Biography
Sithandiwe (Stha) Yeni holds a Master’s degree in Development Studies from the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam and an MPhil in Land and Agrarian Studies from PLAAS. Stha was previously the national coordinator of Tshintsha Amakhaya, a network of 10 civil society organisations working on land, water and food justice, where she ran policy advocacy and campaign and worked to strengthen critical consciousness of rural activists. Prior to that, she was rural transformation programme manager at Oxfam South Africa and a researcher at the Land and Accountability Research Centre (LARC) at the University of Cape Town, looking at mining rights and land rights violations by traditional leaders in rural villages. During her time at LARC she was a lead researcher and narrator in the documentary film This Land, which highlights land rights violations by chiefs and resistance by the villagers. She is also a doctoral fellow at the Centre for Humanities Research (UWC), member of Young African Researchers in Agriculture (YARA) and Collective of Agrarian Scholar-Activists from the South (CASAS). She occasionally writes opinion articles for the Daily Maverick, Mail and Guardian and The Witness.