Sibusisiwe Ndlela is human rights lawyer and an Attorney of the High Court of South Africa. Her primary areas of expertise are in sexual and reproductive justice and environmental justice (including water and sanitation).

She has experience running strategic litigation cases in South Africa, including on universal access to maternal and child health care services; HIV discrimination in employment; and access to medicines. She has also made parliamentary submissions on the universal health coverage under the National Health Insurance Bill and on the decriminalisation of sex work. She also has experience in developing and running advocacy programmes.

She has worked as a health lawyer in the Health Rights Programme at SECTION27, a law researcher at the Supreme Court of Appeal (South Africa), a legal intern in the Strategic Litigation Unit at Lawyers for Human Rights, and a candidate attorney at ENSAfrica. She has also consulted for the Sexual and Reproductive Justice Coalition.

She has an LLB from the University of Cape Town and an LLM (Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Africa) (with distinction) from the University of Pretoria. She is currently reading towards her PhD (Environmental Law) at the University of the Witwatersrand. Her research uses a decolonial ecofeminist lens to interpret the South African Government’s human rights obligations as they pertain to sanitation.

Sibusisiwe’s career aspirations involve shifting prevailing dominant narratives and developing feminist jurisprudence, which both centre on breaking away from the colonial and rethinking what it means to be African, especially for women and sexual and gender minorities.

Sibusisiwe joins ISLA as a Legal Officer in the Asserting Contested Rights sub-priority area where she will be supporting the organisation to establish and strengthen an ACR Network of Lawyers.

In her free time, Sibusisiwe enjoys boxing, spa treatments, and binge-watching reality TV.