UN Women / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Guatemala - Rural Women Diversify Incomes and Build Resilience
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Priority Areas

Supporting feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements to thrive, to be a driving force in challenging systems of oppression, and to co-create feminist realities.

Building Feminist Economies

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Building Feminist Economies is about creating a world with clean air to breath and water to drink, with meaningful labour and care for ourselves and our communities, where we can all enjoy our economic, sexual and political autonomy.

In the world we live in today, the economy continues to rely on women’s unpaid and undervalued care work for the profit of others. The pursuit of “growth” only expands extractivism - a model of development based on massive extraction and exploitation of natural resources that keeps destroying people and planet while concentrating wealth in the hands of global elites. Meanwhile, access to healthcare, education, a decent wage and social security is becoming a privilege to few. This economic model sits upon white supremacy, colonialism and patriarchy.

Adopting solely a “women’s economic empowerment approach” is merely to integrate women deeper into this system. It may be a temporary means of survival. We need to plant the seeds to make another world possible while we tear down the walls of the existing one.

We believe in the ability of feminist movements to work for change with broad alliances across social movements. By amplifying feminist proposals and visions, we aim to build new paradigms of just economies.

Our approach must be interconnected and intersectional, because sexual and bodily autonomy will not be possible until each and every one of us enjoys economic rights and independence. We aim to work with those who resist and counter the global rise of the conservative right and religious fundamentalisms as no just economy is possible until we shake the foundations of the current system.

Our Actions

Our work challenges the system from within and exposes its fundamental injustices:

  • Advance feminist agendas: We counter corporate power and impunity for human rights abuses by working with allies to ensure that we put forward feminist, women’s rights and gender justice perspectives in policy spaces. For example, learn more about our work on the future international legally binding instrument on “transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights” at the United Nations Human Rights Council.

  • Mobilize solidarity actions: We work to strengthen the links between feminist and tax justice movements, including reclaiming the public resources lost through illicit financial flows (IFFs) to ensure social and gender justice.

  • Build knowledge: We provide women human rights defenders (WHRDs) with strategic information vital to challenge corporate power and extractivism. We will contribute to build the knowledge about local and global financing and investment mechanisms fuelling extractivism.

  • Create and amplify alternatives: We engage and mobilize our members and movements in visioning feminist economies and sharing feminist knowledges, practices and agendas for economic justice.

“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”.

Arundhati Roy, War Talk

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Before you begin

Before starting the WITM research methodology, it is important you prepare the background and know what to expect.

Capacity

With AWID’s WITM research methodology, we recommend that you first review the entire toolkit.

While this toolkit is designed to democratize WITM research, there are capacity constraints related to resources and research experience that may affect your organization’s ability use this methodology.

Use the “Ready to Go?” Worksheet to assess your readiness to begin your own WITM research. The more questions you can answer on this worksheet, the more prepared you are to undertake your research.

Trust

Before beginning any research, we recommend that you assess your organization’s connections and trust within your community.

In many contexts, organizations may be hesitant to openly share financial data with others for reasons ranging from concerns about how the information will be used, to fear of funding competition and anxiety over increasing government restrictions on civil society organizations.

As you build relationships and conduct soft outreach in the lead-up to launching your research, ensuring that your objectives are clear will be useful in creating trust. Transparency will allow participants to understand why you are collecting the data and how it will benefit the entire community.

We highly recommend that you ensure data is collected confidentially and shared anonymously. By doing so, participants will be more comfortable sharing sensitive information with you. 

First step

1. Gather your resources

We also recommend referring to our “Ready to Go?” Worksheet to assess your own progress.

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Join Us

Join Us

By joining AWID, you are becoming part of worldwide feminist organizing, a collective power that is rooted in working across movements and is based on solidarity.

Individual

Organization

 

Solidarity Economy

Definition

The solidarity economy (including cooperative economy and gift economy) is an alternative framework that is allowing for different forms in different contexts, open to continual change.

This framework is grounded in the principles of:

  • solidarity, mutualism (Mutual Aid), and cooperation
  • equity in all dimensions
  • social well-being
  • sustainability
  • social and economic democracy
  • pluralism

The producers in a solidarity economy develop economic processes that are intimately related to their realities, preservation of the environment and mutual cooperation.

Context

According to feminist geographer Yvonne Underhill-Sem, the gift economy is an economic system in which goods and services flow between people without explicit agreement of their value or future reciprocity.

Behind gifting is human relationship, generation of goodwill, and attention to the nurturance of the whole society and not just one’s immediate self and family, it is about the collective.

For example, in the Pacific region, this includes: collecting, preparing, and weaving terrestrial and marine resources for mats, fans, garlands, and ceremonial items; and raising livestock and storing seasonal harvests.

Feminist perspective

The incentives for women to be involved in economic activities are diverse, ranging from the fulfillment of career aspirations and making money for a long-term comfortable life to making money to make ends meet, paying off debt, and escaping from the drudgery of routine life.

To accommodate the diverse environments that women operate in, the concept of solidarity economy is in continual development, discussed and debated.

Learn more about this proposition

Part of our series of


  Feminist Propositions for a Just Economy

What will be different about this Forum?

With up to 2,500 participants on-site and 3,000 virtual/hybrid participants, it will be the largest AWID Forum ever. We envision multiple spaces for meaningful connection, learning, exchange, strategic conversations, healing and celebration. It is the first time we gather in this space since the pandemic, and we can’t wait.