Resourcing Feminist Movements

The “Where is the Money?” #WITM survey is now live! Dive in and share your experience with funding your organizing with feminists around the world.
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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:
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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.
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Build knowledge: We explore, exchange, and strengthen knowledge about how movements are attracting, organizing, and using the resources they need to accomplish meaningful change.
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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.
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2002: Discussions on the Financing for Development agenda begin
The Monterrey Conference on Financing for Development marked the beginning of discussions on the Financing for Development agenda.
- The Monterrey Consensus was adopted at this first international conference on Financing for Development. It was the first United Nations hosted summit-level meeting to address key financial and related issues on global development.
- The Conference and its preparatory process saw unprecedented cooperation between the United Nations and the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) as part of efforts to promote greater coherence and consistency among the international monetary, trade and financial systems and institutions.
- Monterrey also marked the first time that financing for development debates took place between governments, representatives of civil society and the business sector. These actors moved the discussion beyond a ‘technical’ focus, to look at how to mobilize and channel financial resources to fulfill the internationally agreed development goals of previous UN conferences and summits of the 1990s, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
- The Women’s Caucus noted the historical significance of the conference stating that it had the potential to address structural challenges that continue to hamper development but also raised concern over the effects of increased militarisation and fundamentalism on women, despite the fact that the Monterrey Consensus assumed that the global economic and financial system worked for all.
- Learn more about the six Monterrey themes and the conference follow up mechanisms: Gender Issues and Concerns in Financing for Development by Maria Floro, Nilufer Çagatay, John Willoughby and Korkut Ertürk (INSTRAW, 2004)
Quando é que os resultados do inquérito estarão disponíveis?
Iremos analisar as respostas ao inquérito para obter informações e tendências, e iremos apresentar os resultados durante o 15.º Fórum Internacional da AWID em Bangkok, e online em dezembro de 2024. Registe-se para participar no Fórum aqui!
What is the United Nations Financing For Development Process?
The United Nations (UN) Financing for Development (FfD) process seeks to address different forms of development financing and cooperation. As per the Monterrey Consensus it focuses on six key areas:
- Mobilizing domestic financial resources for development
- Mobilizing international resources for development: foreign direct investment and other private flows
- International trade as an engine for development
- Increasing international financial and technical cooperation for development
- External debt
- Addressing systemic issues: enhancing the coherence and consistency of the international monetary, financial and trading systems in support of development.
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Community Jobs Board
Are you job hunting? One of the perks of joining the AWID Community, is getting access to our community curated jobs board. You'll get to explore new opportunities, and you will also have the chance to share vacancies and call for proposals with all members.
Will there be pre-Forum convenings this time around?
We have been contacted by global and regional partners about some ideas for pre-Forum convenings and we will share more information about these ideas soon.
If you plan to organize a meeting before the Forum please let us know!
Many beautiful things emerged from the 2016 Black Feminisms Forum (BFF) that was organized by an Advisory Group and funded by AWID. Some of the independent organizing that arose from the BFF include Black feminist organizing in Brazil. While we won’t have another BFF this year, we remain committed to sharing some key learnings with anyone interested in continuing work around Black feminist organizing.
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On feminist resourcing today
- Take the Where is the Money Quiz here!
- Our Resource
- How Can Activists Resource Our Own Activism?
- What we can learn from feminists who fund themselves
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In response to these challenges, we collaborated with Impactmapper to co-create a comprehensive resource that combines two powerful tools to strengthen the funding ecosystem for social justice movements.
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Registration status:
Search for funders based on their requirements for groups to be registered.
WITM - Refreshed INFOGRAPHIC 2 EN
How funding falls short for feminist movements
Feminist movements need core and long-term funding - including savings and reserves - to stay focused on systemic change. Reserves aren’t extras; they're essential for sustainability.
Who we are & what we do
We are excited to share our new Strategic Plan (2023-2027) with the world. AWID will make an announcement to inform our community and members very soon.
The Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) is a global, feminist, membership, movement-support organization.
For 40 years, AWID has been a part of an incredible ecosystem of feminist movements working to achieve gender justice and women’s human rights worldwide.
Our vision

AWID envisions a world where feminist realities flourish, where resources and power are shared in ways that enable everyone, and future generations, to thrive and realize their full potential with dignity, love and respect, and where Earth nurtures life in all its diversity.
Our mission
Our mission is to support 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.
Our tactics
We advance our work through these tactics:
Influencing, advocacy and campaigning
We collaboratively leverage our access, power, resources and relationships to strategically influence policy and practice. We aim to advance feminist agendas through our work with policy makers, funders and activists in regional and global spaces. We also work to influence feminist and women’s rights movements to centre historically oppressed movements as part of efforts to strengthen our collective power and influence.
Convening and connecting
We use our convening power to facilitate dialogue and strategize on key issues. We connect our members and allies with one another, sharing and exchanging resources, ideas and action across relevant issues. We organize and facilitate spaces to strengthen and engage across movements, to imagine and envisage new futures, to develop effective influencing tactics and to co-create powerful agendas and processes.
Solidarity and bridge-building
We work to mobilize our members and the movements we support to strengthen collective action in solidarity with feminist causes and defenders at risk. We build partnerships, engage in active listening and ongoing, long-term, solidarity. We work with defenders to build a body of knowledge and support networks of solidarity on protection and wellbeing.
Arts and creative expression
We recognize the unique and strategic value of cultural and creative strategies in the struggle against oppression and injustice. We work with artists who centre feminist voices and the narratives of historically oppressed communities. In this emerging tactic, we see art and creative expression helping us envision a world where feminist realities continue to flourish and be celebrated.

Our initiatives
Our initiatives work at the intersections of the sites of change we work to address, the movements we prioritize, and the tactics we use:
Advancing Universal Rights and Justice
We monitor, document and make visible how anti-rights actors are operating and colluding in multilateral spaces and support feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements and allies to counter their influence and impact.
Building Feminist Economies
Working on extractivism, tax justice and corporate accountability, we build knowledge on corporate power and influence; advocate for corporate accountability and equitable distribution of wealth; and amplify feminist proposals for just economies.
Resourcing Feminist Movements
We develop accessible, action-oriented analysis on the state of resourcing for feminist movements. We aim to influence funders’ policies and practices, deepen and sustain funding for feminist social change, and support movements’ needs and strategies.
In addition to the impact we aim to have in the world, AWID is expressly committed to strengthening our own organizational learning and resilience in order to further strengthen global feminist movements.
Our donors
Thank you!
Without the generous funding and support from our donors, our work would not be possible
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Struggling for Human Rights, Facing Injustice across LAC
This year we are honoring 19 Women Human Rights Defenders from the Latin America and the Caribbean region. 16 defenders were murdered, including 6 journalists and 4 LGBTQI 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 hashtags #WHRDTribute and #16Days.
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3. Design your survey
After assessing your organization’s capacity and research goals, you may choose to conduct a survey as one of the methods of data collection for your research analysis.
In this section:
- Why conduct a survey?
- Identify your survey population 1. Online survey 2. Paper survey
- Create your questions 1. Short and clear questions 2. Simple and universal language 3. "Closed" and "open" questions 4. Logical organization 5. Less than 20 mins 6. Simple and exciting
- Test and translate 1. Your advisors 2. Draft and test 3. Translation
- Target the right population 1. Sample size 2. Degree of participation 3. Database and contact list
Why conduct a survey?
A survey is an excellent way to gather information on individual organizations to capture trends at a collective level.
For example, one organization’s budget size does not tell you much about a trend in women’s rights funding, but if you know the budgets of 1,000 women’s rights organizations or even 100, you can start to form a picture of the collective state of women’s rights funding.
As you develop your survey questions, keep in mind the research framing that you developed in the previous section.
Remember: Your framing helps you determine what information you are trying to procure through your survey. The data collected from this survey should allow you to accomplish your goals, answer your key questions, and create your final products.
See examples of survey questions in AWID’s Sample WITM Global Survey
Identify your survey population
This is an important step – the clearer you are about which populations you want to survey, the more refined your questions will be.
Depending on your research goals, you may want to create separate surveys for women’s rights organizations, women’s funds and donors. Or you may want to focus your survey on women’s groups and collect interviews for women’s funds and donors, as a survey for each population can be resource-intensive.
The questions you ask women’s groups may be different than ones you would ask women’s funds. If you plan on surveying more than one population, we encourage you to tailor your data collection to each population.
At the same time, some key questions for each population can and should overlap in order to draw comparative analysis from the answers.
Online survey
If you can reach your survey population online, it is useful and efficient to create an online survey.
We recommend two online tools, both which offer free versions:
Survey Gizmo allows you to convert your data for SPSS, a statistical software useful for advanced data analysis
Your data analyst person(s) will be the best person(s) to determine which tool is best for your survey based on staff capacity and analysis plans.
For accessibility, consider making a PDF form version of your survey that you can attach via email. This ensures organizations that have sporadic internet connections or those that pay for it by the minute can download the survey and complete it without requiring a constant online connection.
Paper survey
You may decide that an online approach is not sufficiently accessible or inclusive enough for your popuation.
In this case, you will need to create a paper survey and methods to reach offline populations (through popular events or through post, with pre-stamped envelopes for returning).
Create your questions
Make it easy for participants to complete your survey.
1. Short and clear questions
If the questions are confusing or require complex answers, you risk having participants leave the survey unfinished or providing answers that are unusable for your analysis.
Ensure your questions only ask for one item of information at a time.
For example:
- What is your organization’s budget this year?
Easy to answer: participant can easily locate this information for their organization, and it is only asking for one item of information.- What percentage of your budget have you identified as likely sources for funding for your organization, but are still unconfirmed?
Confusing and difficult to answer: are you asking for a list of unconfirmed funding sources or percentage of funding that is likely but unconfirmed?
This information is difficult to obtain: the respondent will have to calculate percentages, which they may not have on hand. This increases the risk that they will not complete the survey.
2. Simple and universal language
Many words and acronyms that are familiar to you may be unknown to survey participants, such as “resource mobilization”, “WHRD”, and “M&E”, so be sure to choose more universal language to express your questions.
If you must use industry lingo – phrases and words common to your colleagues but not widely known – then providing a definition will make your survey questions easier to understand.
Be sure to spell out any acronyms you use. For example, if you use WHRD, spell it out as “Women’s Human Rights Defenders".
3. "Closed” and "Open" questions
Closed questions:
Only one response is possible (such as “yes,” “no” or a number). Survey participants cannot answer in their own words and they typically have to choose from predetermined categories that you created or enter in a specific number. Responses to closed questions are easier to measure collectively and are often quantitative.
Example of a closed question: What is your organization’s budget?
Open-ended questions:
These are qualitative questions that are often descriptive. Respondents answer these questions entirely in their own words. These are more suitable for interviews than surveys.
They are harder to analyze at a collective level as compared to closed-end questions, especially if your survey sample is large. However, by making open-ended questions very specific, you will make it easier to analyze the responses.
Whenever possible, design your survey questions so that participants must select from a list of options instead of offering open-ended questions. This will save a lot of data cleaning and analysis time.
Example of open-ended question: What specific challenges did you face in fundraising this year?
Familiarize yourself with different types of questions
There are several ways to ask closed-ended questions. Here are some examples you can review and determine what fits best for the type of data you want to collect:
- Multiple choice questions: the participant can select one or several options you pre-entered
- Rating scales: the participant gives a note on a scale you pre-determine.
For this type of questions, make sure to clearly state what the bottom and the top of your scale mean - Ranking: the participant will choose and organize a certain number of answers you pre-determine.
4. Logical organization
If you plan to conduct this research at regular intervals (such as every two years), we recommend developing a baseline survey that you can repeat in order to track trends over time.
Set 1: Screening questions
Screening questions will determine the participant’s eligibility for the survey.
The online survey options we provided allow you to end the survey if respondents do not meet your eligibility criteria. Instead of completing the survey, they will be directed to a page that thanks them for their interest but explains that this survey is intended for a different type of respondent.
For example, you only want women’s rights groups in a given location to take this survey. The screening questions can determine the location of the participant and prevent respondents from other locations from continuing the survey.
Set 2: Standardized, basic demographic questions
These questions would collect data specific to the respondent, such as name and location of organization. These may overlap with your screening questions.
If resources permit, you can store these answers on a database and only ask these questions the first year an organization participates in your survey.
This way when the survey is repeated in future years, it is faster for organizations to complete the entire survey, increasing chances of completion.
Set 3: Standardized and mandatory funding questions
These questions will allow you to track income and funding sustainability. Conducted every year or every other year, this allows you to capture trends across time.
Set 4: Special issues questions
These questions account for current context. They can refer to a changing political or economic climate. They can be non-mandatory funding questions, such as attitudes towards fundraising.
For example, AWID’s 2011 WITM Global Survey asked questions on the new “women & girls” investment trend from the private sector.
5. Less than 20 mins
The shorter, the better: your survey shouldn’t exceed 20 minutes to ensure completion and respect respondents’ time.
It is natural to get excited and carried away by all the types of questions that could be asked and all the information that could be obtained. However, long surveys will lead to fatigue and abandonment from participants or loss of connection between participants and your organization.
Every additional question in your survey will add to your analytical burden once the survey is complete.
6. Simple and exciting
- Let participants know the estimated time to complete the survey before they begin
- Specify what information they will need to complete it so they have it on hand (for example, if you are asking for financial data, say it at the outset so they can prepare)
- Request information that organizations can easily access and provide – for example, requesting financial information from 20 years ago may be difficult (or impossible) for organizations to provide.
- Create an incentive to convince your survey population to complete the survey, such as a prize raffle. For example, AWID held a raffle draw for a round-trip flight to the AWID Forum as a prize for completing our 2011 WITM Global Survey.
General tips
- Ask for exact budgets instead of offering a range (in our experience, specific amounts are more useful in analysis).
- Specify currency! If necessary, ask everyone to convert their answers to the same currency or ask survey takers to clearly state the currency they are using in their financial answers.
- Ensure you collect enough demographic information on each organization to contextualize results and draw out nuanced trends.
For example, if you are analyzing WITM for a particular country, it will be useful to know what region each organization is from or at what level (rural, urban, national, local) they work in order to capture important trends such as the availability of greater funding for urban groups or specific issues.
Test and translate
1. Your advisors
Involving your partners from the start will allow you to build deeper relationships and ensure more inclusive, higher quality research.
They will provide feedback on your draft survey, pilot test the survey, and review your draft research analysis drawn from your survey results and other data collection.
These advisors will also publicize the survey to their audiences once it is ready for release. If you plan on having the survey in multiple languages, ensure you have partners who use those languages.
If you decide to do both survey and interviews for your data collection, your advisor-partners on your survey design can also double as interviewees for your interview data collection process.
2. Draft and test
After your survey draft is complete, test it with your partners before opening it up to your respondents. This will allow you to catch and adjust any technical glitches or confusing questions in the survey.
It will also give you a realistic idea of the time it takes to take the survey.
3. Translation
Once the survey is finalized and tested in your native language, it can be translated.
Be sure to test the translated versions of your survey as well. At least some of your pilot testers should be native speakers of the translated languages to ensure clarity.
Target the right population
1. Sample size
Your survey sample size is the number of participants that complete your survey.
Your survey sample should reflect the qualities of the larger population you intend to analyze.
For example: you would like to analyze the millions of women’s rights groups in Valyria but you lack the time and resources to survey every single one.
Instead, you can survey only 500 of the Valyrian women’s rights groups – a sample size - to represent the qualities of all the women’s groups in the region.
Recommended sample size
- 100 survey participants or less tend to be unreliable
- 250 to 400 will yield results of reasonable accuracy
- over 400 are fully adequate and will also allow accurate analysis of subgroups (for example, age groups).
Although it is not necessary to determine your exact sample size before you launch your survey, having a size in mind will allow you to determine when you have reached enough participants or whether you should extend the dates that the survey is available, in case you feel that you have not reached enough people.
2. Degree of participation
Even more important than size of a sample is the degree to which all members of the target population are able to participate in a survey.
If large or important segments of the population are systematically excluded (whether due to language, accessibility, timing, database problems, internet access or another factor) it becomes impossible to accurately assess the statistical reliability of the survey data.
In our example: you need to ensure all women’s groups in Valyria had the opportunity to participate in the survey.
If a segment of women’s groups in Valyria do not use internet, and you only pull participants for your sample through online methods, then you are missing an important segment when you have your final sample, thus it is not representative of all women’s groups in Valyria.
You cannot accurately draw conclusions on your data if segments of the population are missing in your sample size; and ensuring a representative sample allows you to avoid this mistake.
3. Database and contact list
To gain an idea of what the makeup of women’s groups for your area of research (region, population, issue, etc) looks like, it may be useful to look at databases.
- Some countries may have databases of all registered nonprofits, which will allow you to know your full population.
- If databases are not available or useful, you can generate your own list of groups in your area of research. Start with networks and coalitions, ask them to refer you to additional groups not in the membership lists.
By understanding the overall makeup of women’s groups that you plan to target, you can have an idea of what you want your sample to look like - it should be like a mini-version of the larger population.
After participants have taken your survey, you can then gauge if the resulting population you reached (your sample size) matches the makeup of the larger population. If it doesn’t match, you may then decide to do outreach to segments you believe are missing or extend the window period that your survey is open.
Do not be paralyzed if you are unsure of how representative your sample size is – do your best to spread your survey as far and wide as possible.
Previous step
Next step

Estimated time:
• 2 - 3 monthsPeople needed:
• 1 or more Research person(s) • Translator(s), if offering survey in multiple languages • 1 or more Person(s) to assist with publicizing survey to target population • 1 or more Data analysis person(s)Resources needed:
• List of desired advisors: organizations, donors and activists • Optional: an incentive prize to persuade people to complete your survey • Optional: an incentive for your advisorsResources available:
• Survey Monkey or Survey Gizmo • Sample of WITM Global SurveyPrevious step
Next step
4. Collect and analyze your data






