Anit-Racism Movement (ARM) / Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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.
Around the world, feminist, women’s rights, and allied movements are confronting power and reimagining a politics of liberation. The contributions that fuel this work come in many forms, from financial and political resources to daily acts of resistance and survival.
AWID’s Resourcing Feminist Movements (RFM) Initiative shines a light on the current funding ecosystem, which range from self-generated models of resourcing to more formal funding streams.
Through our research and analysis, we examine how funding practices can better serve our movements. We critically explore the contradictions in “funding” social transformation, especially in the face of increasing political repression, anti-rights agendas, and rising corporate power. Above all, we build collective strategies that support thriving, robust, and resilient movements.
Our Actions
Recognizing the richness of our movements and responding to the current moment, we:
Create and amplify alternatives: We amplify funding practices that center activists’ own priorities and engage a diverse range of funders and activists in crafting new, dynamic models for resourcing feminist movements, particularly in the context of closing civil society space.
Build knowledge: We explore, exchange, and strengthen knowledge about how movements are attracting, organizing, and using the resources they need to accomplish meaningful change.
Advocate: We work in partnerships, such as the Count Me In! Consortium, to influence funding agendas and open space for feminist movements to be in direct dialogue to shift power and money.
Do I have to be an AWID member to participate in the Forum?
No, you don't have to be an AWID member to participate but AWID members receive a discounted registration fee as well as a number of other benefits. Learn more on how to become an AWID member.
Clone of CFA 2023 - Hybrid like never before: in person - EN
In-person
Participants will come together in Bangkok, Thailand. We can’t wait!
Tribute test
This year we are honoring 18 Women Human Rights Defenders from the Latin America and the Caribbean region. Alone 15 of those were murdered, among which 6 are journalists and 4 LGBTQI and/or sex workers’ rights defenders. Please join us in commemorating the life and work of these women by sharing the memes below with your colleagues, friends and networks and by tweeting using the hashtag #AWIDTribute.
Our individual and institutional members come from ALL regions of the world and 163 countries. Our latest members join us from France, South Sudan, the United Kingdom, and Lebanon. All of our members bring with them a rich and diverse array of perspectives, experiences, knowledge, energy and inspiration!
Did you know about our weekly member profiles?
One of the benefits of being an AWID member, is having your story featured on awid.org, in our newsletters which go out to 35,000 subscribers, and via our social media channels which have over 60,000 followers.
If you have any difficulties and require support with the sign-up process, please do not hesitate to contact us at membership@awid.org
What Our Members Say
"We have found AWID to be a very exciting network and we are involved in many of its platforms." - Engabu Za Tooro (AWID institutional member)
"I am looking forward to a fruitful engagement with the team. Feeling great. Thanks for accepting me as a member." - R. Chakraborty (AWID individual member)
"Thank you so much AWID, your work is tremendous. I really appreciated your efforts." - E. Khan (AWID individual member)
Asma was a leading Pakistani rights activist, fearless critic of the military’s interference in politics and a staunch defender of the rule of law.
She was the founding chairwoman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent group, and was a trustee of the International Crisis Group. She won international awards and served as the United Nations rapporteur on human rights and extrajudicial killings.
“With her life, Asma rewrote the history that many of us were told as women. Asma changed the world. She changed it in Pakistan, and she changed it in our imaginations."
Today, many community knowledge systems are at risk.
Fast-paced economic, political, and cultural changes are bulldozing environments, practices and livelihoods. Various forms of knowledge are being erased from practice, commodified and colonized in the massive swallow of globalisation and in the promise of short-term gains or band aid solutions.
Definition
Buen Vivir, a concept adapted from Andean Indigenous peoples’ knowledges, is described as the collective achievement of a life in fulfillment, based on harmonic and balanced relations among human beings and all living beings, in reciprocity and complementarity. It means acknowledging that human beings are a part of nature, we depend on nature and are inter-dependent among ourselves.
Inherent in Buen Vivir is a vision that integrates production and reproduction as inseparable processes of the economy, of wealth production and living conditions.
Feminist perspective
In this sense, a broad understanding of Buen vivir from a feminist lens values relationships and resources mobilized in production and reproduction cycles—favouring equilibrium of not just the market kind—to guarantee continuity and changes as long as they are compatible with economic justice and life sustainability.
From a feminist perspective there have also been criticisms of the binary conceptions of gender and complementary of men and women. Binary conceptions leave little space for a deeper discussion on heteropatriarchy and non-conforming gender relationships.
Nevertheless, one of the main contributions of centralizing the principle of Buen Vivir to political, economic and social frameworks, is that equality is no longer the paradigm of individual rights, but the transformation of society as a whole.
Learn more about this proposition:
Buen Vivir: An introduction from a women’s rights perpective in Boliva by Martha Lanza challenges the notion that Buen Vivir is gender neutral and calls for the dismantling of patriarchal power structures that persist. In the same publication, Magdalena León takes a look through a gender lens at how the cosmovision of Buen Vivir seeks to overcome ideals of permanent expansion and growth and sheds light on gender biases that need to be addressed.
Indigenous Women's Visions of an Inclusive Feminism by Myrna Cunningham highlights the contributions from indigenous women in building a more diverse, inclusive and ultimately stronger feminist movement are key.
Jacqueline was a pioneering Malian/Burkinabe feminist, nationalist and educator.
She taught English in Senegal, before being recruited in 1961 as an English teacher at the Lycée Philippe Zinda Kaboré in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. Through her activism, she was involved in the popular uprising of January 3, 1966. Between 1961 and 1966, Jacqueline was also responsible for the trade union press, Voices of the Teachers. She was appointed as the head of the Normal Course for Young Girls (now known as Nelson Mandela High School) until 1974, and dedicated herself to girls’ education and advancing women’s rights.
In 1984 she was awarded the Paul G. Hoffmann Award for outstanding work in national and international development.
