Our strategic plan “Feminist Realities” completed its final year at the end of 2022. For the past five years, this bold framework pushed us to go beyond feminist futures and to recognize the feminist solutions and ways of life that already exist in the here and now. Realities that must be uplifted, celebrated, and popularized. The Feminist Economies We Love multimedia story project and Our:Resource knowledge hub on autonomous ways to resource feminist activism are just two examples of this visionary work, always deeply collective with diverse feminist movements.

Download the full 2022 Annual review

2022 was a year of transitions in AWID.

With this reflection on the year, we invite you to celebrate with us beautiful closures and promising beginnings. Change and transitions are an inseparable part of life and movements, which we seek to embrace with intention and care.

Download the full 2022 Annual review

A dynamic network of people around the world, AWID members are researchers, academics, students, educators, activists, business people, policy-makers, development practitioners, funders, and more. Our members - of every age - are those who make AWID a unique global feminist association.

Membership with AWID is open to anyone who shares our values

We offer different types of memberships geared to income level and whether you are an individual or an organization. Currently we have over 5000 members, individual and institutional, from 164 countries.

Our members are an important part of our work

We collaborate for advocacy on specific issues, members vote in elections for our Board, and can also participate in and contribute to our Priority Areas through webinars, surveys, or urgent actions, for example.

Our institutional membership draws from a broad range of organizations interested in advancing gender justice and women’s human rights, including women’s rights organizations, from the local to the global levels, grassroots networks, major international institutions, government departments, university programs and more. 63% of our members are from the global South and 38% are under the age of 30.

Learn more about our members

Unfortunately, no. AWID is not a direct service or individual advocacy organization.

It would be better for you to seek legal advice and contact a women’s shelter or referral centre in your area.

The HotPeachPages is an online resource that offers links to women’s shelters around the world. AWID cannot vouch for the accuracy or quality of its listings, but it may be a good place to start if you don’t know of organizations in your area.

Linda Porn is yet another heroine of feminist union organizing and sex worker activism nationally (in Spain) and transnationally.

Originally from Mexico, she has been living in Spain since the 2000s. She is a sex worker, an activist, a single mother and a multidisciplinary artist. Drawing from these different identities, she uses performance, video art and theater to vizibilize struggles at the intersections of transfeminism, sex work, migration, colonialism and motherhood.

She combines art and sex work while caring for her daughter as a single mother.

Linda also belongs to sex workers collectives that fight for their rights, such as the OTRAS union and CATS Murcia. She also co-founded the group 'Madrecitas' - that visibilises and denounces racist institutional violence against migrant families. Violence to which she and her daughter were subjected as a sex worker and migrant single mother.

You can follow her art work here.

Further drafting sessions on the Addis Ababa outcome document

• Additional sessions in support of continued progress on the Outcome Document continued from 1-5 June 2015.
• From 15 – 19 June the scheduled 3rd drafting session of the outcome document of the conference took place at UN headquarters

Learn more from the CSO Hitchhiker’s Guide

English, French, Spanish and Mandarin.

All our change processes rely on the relationships we build at spaces like the AWID Forums where you dance together, your humour comes through, your real self, you tell stories. That is what makes the difference.
- Nicky Mcintyre, USA

We know that first time travel can be exciting but also stressful. In recognition of the many challenges involved, we will be providing more information and details about how to get to Bangkok when Registration opens early next year.

New

Online & Hybrid

As an online participant, you can facilitate activities, connect and converse with others, and experience first-hand the creativity, art and celebration of the AWID Forum. Participants connecting online will enjoy a rich and diverse program, from workshops and discussions to healing activities and musical performances. Some activities will focus on connection among online participants, and others will be truly hybrid, focusing on connection and interaction among online participants and those in Bangkok.

English article created from Spanish site

A framework for your research will guide throughout your research process, and the framing document you develop can also serve as a concept note to advisors and partners, and a funding proposal to potential donors.

Before conducting any research:

• Set the goals of your research
• List the key questions you want your research to answer
• Write out the type of data you will need to obtain and review to answer your key questions
• Define the final products you will produce with your research

Your research framing may evolve over time as you refine your questions and gather new information. However, building an initial research framing will allow you to work from a solid foundation.

Goals

To create a strong foundation for your WITM research, it is important to clarify what you hope to accomplish.

For example, one goal of AWID’s WITM global research was to provide rigorous data to prove what we already knew anecdotally: that women’s rights organizations are discrepantly underfunded. With this data, we felt we would be better positioned to influence funders in their decision-making.

Your goals could be to:

• Generate hard data on funding realities and trends to prove or disprove existing myths.
• Gain deeper insight into differences between the perspectives of donors and women’s rights organizations.
• Influence donors in grant-making.
• Add crucial input to key funding debates.
• Explore collaboration between donors and women’s rights organizations on issues that emerge from the research.

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Key questions

Frame your research process with key questions that only your research can answer and limit those questions to a specific time frame (e.g. past five years, past year, etc.).

Consider the following points:

• What exactly do you want to learn more about and what is the hypothesis you would like to test? Writing this out will assist you in your thought process.
• Is there existing research on this? If research already exists, it may not make sense to conduct new WITM research unless you feel like the existing research is not extensive or specific enough.  
• What time frame do you want to cover in your analysis? For example, will your research analyze only the past year, or several previous years, such as the past five years?
• Are you planning to repeat your survey to collect data in the future?

Choosing a specific timeframe for your research can result in more precise findings than working with an open-ended timeframe. Also, deciding whether you will repeat this research at regular intervals will allow you to set up data collection benchmarks for easy replication and comparison over time.

These were the key questions that guided AWID’s WITM research process:

• What is the current state of women’s organizations’ financial sustainability across the world?
• What external and internal trends are impacting donors’ funding decisions to support women’s organizations and movements?

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Type of data

Now that you determined your key questions, you can determine what kind of data will help you answer your key questions. This will allow you to plan the rest of your schedule for your WITM research.

For example, will you conduct a survey that covers an extensive portion of your priority population? Will you analyze the applications that funders are receiving from a certain region? Will you also conduct interviews (recommended)? By determining the types of data you need, you can reach out to external parties who will provide this data early on, and plot out your full schedule accordingly. Some suggested sources of data could be:

• Surveys you create for women’s rights organizations and donors
• Application and grantmaking data from donors funding cycles
• Interviews of prominent activists, organizations, and donors
• Donor data from membership organizations and networks, such as  the Foundation Center, regional or national donor affinity groups.

Diverse data sets are a great way to create robust and rich analysis.

The data from AWID’s 2011 Global Survey formed the backbone of our analysis in Watering the Leaves, Starving the Roots report. However, we also collected data from interviews and interactions with several actors in the field, ranging from donors to activists and women’s rights organizations.

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Final products

In addition to allowing you to set your schedule, creating an initial plan of what products you will develop will also allow you to work out what resources you need.

For example, will you only produce a long research report or will you also create infographics, brochures and presentations? Depending on your products, you may need to hire a design firm, plan events and so on.

These products will also be the tools you use to achieve your goals, so it is important to keep those goals in mind. For example, is your WITM research exclusively intended as an advocacy tool to influence funders? In that case, your products should allow you to engage with funders at a deep level.

 Some sample products:

• Long report for dissemination with key funders and organizations.
  Historically, AWID WITM research has centered on a long report, from which AWID distilled other smaller products  - see rest of list.
• Infographic for viral distribution online
• Short animation demonstrating key findings
• Short brochure(s) distilling your findings and messages
• Articles and blog posts on key findings to draw interest to your larger report
• Seminars or webinars presenting key findings.

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Conclusion: Framing your research will give you the big picture

Framing your research to cover goals, key questions, types of data, and final products will allow you to create a well-planned schedule, prepare your resources in advance, and plan a realistic budget.

This will make interactions with external partners easier and allow you to be nimble when unexpected setbacks occur.

Previous step

1. Gather your resources

Next step

3. Design your survey

Estimated time:

• 1 month

People needed:

• 1 or more Research person(s)

Resources available:

• AWID Research Framing: sample 1
• AWID Research Framing: sample 2

Previous step

1. Gather your resources

Next step

3. Design your survey

Ready to Go? Worksheet

Download the toolkit in PDF