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Special Focus

AWID is an international, feminist, membership organisation committed to achieving gender equality, sustainable development and women’s human rights

Young Feminist Activism

Organizing creatively, facing an increasing threat

Young feminist activists play a critical role in women’s rights organizations and movements worldwide by bringing up new issues that feminists face today. Their strength, creativity and adaptability are vital to the sustainability of feminist organizing.

At the same time, they face specific impediments to their activism such as limited access to funding and support, lack of capacity-building opportunities, and a significant increase of attacks on young women human rights defenders. This creates a lack of visibility that makes more difficult their inclusion and effective participation within women’s rights movements.

A multigenerational approach

AWID’s young feminist activism program was created to make sure the voices of young women are heard and reflected in feminist discourse. We want to ensure that young feminists have better access to funding, capacity-building opportunities and international processes. In addition to supporting young feminists directly, we are also working with women’s rights activists of all ages on practical models and strategies for effective multigenerational organizing.

Our Actions

We want young feminist activists to play a role in decision-making affecting their rights by:

  • Fostering community and sharing information through the Young Feminist Wire. Recognizing the importance of online media for the work of young feminists, our team launched the Young Feminist Wire in May 2010 to share information, build capacity through online webinars and e-discussions, and encourage community building.

  • Researching and building knowledge on young feminist activism, to increase the visibility and impact of young feminist activism within and across women’s rights movements and other key actors such as donors.

  • Promoting more effective multigenerational organizing, exploring better ways to work together.

  • Supporting young feminists to engage in global development processes such as those within the United Nations

  • Collaboration across all of AWID’s priority areas, including the Forum, to ensure young feminists’ key contributions, perspectives, needs and activism are reflected in debates, policies and programs affecting them.

Related Content

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Illustration d'une main à la peau blanche tenant de l'argent rose sur un fond turquoise.

DES SALAIRES DÉCENTS

Nós redistribuímos recursos para os nossos parceires beneficiários e identificamo-nos como um fundo feminista e/ou de mulheres. Devemos participar no inquérito?

Não, apreciamos muito o vosso trabalho, mas atualmente não solicitamos respostas de fundos feministas e de mulheres. Encorajamos-vos a partilhar o inquérito com os vossos parceires beneficiários e as vossas redes feministas.

Madiha El Safty

Madiha fue una destacada profesora de Sociología con activa participación en la sociedad civil como defensora de los derechos de las mujeres en la región árabe.

Presidió la Alianza para las Mujeres Árabes y dentro del Consejo Nacional de Mujeres fue miembro del Comité de la Sociedad Civil y del Comité para el Desarrollo de la Gobernación de Minia. Fue autora de numerosas publicaciones en las que analizó y arrojó luz sobre las desigualdades de género y la discriminación contra las mujeres.

Es recordada con cariño por colegas, estudiantes y amigxs.


 

Madiha El Safty, Egypt

Reason to join 1

Faites partie d’une organisation et d’une communauté internationales, associatives et féministes. Nos membres sont établi·e·s dans toutes les régions du monde; iels apprennent les un·e·s des autres et se soutiennent mutuellement dans un réseau mondial fondé sur la solidarité.

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Download your faciliation guide:

"A Feminist Approach to Understanding Illicit Financial Flows and Redirecting Global Wealth"

IFF Toolkit

Download your facilitation guide in English

This Guide is also available in Spanish and Russian


Thanks to the co-creators of this facilitation guide:

  • Daniela Fonkatz and Ana Ines Abelenda (AWID)
  • Zenaida Joachim (Mesoamericanas en Resistencia - El Salvador)
  • Olga Shnyrova (Ivanovo Center for Gender Studies - Russia)
  • Leah Eryenyu (Akina Mama Wa Afrika - Uganda)
  • Daryl Leyesa (Oriang and PKKK/National Rural Women Congress - the Philippines)

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Mustard background with a pink map of Spain and a yellow pin of the location of Sindicato Otras;

هل استطيع الوصول للاستطلاع وتعبئته من هاتفي؟

نعم، يمكن تعبئة الاستطلاع من خلال الهاتف الذكي.

Teresia Teaiwa

Considérée par le Guardian comme l'une des icônes nationales de Kiribati, Teresia était une avocate téméraire.

Elle travaillait en étroite collaboration avec des groupes féministes aux îles Fidji. Ses travaux de recherche ont servi à aborder les problèmes du féminisme et de l'égalité de genre dans le Pacifique. Elle était également corédactrice de l’International Feminist Journal of Politics. En Océanie, son influence a traversé les frontières académiques, ainsi que les mouvements pour la justice sociale.


 

Teresia Teaiwa, Fiji

Solidarity: membership why page

Solidarity 

We take a position in solidarity with each other and diverse struggles for justice and freedoms. We strive to mobilize and strengthen collective action and practice meaningful ways of working with each other.

Holding up the Skies

A Film Series on Feminist Realities from Africa and the African Diaspora

by Gabrielle Tesfaye

When I created my short animation film, The Water Will Carry Us Home, my mind was plugged into a magical world of fearless resilience and ancestral mermaids who transformed their deepest scars into a new generation of life. Set during the time of the transatlantic slave trade, I was pulled to show this history of African enslavement in a different way than it has ever been told on screen. I wanted to give my ancestors the commemoration they never received. I was motivated to reclaim the history that continues to paint us as helpless victims. Essentially, I wanted to tell the truth. To reclaim and reimagine our history and perspective, means to simultaneously heal our generational traumas that exist today. It is this important work that so many women through the African continent and the African diaspora are doing today, igniting our collective Feminist Realities. 

In the making of the film I researched religiously, and in what was written, I saw what was not. There were many times I felt I was hitting a wall trying to find something that was not there, and it was in those voided places that I realized the storytellers of today are filling the voids. I found the most useful stories in contemporary art, film, and African diaspora folklore. 

“... a truly unique, raw and representation of feminist power in action.”
 
    - Hers is Ours Collective, organizers of the Outsider Moving Art & Film Festival

The Water Will Carry Us Home carried itself around the world into the hearts of the Diaspora. It also led me here, as the curator of the African and Diaspora film screenings of AWID’s Co-Creating Feminist Realities initiative. Whilst curating this collection of films, I looked for stories that were completely unique, raw and representational of feminist power in action. Consisting of three shorts and one feature, they reveal stories through many communities in Africa and the diaspora, including Ethiopia, Uganda, The Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa and Kenya. These films reposition African women as what they truly are- self governing and empowered through the unfiltered lens of their work. 

“An incredibly beautiful, attentive, finely observed telling of the connection between Africa and its Diaspora formed form the trans Altantic slave trade. The visual universe it creates is just gorgeous… an echo of the fusion of spiritual traditions and non-linear time that speak to how we are still experiencing the moments of the past that formed 'new' worlds of diaspora blackness.”
 
    - Jessica Horn, PanAfrican feminst strategist, writer and co-creator of the temple of her skin


Our short documentary film, Women Hold Up the Sky, created by the WoMin African Alliance, tells the story of women activists in Uganda and the Democractic Republic of Congo who are actively reclaiming their land rights, threatened by mining and other extractives in their homes. The film not only exposes the corruption of extractivism, but finally shares what we have been missing on screen - how grassroots African women are actively organizing, strategizing, and analyzing within their communities to create women-centred and community-driven alternatives. Margaret Mapondera of WoMin explains it beautifully, that they are the “custodians of lands, forests, waters, rivers and territories; the ways in which women hold and transmit the stories / herstories of our past and our futures; the powerful and transformative ways of being that women embody in their relationships to each other, to the environment and in themselves.” 

“A refreshing and much-needed piece of cinema highlighting the many ways African women are coming together to create women-led and community-driven alternatives… The fight is on and
women hold the key.”
 
    - Hers is Ours Collective, organizers of the Outsider Moving Art & Film Festival


Pumzi, created by critically acclaimed director Wanuri Kahiu, bridges Africa and science fiction around climate and environmentalism. Pumzi imagines a futuristic world where humankind has been forced to settle on another planet. While Pumzi seems afro-futuristic and new for Africa on the surface, Kahiu reveals the truth that science fiction and fantasy is something that has always existed in African storytelling, but never recognized. Kahiu creates a world where women are truth seekers and heroes who pioneer us into a new world, the opposite of images that position Africans as victims of war and destruction. Instead, Pumzi writes the narrative of African women being their own saviors and problem solvers, who stop at no cost to follow the cryptic visions they channel in their dreams. 

“A pioneering African sci-fi film, situating women as scribes of the future and opening up our visions about other worlds, other universes we might occupy as Africans - always an important exercise as we imagine our way out of present crises.”
 
       - Jessica Horn, PanAfrican feminst strategist, writer and co-creator of the temple of her skin


Our feature film of the program, Finding Sally is set in 1970’s Ethiopia during the time of The Red Terror war, documenting the striking history of director Tamara Mariam Dawit’s activist aunt, Sally Dawit. Throughout the film we learn of Sally’s incredible journey as a young and courageous woman activist navigating one of the most violent times of Ethiopian history. Sally’s story not only reveals the gravity of this time, but the reflection of her own personal evolution as a young woman. Dawit was intentional to tell the film through the lens of women, untouched by male voices. Due to so much Ethiopian history being told by men, the making of this powerful story preserved its reality of honoring the feminist perspective. Dawit explains, “Women in revolution and war are often only included as someone's spouse or someone who did cooking or typing work. I wanted to look at the activism around the revolution only through the memories and voices of women.” Finding Sally demonstrates the reclamation of history sought by current filmmakers today. It is an igniting of feminist power and our connected realities throughout time.   

“The responsibility falls on us, to remember these women that came before us and their brilliant work so they are not forgotten like the thousands of women already forgotten while fighting the good fight. Sally is such a woman and may she never be forgotten.”

     - Hers is Ours Collective, organizers of the Outsider Moving Art & Film Festival

Register here to watch this film from June 18-22


These films have became a part of my own psyche, empowering me to continue building powerful alternatives towards justice from within. They affirm that I am a woman among a world of women, holding up the skies and actively building indestructible Feminist Realities. These films are more than stories of African women - they are globally relatable, inspiring and set the example of Feminist Realities for all of us around the world. 


Gabrielle Tesfaye:

Gabrielle Tesfaye is an interdisciplinary artist versed in painting, animation, film, puppetry and interactive installation. Her work is rooted in the African diaspora, Afro-futurism, ancient art practices and cultural storytelling.

Follow us on Social Media to receive news about upcoming events and screenings:

Facebook: @AWIDWomensRights
Instagram: @awidwomensrights
Twitter ENG: @awid
Twitter ES: @awid_es
Twitter FR: @awid_fr
LinkedIn: Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID)

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La foto vertical muestra un grupo de mujeres con carteles durante una manifestación con tres personas sentadas

Нужно ли мне как-то подготовиться, чтобы пройти опрос?

Поскольку опрос посвящен исследованию реалий обеспечения феминистских организаций ресурсами, большинство вопросов касаются финансирования вашей организации в период с 2021 по 2023 год. Вам необходимо будет иметь при себе данную информацию для заполнения анкеты (например, годовые бюджеты и информацию об основных источниках финансирования).

Amal Bayou

Amal was a prominent politician and parliamentarian in Libya. She was a faculty member at Benghazi University from 1995 until her death in 2017.

Amal was a civil society activist and a member of various social and political initiatives. She assisted the families of martyrs and the  disappeared, and was a founding member of a youth initiative called ‘’Youth of Benghazi Libya”. In the 2014 parliamentary elections, Amal was elected to the House of Representatives with more than 14,000 votes (the highest number of votes anyone received in the 2014 elections).

Amal will remain in the memories of many as a woman politician working to ensure a better future in one the most difficult and conflict-ridden contexts in the region.


 

Amal Bayou, Libya

Our values - Justice and systemic change

Justicia y cambio sistémico

Trabajamos por un mundo basado en la justicia social, ambiental y económica; y por la interdependencia, la solidaridad y el respeto. Trabajamos para desmantelar los sistemas de poder opresivo y contra todas sus manifestaciones, incluidos el patriarcado, los fundamentalismos, los militarismos, los fascismos y el poder corporativo que amenazan nuestras vidas y nuestro mundo. Queremos un mundo justo en el que los recursos y el poder sean compartidos en formas que permitan que todas las personas prosperen.