About

amandla.mobi leads campaigns that build real power for Black people, with a particular focus on low-income Black women. We challenge injustice by bringing together our community in critical moments to take targeted, co-ordinated and strategic action to bring real change. Our work is to connect people so that our collective voices have maximum impact and power to hold political and corporate interests to account and advance solutions that build a more just and people-powered Mzansi. Together for justice!

Learn more about our work here or sign up here.

 

 

The Team

Koketso Moeti
Founding Executive Director

Koketso Moeti has a long background in civic activism and has over the years worked at the intersection of governance, communication and citizen action. She currently serves as the Founding Executive Director of amandla.mobi. Prior to this, Moeti worked and consulted for a wide range of national and international organisations. In 2024 she was announced as an inaugural New Voices Advanced Advocacy Fellow. She is also an inaugural Keseb democracy Fellow; Mulago Foundation Rainer Arnhold fellow; inaugural Collective Action in Tech fellow, Atlantic fellow for racial equity; inaugural Obama Foundation fellow and an Aspen Institute New Voices senior fellow. Koketso also serves as a member of WITNESS’ Board of Directors; an expert Advisor to the World Economic Forum’s ‘Partnering with Civil Society in the Fourth Industrial Revolution‘ initiative and a founding reference group member for the Civic Tech Innovation Network.

She is an alumnus of the Inclusive Global Leadership Initiative (IGLI) summer institute, hosted by the Sié Chéou-Kang Center at the University of Denver. When not working, Moeti can be found writing and has been published by The Guardian, City Press, Project Syndicate, the Mail & Guardian, NPR and Al Jazeera, among others.

Paul Mason
Partnerships and Tech Manager

Johannesburg-born civic entrepreneur Paul has spent the last 12 years working on campaigns in South Africa and abroad, connecting people with tools to make a difference. Paul specialises in crowdfunding, digital campaigning, and strategy. He previously worked in the aid and development sector, where he helped run national advocacy campaigns on UN Millennium Development Goals and grassroots HIV/AIDS peer education programmes.

Tlou Seopa
Senior Campaigner

Tlou Seopa is a Senior Campaigner at amandla.mobi and a lead on economic justice campaigns.

With a journalism background, she is a firm believer in the power of accountability and justice. She takes an interest in social advocacy for women, as she believes that women are powerful and are more than capable of changing South Africa and the world for the better.

In 2022, Tlou was listed as one of the Mail & Guardian Top 200 Young South Africans in the Politics and Government category. The award was due to her work on social grants campaigns, including one she led in 2020 during the height of COVID-19, demanding an increase in the Child Support Grant. She dedicates most of her spare time to reading and writing.

Palesa Ramolefo
Campaigner

Palesa Ramolefo is a Campaigner at amandla.mobi and the lead on Health, GBV & Food Justice campaigns. 

A feminist thinker who moves by the belief that if the lives of black women in Africa are improved, then everyone else’s life is improved. She is a journalism graduate and believes in the power of storytelling and art as tools for social change. Palesa is a 2022 Sowetan Unsung Hero and 2019 amandla.mobi fellow.

Zintle Tyuku
Lead Member Engagement Officer

Zintle Tyuku has a long background working for NGOs that use the media to educate and inform communities on health, school curriculum based and socio-economic issues. She has previously focused on messaging and creating narratives for HIV and AIDS programmes for radio. She has extensive experience in radio content production, script writing and managing various radio programmes. Her work included running social mobilisation programmes in communities through various workshops and training programmes. She is currently a Member Engagement Officer at amandla.mobi and has previously worked for organisations such as Tekano, Mindset Network, Soul City and more.

Thabisile Miya
awethu.mobi Coordinator 

Thabisile Miya is passionate about using digital media for advocacy. Her activism was ignited during the #FeesMustFall era. The glaring lack of accountability and unwillingness to prioritise and advance black people demonstrated by the government pushed her towards working in civil society and being on the side of those who can hold government to account. Thabisile is a graduate of the amandla.mobi campaigner fellowship and is also part of the 2020 ASRI future leaders cohort. She has a media studies honours degree and hopes to further her studies in the media and gender space. Being at amandla has helped her further understand the deep-rooted inequalities Black women from low-income backgrounds face.

Tebogo Malatji
Member Engagement officer

Tebogo Malatji grew up in a Township, a place where the daily struggles of black people, especially women, were constantly in her face. The injustice she grew up witnessing is what sparked her activism. She has been involving herself in anything that aims to improve the lives of many living in South Africa who live under the same conditions she grew up in. She believes in the power of communities mobilizing and coming together to hold people they elected into leadership positions accountable, and that was what led her to amandla.mobi. She was also a part of the amandla.mobi 2020 fellowship programme

Shilla Zhou
Office Cleaning Staff

Shilla Zhou’s hobbies include reading novels and watching television. She is interested in pursuing home-based care and describes caring for her husband and two children as very important to her.

The Board

Nomzamo Zondo

Board Chair

Nomzamo is the Executive Director at the Socio-Economic Rights Institute (SERI), where she leads a multidisciplinary team using research, advocacy and litigation to support movements fighting to end inequality and realise socio-economic rights. As a human rights lawyer, she has played a key role in representing the families and miners affected by the Marikana Massacre and street traders in Johannesburg. Nomzamo brings a deep understanding of using the law to hold government and corporate power to account and is an asset to amandla.mobi’s long-term strategic goals. Nomzamo holds an LLB degree from the University of the Witwatersrand and served her articles of clerkship with the Wits Law Clinic. She was admitted as an attorney in 2008.

Nomzamo Zondo is obsessed with fighting the system that strips people of what they need to not only survive, but also thrive – while also attempting to silence them. She is motivated by the strength and resilience of the communities she works with.

Adèle Kirsten

Board Secretary

Adèle Kirsten has been a non-violent, social justice activist for over thirty years in South Africa. She joined the anti-apartheid movement in the 1970s. She is a founding member of Gun Free South Africa (GFSA) and became its Director in March 1995 (until 2002, returning in 2013). Adèle was responsible for helping build the organisation into a national NGO, which together with the Gun Control Alliance, played an important role in advocating for stricter gun laws in South Africa. In November 2000, the Firearms Control Act was passed.

In 2008, her book on the history of GFSA, ‘A Nation without Guns? The Story of Gun Free South Africa’ was published by UKZN Press. In the field of small arms control as a researcher and analyst: she was appointed to several advisory boards, notably the UK Department for International Development Armed Violence and Poverty Initiative as well as the OECD Advisory panel on armed violence reduction. She was also a research associate with the Institute of Security Studies and has published several papers on strategies to reduce gun violence including an evaluation of firearms amnesties in South Africa.

From 2008 to 2010 she was Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation. In 2016 she was appointed to the Marikana Panel of Experts to provide input into and guide the review of the use of less-lethal weapons by the Public Order Police (POP) units in South Africa.

Luke Jordan

Board Member

Luke Jordan heads new products and pricing at Taptap Send, a global remittances start-up. Previously he was a Practitioner in Residence with MIT’s Governance Lab, a staff member at the World Bank and a consultant at McKinsey. He wrote ‘Don’t Build It’, a guide to civic tech product development, contributed to the volume, ‘Ethics in Design and Communication’, on designing and building with low-income communities, and has published on the use of AI for municipal bond valuation, aid project evaluation, and in government in general.

In South Africa, Luke founded and built Grassroot, a non-profit start-up that enabled people without smartphones to engage government. It reached two and a half million users and is now operated by, amandla.mobi, where Luke remains a Board member.

How we’re funded

Amandla.mobi is funded by values-aligned donors, philanthropists, and small donations from our members. Click this link to learn more about how we are funded. Our multi-year funders include the following: