The Emang Basadi Women's Association came into formal existence in 1986 to lobby against laws that discriminated against women in Botswana. Its catalyst was the enactment of the 1982 Citizenship Amendment Act, which sought to deny women married to non-citizen men the right to pass their citizenship to their offspring. The idea of lobbying and organising against this law was the brainchild of Athaliah Lesiba Molokomme. She was then a lecturer in the Department of Law at the University of Botswana, where she taught family law. Mobilisation against this law grew and grew, and led to Emang Basadi becoming a powerful and transformative national institution at a critical time. The number of educated young Batswana had grown substantially; 20 years of successful post-independence planned development and modernising education were bearing fruit, and a new breed of civil society organisations was emerging as a result. Nevertheless, until the birth of Emang Basadi, most women had silently endured gender-based inequalities, which were being exacerbated by the incorporation of their society into a global capitalist system that had transformed Botswana into a labour reserve economy.