Through an interactive panel of key 1980s activists and young women, critical reflections of the SA women’s movements will be made. The focus will be on the creative learnings of the vibrant past, current challenges and concrete action to build sustainable feminist movements in response to current South African feminist movements, which are fragmented or non-existent.

The objective of this session is to contribute to the empowerment of the Arab women’s rights movement through promoting and creating multigenerational dialogue between young and more experienced women. It hopes to encourage multi-generational dialogue and an examination of the movement from different perspectives, but also to present concrete ideas that will allow for continued dialogue in the coming years.

This session will discuss the lessons and challenges of the past two decades of organizing among women home-based and informal workers in Southeast Asia and the rest of the globe. Materials will include case studies which highlight innovative approaches captured through interactive presentations, video clips and/or other audiovisual materials.

This session begins with a panel of five women from different generations. These women will briefly share their experiential learning, as opposed to expert advise, on feminist collaboration work in the South. In the spirit of exploring new ways of doing, being, and collaborating, the panelists will exchange presentations with each other. As such, each will present their construction of another panelist's position and then give reactions to that position. The panel is then devolved and the session becomes an interactive group discussion. This discussion is directed at surfacing feminist notions of critical South-to-South collaborations derived from social movement experiences. To ensure parity of participation among all participants at the session, creative facilitation techniques will be utilized.

We will present a short documentary on the impact of our Binti Football Club which introduces girls to feminism, human rights, personal empowerment and activism in an appealing way. Participants will then be invited to take part in a football match to introduce a discussion on teamwork and movement building.

The session will seek practical answers to the question of how to overcome fragementation and build inclusive movements within multicultural environments that share national histories of oppression and marginalization (as in the case of black and indigenous peoples in Latin America) through examples of movement building using Afro-Ecuadorian ethno-education and bilingual intercultural education. The aim of the session is to develop proposals with practical plans for organizations that strive towards interculturalism and inter-generationality.

This session will highlight the challenges faced in establishing an effective women's movement within the Eastern Cape province and how these challenges are being addressed. The discussion will include the need to build a movement that is sustainable and recognizes the diverse needs of women in the province.

This session will bring together women’s rights leaders to share successful strategies they have used for resource mobilization, pitfalls to avoid, and practical means to manage the funds transparently. This session will offer the leaders of women's organizations (especially of the small and lesser experienced ones) a unique opportunity to understand why they may be having trouble finding funding and how to overcome such challenges using proven strategies.

Four HIV+ African women discuss the themes of sexual/reproductive health and rights, access to treatment care and support, positive prevention and stigma & HIV criminalization. They will share their experiences of building Positive Women’s movements from the grassroots level while working on the above specific themes.

most scholarship on sexual rights in available in English, much of the activism around sexual rights has been limited to the English speaking audiences. In order to have a sexual rights movement that is global in reach, however, the hegemony of English needs to be broken by building scholarship and activism on sexuality and sexual rights across languages. This panel will focus on the role of language played in the context of the Sexual Rights movement. Each presenter will present on the work he/she has done in the region on sexuality and sexual rights and strategies for making scholarships on sexuality and sexual rights available in a language other than English, and the impact their work has had in their regions.

Participants will represent organizations using the internet, mass media and edutainment to create awareness and mobilization to bring about social change. They will share their experiences/ tools and evaluate their efficacy. Proposed panel organizations: Breakthrough, Puntos, Soul City and Unifem.

Acceptance of the sex worker movement, as a feminist association, has been hotly debated for the past two decades. This session will examing the complexities and contradictions within and between sex worker's and women’s movements. Participants will leave with a much richer understanding of how feminist debates have been polarized around two oppositional positions—one that promotes women’s rights through abolitionist principles and another that promotes sex workers rights, as a part of the women’s movement, through decriminalization and legalization policies and principles. This session will acknowledge the polarization of the debate but try to open up discussion about the various feminist positions related to sex work and the women’s movement that are being explored. It will examine the changes, challenges and contradictions that have emerged through policies, ideologies and programming practices with the aim of seeing where solidarity can surface so that women’s rights are more effectively supported across such lines of debate.

This interactive session will share concrete strategies and advocacy efforts to resist and challenge religious fundamentalisms in different regional and religious contexts. Presenters will focus on learnings and strategies that can be adapted by women's rights advocates across regions. The session will also discuss what we can learn about the ways religious fundamentalist projects operate so as to better equip ourselves to launch effective counteractions. Members of the audience will be invited to ask questions and share their own experiences.

Four representatives from crises countries will share experiences in order to shape a strategy on movement-building for crisis and countries in transition, particularly in Southern Africa. The idea is to strengthen the strategy for the countries in the region. This is because women organizing in contexts of crisis and transition often find it lonely and overwhelming. This is therefore an opportunity to help women in Angola, DRC, Swaziland and Zimbabwe to come up with strategies that work.come up with strategies that work.

The panel will begin with a background presentation on the history of international and national campaigns for abortion rights since the 1970s and how medical abortion has been incorporated since it came to the attention of the women's movement. This presentation will emphasize how the opportunities were identified and how decisions were made to single out potential allies. Two presentations will discuss how Eastern Europe and Latin America have been making medical abortion increasingly accessible through formal and informal channels despite legal and political barriers.This session will host an interactive panel that includes 4 speakers and a moderator. Participation from the audience as well as questions directed toward the panelists will be a substantial part of the session.

Grassroots leaders from large-scale movements of poor and limited income women for local community development will discuss their lessons learned in achieving self-representation. They will reflect on the tensions, successes and lessons learned in partnering with donors, policy institutions, other social movements and feminist, NGO-led movements.

Mapping is a participatory organizing tool developed by homeworkers from countries in Europe, Asia and Latin America to both build their organizations and understand supply chains. This session will explain the methodology and give participants the opportunity to try it out.

Five activists take participants through a mini power-analysis exercise , as an experiential illustration of the methodology underlying JASS' multi-regional feminist movement-building initiative. Unlike the purely technical path that has tended to dissipate women's change efforts over the past decade , this approach re-politicizes thinking , strategies and action.

This session will examine the opportunities, obstacles and challenges in using laws and legal mechanisms as focal points for action. The International Women's Tribune Centre will discuss its efforts in constituency building around Resolutions 1325 and 1820, and how it is linked to promoting national accountability to these international laws. International Women's Rights Action Watch Asia Pacific will talk about the relevance of the rights framework on movement building and the claiming of rights at the national level, based on their experience working with groups from around the world. The Global Justice Centre will speak about the dichotomy between international legal guarantees for women in international tribunals vs. domestic guarantees (or lack thereof), using its work in Sierra Leone and Iraq as examples. 

Strengthening women's leadership is the cornerstone of a viable movement for advancing women's rights, and essential to creating a just and peaceful world. Four organizations—Women's Learning Partnership (WLP), Center for Women's Global Leadership (CWGL), CREA, and Association for Women's Rights In Development (AWID)—are among the leading organizations working on women's leadership development. They will discuss their conceptual framework and programs for promoting women's leadership, and share the methodology, outcomes, and key challenges to their work. Participants will engage in collective brainstorming to discuss strategies for expanding women's participation in decision-making at all levels.

Five Global Fund for Women Advisors from different regions of the world present case studies of successes and challenges in building feminist movement(s). Issues of leadership, ideological polarization within and outside of the movement(s), political environments, poor communications systems, and lack of financial resources will be addressed among others. Case studies in political organizing, labor movements, LGBTIQ organizing, gender violence, and peace-building advocacy provide specific examples of the realities of feminist movement building.

This panel brings together organizers dealing with the interconnections between homelessness, poverty and violence in women's lives. With millions of people living in shacks in South Africa, housing is an urgent issue that is crucial to further movement building between feminist organizers. This strategy session includes film screenings from movements.

An enjoyable and practical workshop in which participants can reflect upon shared experience and strengthen analyses in relation to transnational network organizing. Working together participants will define key elements of successful transnational networks that strengthen women’s ability to call national and international actors to account on women’s rights.

In this panel discussion, participants from the New Zealand Disability Coalition Against Violence describe the coalition from an initial acknowledgment of the gaps, to a description of how it was formed by disabled women. As we describe how the coalition has begun to operate, we will encourage substantial participation from disabled and non-disabled women in the audience so we can share experiences.

This interactive panel comprised of young and established women activists will look critically at one of the world’s largest women’s movements. How has it survived over 150 years? The session will share lessons learned on how the movement has evolved and sustained itself while exploring the inter-generational issues faced by women’s organizations and women’s movements.

This interactive session will share concrete strategies and advocacy efforts to resist and challenge religious fundamentalisms in different regional and religious contexts. Presenters will focus on learnings and strategies that can be adapted by women's rights advocates across regions. The session will also discuss what we can learn about the ways religious fundamentalist projects operate so as to better equip ourselves to launch effective counteractions. Members of the audience will be invited to ask questions and share their own experiences.

In this session, the organizers of the Observatorios de la Transgresión Feminista, held in Nicaragua, Mexico and Costa Rica, will share lessons and insights about feminist movement-building garnered from these innovative experiences.

The power of the internet for advocacy and organizing has long been recognized by women's movements to document abuses, redefine history, build knowledge and connections, and amplify the pressure for change. New directions in movement building are harnessing internet social networking tools for women's empowerment. This interactive debate with feminist internet activists will explore interconnections between the internet and women's rights. It will examine the feminist and subversive nature of social networking and web 2.0 tools to better understand how technology and virtual spaces are really political spaces for women to claim.

Join representatives from the Women's Funding Network, the Bulgarian Women's Fund, and Ellen Sprenger, a well-known strategist, for a lively and intimate discussion on how social change happens, how to plan social change work, and how to measure impact. Using a social change framework, our small group of approximately 15 people will have the opportunity to learn with interactive exercises and will view a web-based evaluation tool. Those who are interested will have the opportunity to receive one-on-one mini-consultations on how to use the social change framework to improve their work and to share their impact.

Women from Mexican feminist, indigenous,and rural people's movements will come together to organize a strategic session with the aims of: analysing common threats to fully exercising women's rights in the world, caused by governmental repression and fundamentalist action; balancing the opportunities and challenges of coordination among women of different social movements; and designing possible actions and mechanisms for emergency intervention.

This interactive panel presents the DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) Debates on feminisms within women’s movements, and specifically aims at thinking through the strategic questions of what the new geopolitical terrain is, and how women's movements can engage in global policy advocacy.

Arab women have built a new movement to end violence against women, calling it 'Karama,' the Arabic word for 'dignity.' Building on their hard work and experience as activists in their home countries, women across the Middle East and North Africa have developed Karama nationally, regionally, and globally through face-to-face consultations, conferences, and advocacy before their national governments, the Arab League, and the UN. By convening, fostering women's analysis of violence, then implementing joint campaigns from the community level up to CEDAW, the Karama model builds trust, creates a shared vision to end violence against women, and raises the visibility and leadership of Arab women to national, regional, and global arenas. Karama brings together women activists, academics, opinion-makers, and community leaders, strengthens and amplifies their voices, fosters regional awareness, consciousness, and trust, and creates a platform for women to work together and take full control of their futures.

This session explores the opportunities for building and sustaining women’s movements through the use of the Optional Protocol to CEDAW as a tool for protecting and promoting women's human rights.

Urgent Action Fund-Africa and Urgent Action Fund join together for a session using UAF’s groundbreaking research on sustainability to stage a dynamic dialogue about women activists’ strategies for keeping safe, healthy and sane. We conclude with practical ideas about ensuring our movements make safety and well-being central to our activism.

A speak-out is a powerful/empowering technique used to give voice to oppression. One common thing among women at the AWID Forum from different countries and cultures, is that they unknowingly oppress and marginalize women with disabilities. This session raises awareness and demonstrates ways to become allies of disabled women.

Women activists from around the world have come together to strategize and propose actions at the global level in a systematic way for several decades. This highly interactive session seeks to bring a variety of activists together to discuss ways to build effective alliances and learn from each other using art and culture as a means of organizing on the ground. We plan a session to highlight the leadership models of the Indigenous women's movement, the Roma women's movement and community-based women's organizations.

Based on the Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR) international comparative research on sexuality in Muslim societies, this session will look at sexual rights movements in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to explore how these movements are built, their strategies, and the extent to which they are successful in national contexts.

Our session is aimed at building skills on how to use new media - blogs, podcasts and video - for advocacy purposes specifically for LGBT and women's issues. We will discuss techniques we used for LGBT advocacy in Kyrgyzstan and success stories from other organizations.

This session will explore the Southern African movement for the sexual rights of girls and women and provide a space for the sharing of strategies and experiences of women's rights organizations in Namibia and Zimbabwe, as well as the development of new strategies and joint campaigns across our borders.

An artistic workshop requiring participation on any instrument to develop and strengthen creativity in musicanship and sound exploration. This session will be directed by Edwina Thorne with Dr Marilyn Waring assisting with performance skills. Language is not a barrier but basic music skills and understanding is needed by participants.