BUILDING FEMINIST MOVEMENTS AND ORGANIZATIONS

Background

Given the challenges present in the current global context, women’s organizations and movements must be stronger than ever to hold the line on past advances and continue to push for making women’s rights a reality. Negative external forces, limited resources, and other factors have all taken a toll on women’s organizations. Many women’s rights activists agree that organizational weaknesses and fragmentation have limited the possibilities for collective action. While there is a valid critique of the “NGO-ization” of women’s and other movements, organizations do play a critical role in social movements. How can we reshape the tools we use to strengthen women’s organizing—both within and beyond formal organizations— to advance feminist agendas and respond to diverse contexts?

Outcomes

• Women’s organizations are more effective through deeper understanding and active incorporation of movement-building approaches to their work.
• Women’s organizations are better able to analyze their strategies and to present compelling evidence of the value and impact of their work.

Activities in 2010

Concepts and Practices of Women’s Movements:

• Revise and expand the publication Changing Their World by commissioning new case studies of women’s movements working either with specific constituencies of women, or in intensely challenging contexts.
• Generate discussion and debate re-examining and clarifying concepts related to movements, movement-building, and women’s movements in institutes, trainings and meetings of women’s organizations.

Organizational Strengthening: Feminist Approaches to Monitoring and Evaluation

AWID’s Where is the Money for Women’s Rights? initiative demonstrates that commonly used monitoring and evaluation (M&E) tools are often too rigid or linear, and fail to effectively capture the depth, complexity, impact and value of women’s organizing.

• Discussion papers critiquing current M&E frameworks as experienced by women’s organizations and movements worldwide based on a review of existing M&E processes and related literature.
• Participatory research with grantees of the MDG3 Fund, which was created by the Dutch Government and is the single largest fund ever created for gender equality in the history of development cooperation. Working with the grantees, AWID will define strategies to effectively capture both lessons about and changes in advancing gender equality and women’s rights that the MDG3 Fund projects generate and to harvest insights into how women’s organizations contribute to make change happen.

Strategic Initiative Team

Srilatha Batliwala – Associate Scholar and Lead Researcher
Sanushka Mudaliar – Manager