Kay Mahonde is the Strategic Initiatives Manager at ISLA, responsible for the Producing Knowledge for Strategic Litigation and Strengthening Capacity to Litigate Strategically. She Joined ISLA, as a Legal Researcher in the Violence Against Women programme, in 2016.

Following her studies at the Wits Law School and the Mandela Institute, she worked at BirdLife South Africa and the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS), Lawyers against Abuse and POWA. At CALS, she became a Bertha “Be Just” Initiative, which trains and supports human rights movement lawyering.

Kay’s professional trajectory has included working on issues such as access to housing, education and sanitation; violence against women, sexual violence in schools, alcohol-related gender-based violence (GBV), the role and functions of the national task team on GBV, environmental justice and the rule of law.

She aims to be a movement lawyer that engages with the disparity existing between law and access to justice for women and is interested in the relationships between social movements and the law.