Given the current state of the COVID 19 pandemic, our Board of Directors has decided to postpone the 14th AWID International Forum to September 20-23, 2021. The location of the Forum remains Taipei, Taiwan.

The trans house confirms the transformative force of social movements: if no one helps nor provides for us, if the State ignores us, then we’ll do it ourselves.

After careful consideration, the 14th International AWID Forum will now take place 11-14 January 2021 in Taipei, Taiwan. This decision is guided by several criteria like participant safety and security, logistical viability and accessibility.

New Board member Nidhi Goyal reflects on her journey as a disabled feminist and activist from India. 

The Association for Women's Rights in Dvelopment does not have any affiliation or responsibility for the African Women in Dialogue program convened by the Zanele Mbeki Foundation based in South Africa. Despite our directly expressed concern to the Zanele Mbeki Foundation, the African Women in Dialogue program has chosen to use the acronym AWID and describe their convening as the AWID Forum. 

At AWID, we spend a lot of time thinking about power, and how it functions not only in the world at large but also internally within our own organization. It is this commitment to building collective power that inspired us to begin experimenting with a practice of sharing leadership.

For those who have attended a previous AWID Forum you can probably remember the energies that are generated in a space with 2000 feminist and social justice activists. The strength and renewal we feel when we meet with fellow activists all working together to co-create a better world. The learning and new knowledge we gain, create, and share. The solidarity we feel when we are able to build and strengthen connections.

We invite all to join us at the table, eat with us, sit with us, learn with us, grow with us…be with us as we co-create, and nourish our Black Feminist Futures.

In the lead up to the first Black Feminisms Forum, This is Africa will be publishing a series of interviews, features and articles about Black Feminisms. First up, Maggie Mapondera sits down with renowned activist, scholar and thinker Gay J McDougall, a member of the BFF’s Working Group, to talk about the struggles faced by women of African descent the world over.

Our freedom dreams are a roaring Black; swellings of coming insurrection manifested. This roar is felt in the tip of a brush about to paint the sounds of our resistance; in the cadence of saxophones, playing the drawings that our grandmothers sketched, of struggles unrelenting; in the poems inscribed by the movement of our bodies when that bass drops.