Sthandiwe 'Stha' Yeni
“I believe that to reach a world free of racial inequality and discrimination we need to strengthen and support the power of those that are marginalized to drive the change.”
Sthandiwe “Stha” Yeni is an independent researcher currently studying for a PhD at the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, University of the Western Cape. She holds a Masters in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her areas of research include land reform, politics of the commons, small-scale agriculture and climate change, and meanings of land
Stha has 15 years of experience in civil society organisations, working on land and agrarian transformation. She was the national coordinator for Tshintsha Amakhaya, a network of ten civil society organizations working on land, water and food justice in rural South Africa. Prior to that, she worked as a rural transformation project manager at Oxfam South Africa, and as a researcher at the Land and Accountability Research Centre at the University of Cape Town. She is a 2018 inaugural Atlantic Fellow for Racial Equity and the 2021 Next Generation Social Sciences Research Fellow.