Fikile Vilakazi PhD

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, and traditional and energy healing. She had an opportunity to do student support and mentoring, fieldwork, outreach programs, community mobilization, building partnerships, manage and directing programs.

Dr. Fikile Vilakazi has six years of that period dedicated to fundraising, directing an organization, providing strategic direction to processes, and 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. During 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.

Dr. Fikile Vilakazi is also a spoken word artist and a traditional singer and praiser. She has also founded various organizations, collectives, and coalitions and sits on various boards of national, regional, and international organizations and networks. She is a qualified sangoma, known as gogo Solomon Shabangu by initiation Empangeni yamaJoye, bondabezitha, umthunzomuhle, ekhaya likababa uNkunzemnyama insizwa kaSangweni. She currently lectures on 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 Ph.D. from the University of KwaZulu Natal in Gender Studies and is an alumnus of the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland in the doctoral field of social and public policy.