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.

Advancing Universal Rights and Justice

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Uprooting Fascisms and Fundamentalisms

Across the globe, feminist, women’s rights and gender justice defenders are challenging the agendas of fascist and fundamentalist actors. These oppressive forces target women, persons who are non-conforming in their gender identity, expression and/or sexual orientation, and other oppressed communities.

Discriminatory ideologies are undermining and co-opting our human rights systems and standards,  with the aim of making rights the preserve of only certain groups. In the face of this, the Advancing Universal Rights and Justice (AURJ) initiative promotes the universality of rights - the foundational principle that human rights belong to everyone, no matter who they are, without exception.

We create space for feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements and allies to recognize, strategize and take collective action to counter the influence and impact of anti-rights actors. We also seek to advance women’s rights and feminist frameworks, norms and proposals, and to protect and promote the universality of rights.

Our actions

Through this initiative, we:

  • Build knowledge: We support feminist, women’s rights and gender justice movements by disseminating and popularizing knowledge and key messages about anti-rights actors, their strategies, and impact in the international human rights systems through AWID’s leadership role in the collaborative platform, the Observatory on the Universality of Rights (OURs)*.
  • Advance feminist agendas: We ally ourselves with partners in international human rights spaces including, the Human Rights Council, the Commission on Population and Development, the Commission on the Status of Women and the UN General Assembly.
  • Create and amplify alternatives: We engage with our members to ensure that international commitments, resolutions and norms reflect and are fed back into organizing in other spaces locally, nationally and regionally.
  • Mobilize solidarity action: We take action alongside women human rights defenders (WHRDs) including trans and intersex defenders and young feminists, working to challenge fundamentalisms and fascisms and call attention to situations of risk.  

 

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Ȃurea Mouzinho

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Biography

Ȃurea Mouzinho is a feminist economic justice organizer and advocate from Luanda, Angola. Rooted by a pan-African, socialist and decolonial feminist politics and practice, in 2016 she co-founded and has since been a co-coordinator of Ondjango Feminista, a feminist collective working to advance a transformative women’s rights and gender justice agenda in Angola through consciousness-raising, mobilisation and advocacy. Her 10-year work history encompasses roles in research, project-management, grant-making, advocacy and movement-building primarily on issues at the intersection of women's rights, economic policies and social justice. She has written on the history and challenges for women's organising in Angola, the interplay between extractivism, militarisation and violence against women in Mozambique, and the contemporary economic liberatory practices of African peoples worldwide. Currently, Ȃurea works as policy advocacy and campaigns coordinator at the Global Alliance for Tax Justice (GATJ), leading the alliance's work on tax and gender. Ȃurea is a strategic advisor for Eyala, an alumni and regular contributor to FEMNET's African Feminist Macroeconomics Academy (AFMA) and has previously served as advisor for Sub-Saharan Africa for FRIDA-The Young Feminist Fund. She is trained in economics (University of Cape Town, Monash University) and has a Masters in Development Studies from SOAS, University of London.

Ȃurea has a loud laugh, is a proud house-plant caretaker, and enjoys strolling the beaches of the Angolan Atlantic coast followed by slow evenings laying on her carpet. She occasionally tweets on @kitondowe.

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Who are AWID's members?

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A dynamic network of people around the world, AWID members are researchers, academics, students, educators, activists, business people, policy-makers, development practitioners, funders, and more. Our members - of every age - are those who make AWID a unique global feminist association.

Membership with AWID is open to anyone who shares our values

We offer different types of memberships geared to income level and whether you are an individual or an organization. Currently we have over 5000 members, individual and institutional, from 164 countries.

Our members are an important part of our work

We collaborate for advocacy on specific issues, members vote in elections for our Board, and can also participate in and contribute to our Priority Areas through webinars, surveys, or urgent actions, for example.

Our institutional membership draws from a broad range of organizations interested in advancing gender justice and women’s human rights, including women’s rights organizations, from the local to the global levels, grassroots networks, major international institutions, government departments, university programs and more. 63% of our members are from the global South and 38% are under the age of 30.

Learn more about our membership

I am experiencing violence in one or more of my relationships. Can AWID advocate on my behalf?

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Unfortunately, no. AWID is not a direct service or individual advocacy organization.

It would be better for you to seek legal advice and contact a women’s shelter or referral centre in your area.

The HotPeachPages is an online resource that offers links to women’s shelters around the world. AWID cannot vouch for the accuracy or quality of its listings, but it may be a good place to start if you don’t know of organizations in your area.

June 2015

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Further drafting sessions on the Addis Ababa outcome document

Learn more from the CSO Hitchhiker’s Guide

What languages will be included in the Forum?

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English, French, Spanish and Mandarin.

Emilsen Manyoma

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Category
Civil & Political Rights
Region
Latin America
Cause of death / disappearance

Killed / Asesinada / Assassinée 

Calls for Participation

Capitalism is the Virus: Feminist Recovery is the Antidote

Snippet FEA Land and Agroecology

LAND AND 

AGROECOLOGY

Rural Women Caring for Nature and Communities

Body

Snippet FEA Get Involved Story 2 (EN)

GET INVOLVED!

You can follow Nous Sommes la Solution
on Facebook and support their work by donating here.

Snippet FEA Exclusion and Stigma (EN)

An illustration of a megaphone in navy blue. Lines representing sound waves are coming out the speaker end, in burgundy.

THE EXCLUSION, STIGMA AND INSTITUTIONAL ABUSE
that trans and travesti people continue to face on a daily basis

From “WID” to “GAD” to Women’s Rights: The First Twenty Years of AWID

In 2002 AWID celebrated its 20th anniversary. Given the challenging political, economic and funding environment in which women's organizations must survive, a milestone such as this is worthy of recognition.

In the past two decades the geo-political landscape has been transformed and development theories have come and gone, but approaches to ensure women benefit from development processes have endured.

In its twenty-year history, AWID grew from a volunteer organization for U.S. "Women in Development" (WID) specialists to an international network striving to support proactive and strategic gender equality research, activism and policy dialogue.

On the occasion of its 20th anniversary, this paper charts not only the changes in AWID's organizational structure and goals but also the shifts in policy approaches to gender equality in a changing global environment, through the lens of a membership organization committed to improving the lives of women and girls everywhere.