Feminists disrupt systems, spaces, events that oppress, violate and exclude us from living freely, expressing our desires and creating alternative, safe and realised lives. The internet is a space, a platform, a digital connector that we are increasingly using to agitate, communicate and mobilise. As state surveillance of activists increases, misogynist trolls play out their violences, companies mine our data and invade our privacy, we need to disrupt and claim the Internet!

Question marks over support for short-term projects run by UN population fund prompt concern over future of programmes in Syria, east Africa and beyond.

After a decade of conducting and publishing research on trends affecting funding women’s rights organisations and work, AWID has developed a ‘Do-it-Yourself toolkit”, for adapting the Where is the Money for Women’s Rights (WITM) research methodology to specific locations, constituencies, and issues.

There is cause for celebrating commitments made for women and girls by UN heads of state in adopting the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as well as a sense of relief as it became evident that prolonging the negotiating process would only result in a watered-down text. But this feeling is bittersweet.

AWID spoke with Pierre Meyer author of the report “Do Not Wake up a Sleeping Lion: Mapping the legal environment of LGBTQ persons in Francophone West Africa”.

Women and girls are in the public eye, recognized as key agents in development, like never before. Yet this increased interest is not translating into resources for the very organizations that are key to creating sustained systematic change in the lives of women and girls, as a new animation video from AWID shows.

For decades, the women’s rights movement and women’s rights organizations have been severely underfunded. AWID research in 2010 revealed that the median budget for 740 women’s organizations all over the globe was a miserly US$20,000. In the same year, as a point of reference, the income for Save the Children International and World Vision International was US$1.442 billion and US$2.611 billion respectively.

One of the most profound social transformations of the past century is in the status of women, and importantly, in the worldwide acceptance of the notion of women's rights and gender equality as desirable goals.

FRIDAY FILE: The richer, more powerful UN women’s agency that women have long asked for is now much closer to becoming a reality, but there are still challenges ahead.

By Kathambi Kinoti