Networking sisterhood, from the informal to the global: AkiDwA, the African and Migrant Women's Network, Ireland

In this article we document the networking strategies of Ireland's leading migrant women's organization, AkiDwA - the African and Migrant Women's Network. We begin by positing networking as a process of agency and transformation and argue for the heuristic potential of 'network' in unpacking the gendered experiences of migration. Employing theoretical and ethnographic tools, we position AkiDwA as key to understanding how migrant women have been addressing discrimination, isolation, exclusion, violence and racism, through promoting gendered and culturally sensitive services and policies. We outline three phases in AkiDwA's development since the onset of immigration in the 1990s, from the informal to the global, situating it as the hub of overlapping national and global networks of migrant women, spanning Ireland, Europe and beyond. We conclude by suggesting that network analysis, rather than being a general grand theory, allows us to develop the micro-macro links that, as Robert Holton argues, bring together small worlds with larger structures. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership