envisions a Bahrain where the platforms she builds are not needed. A Bahrain “that doesn’t punish differences, whether it’s differences of identity of opinion, of religion, of social status.”
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