Founding members Stella Dadzie, Olive Morris and Gail Lewis created OWAAD to be an independent, national, umbrella organisation of Black women.

[9] OWAAD organised around multiple issues impacting both Black and Asian Women, such as domestic violence, children's rights in school, anti-Black discrimination within policing, and immigration and deportation.

OWAAD joined the campaign against Section 4 of the 1824 Vagrancy Act which enabled police officers discretionary power to arrest anyone they deemed as suspicious.

This gave British police and the UK Criminal Justice System the power to arrest, charge and convict someone for walking down the street.

The documentary film “The Ultimate Test” found that several thousands of African-American women were unaware they were participating in clinical trials of the drug.

These virginity tests were used to determine the outcome of a woman's application with the added restrictions of the Immigration Act 1971 that increased discriminatory practices to limit non-white Commonwealth migrants.

[13] The first OWAAD conference in 1979 was held in Brixton at the Abeng Centre in Gresham Road with a panel of speakers on education, employment, immigration, the health service and more.

[22][23] In 2023, Modern Art Oxford commissioned Valerie Asiimwe Amani, a Tanzanian artist and writer, for their summer programme "Boundary Encounters", for which she created an immersive installation in response to the OWAAD archive of newsletters and journals.