Fidan Dogan
Building Feminist Economies
Building Feminist Economies is about creating a world with clean air to breath and water to drink, with meaningful labour and care for ourselves and our communities, where we can all enjoy our economic, sexual and political autonomy.
In the world we live in today, the economy continues to rely on women’s unpaid and undervalued care work for the profit of others. The pursuit of “growth” only expands extractivism - a model of development based on massive extraction and exploitation of natural resources that keeps destroying people and planet while concentrating wealth in the hands of global elites. Meanwhile, access to healthcare, education, a decent wage and social security is becoming a privilege to few. This economic model sits upon white supremacy, colonialism and patriarchy.
Adopting solely a “women’s economic empowerment approach” is merely to integrate women deeper into this system. It may be a temporary means of survival. We need to plant the seeds to make another world possible while we tear down the walls of the existing one.
We believe in the ability of feminist movements to work for change with broad alliances across social movements. By amplifying feminist proposals and visions, we aim to build new paradigms of just economies.
Our approach must be interconnected and intersectional, because sexual and bodily autonomy will not be possible until each and every one of us enjoys economic rights and independence. We aim to work with those who resist and counter the global rise of the conservative right and religious fundamentalisms as no just economy is possible until we shake the foundations of the current system.
Our Actions
Our work challenges the system from within and exposes its fundamental injustices:
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Advance feminist agendas: We counter corporate power and impunity for human rights abuses by working with allies to ensure that we put forward feminist, women’s rights and gender justice perspectives in policy spaces. For example, learn more about our work on the future international legally binding instrument on “transnational corporations and other business enterprises with respect to human rights” at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
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Mobilize solidarity actions: We work to strengthen the links between feminist and tax justice movements, including reclaiming the public resources lost through illicit financial flows (IFFs) to ensure social and gender justice.
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Build knowledge: We provide women human rights defenders (WHRDs) with strategic information vital to challenge corporate power and extractivism. We will contribute to build the knowledge about local and global financing and investment mechanisms fuelling extractivism.
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Create and amplify alternatives: We engage and mobilize our members and movements in visioning feminist economies and sharing feminist knowledges, practices and agendas for economic justice.
“The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing”.
Arundhati Roy, War Talk
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We have the pleasure to introduce you to Carmen Silva Ferreira.
She was born in Bahia, the Northeastern part of Brazil. She is an immigrant, a social activist and a mother of 8 children.
Carmen experienced homelessness at the age of 35, after migrating to Sao Paulo on her own. This led her to become a fierce advocate for vulnerable, marginalized and invisibilized communities most affected by the housing crisis. She eventually became one of the founders of MSTC in 2000.
As a visionary political organizer and the current leader of the MSTC, Carmen’s work has laid bare the city's housing crisis and provided inspiration to others on different ways to organize and manage occupations. She stood strong on the forefront of several occupations. One of them is the 9 de Julho Occupation, which now serves as a stage for direct democracy, and a space where everyone can be heard, seen, appreciated and work together.
Carmen has been long celebrated for her boldness in giving life back to abandoned buildings in the heart of São Paulo.
To know more about her life, you can follow her on Instagram!
Suzette Jordan
Snippet FEA Care as the foundation (EN)
Care as the foundation of economies
The COVID-19 pandemic put the global crisis of care into sharp focus and demonstrated the failures of the dominant economic model that is decimating essential public services, social infrastructures and systems of care around the world.
Cozinha Ocupação 9 Julho, the Association of Afro-Descendant Women of the Northern Cauca (ASOM) and Metzineres are only some examples of caring economies that center the needs of marginalized people and nature, as well as the reproductive, invisibilized, and unpaid care work required to ensure the sustainability of our lives, societies and eco-systems.
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Snippet FEA Nous Sommes la Solution (EN)
Nous Sommes la Solution is a rural women 's movement for food sovereignty in West Africa. Founded originally as a campaign against hyper-industrialized agriculture, Nous Sommes la Solution has grown into a movement of more than 500 rural women’s associations from Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ghana, Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Mali and Guinea.
Together, this women-led movement is building and strengthening food and seed sovereignty across West Africa. They feed communities, strengthen local economies, amplify the knowledge of women farmers and mitigate the devastating effects of climate change through agroecological practices. They also organize workshops, forums and community radio broadcasts to share their messages, their traditional knowledges and agroecological practices across rural communities.
In collaboration with universities and public research centers, Nous Sommes la Solution works towards restoring traditional Indigenous varieties of rice (a staple food in West Africa) and promoting local food economies based on agroecological principles, influencing national policy-making, all the while supporting women in creating farming associations and collectively owning and managing farmland.
AWID Forum Social Media Kit
Help spread word about the 2016 AWID Forum!
This kit includes sample messages fit for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, plus images that can be used to accompany these messages.
Using this kit is simple. Just follow these steps:
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Match up your favourite messages and images any way you like.
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Share them on your personal and/or professional social media accounts.
And that’s it – now you can get started!
Match up your favourite tweets below with these images for Twitter
Tweets for your personal handle
I'm going to the #AWIDForum. It's THE place to connect with women's rights & social justice movements. Join me!: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Can't wait to re-imagine #FeministFutures connect with other women's rights & social justice activists @ the #AWIDForum Join me!: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
I’m so excited to attend the #AWIDForum next September, and now we can register! Join me! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Tweets for your institutional handle
Registration is now open for the #AWIDForum! Costa do Sauípe, Brazil, 8-11 Sept. 2016: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Join #AWIDForum, a historic global gathering of women's rights & social justice activists: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Join #AWIDForum to celebrate the gains of our movements & analyze lessons to move forward: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
#AWIDForum – not just an event, a chance to disrupt oppression & advance justice: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Join the #AWIDForum to celebrate, strategize and renew ourselves and our movements: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Feminist Futures
Let's build #FeministFutures together. Register for 2016 #AWIDForum. Costa do Sauípe, Brazil http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Join us to re-imagine & co-create #FeministFutures at the 2016 #AWIDForum. Register: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
#FeministFutures: seize the moment @ #AWIDForum to advance shared visions for a just world: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
We’ll be 2,000 social movement activists @ the #AWIDForum, strategizing our #FeministFutures http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Cross-movement building
We’re more than a one-issue struggle. Join us at the #AWIDForum: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Join #AWIDForum, a space to strategize across movements & leverage our collective power: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Mobilize solidarity & collective power across social movements at the #AWIDForum: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Break the silos b/w our movements. Re-imagine & co-create our futures. All at the #AWIDForum: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Solidarity is a verb. Let’s put it into action at the #AWIDForum: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Special messages
Donors engaging with women’s rights and social movements at the #AWIDForum: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Media and movements: amplifying #FeministFutures at the #AWIDForum: http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Match up your favourite messages below with these images for Facebook.
These messages may also be used on Twitter via private Direct Messages, which don’t have character limits.
Facebook messages for your personal profile
The wait is over! We can all register for the 2016 AWID Forum. So excited to reconnect with fellow activists and re-imagine our feminist futures. See you there, in Brazil! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
I’m so excited to attend the AWID Forum next September, and now we can register! Join me! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Loving the thought of re-imagining feminist futures with 2,000 people from lots of amazing women's rights and social justice movements at the AWID Forum. Register and meet me in Brazil! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
I’m so excited to attend the AWID Forum next September, and now we can register! Join me! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Loving the thought of re-imagining feminist futures with 2,000 people from lots of amazing women's rights and social justice movements at the AWID Forum. Register and meet me in Brazil! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Facebook messages for your organization’s page
Registration is now open for the 2016 AWID Forum in Costa do Sauípe, Brazil! This is not just any event - it’s a key space for women’s rights and social justice activists to come together and re-imagine our feminist futures. You won’t want to miss it! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Join us at the 2016 AWID Forum in Brazil! Activists and movements from all over the world will come together to celebrate, strategize, inspire and renew ourselves and our collective struggles. Register now! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
The 2016 AWID Forum will be a historic global gathering of women’s rights and social justice activists and movements. Join us there to break the silos, strengthen solidarity and leverage our collective power. Register now! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Join us at the 2016 AWID Forum in Brazil! Activists and movements from all over the world will come together to celebrate, strategize, inspire and renew ourselves and our collective struggles. Register now! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
The 2016 AWID Forum will be a historic global gathering of women’s rights and social justice activists and movements. Join us there to break the silos, strengthen solidarity and leverage our collective power. Register now! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
The 2016 AWID Forum will be a historic global gathering of women’s rights and social justice activists and movements. Join us to celebrate, strategize, inspire and renew ourselves and leverage our collective power. Registration is now open! http://forum.awid.org/forum16/
Martha Araceli Chagoy Valdes
Snippet FEA This is the story of the Nadia Echazú (EN)
A workplace does not have to operate on competition and profit. It does not have to exploit people for the benefit of the owner and a small elite either.
Instead, communities on the margins of formal economies are building cooperative models based on autonomy, cooperation, shared responsibility, self-management and solidarity.
Worker-controlled cooperatives and workplaces have always offered alternative ways of generating employment opportunities, income, social security and savings - while distributing revenues in more communal, sustainable and safer ways.
But it is more than an employment opportunity: it is the making of dreams into a reality, and the building of feminist economies based on solidarity and care for each other. It is about creating a world where our lives, our labor and our communities matter.
This is the story of the Nadia Echazú Textile Cooperative, the first social enterprise managed by and for travesti and trans people in Argentina.
Our Vision: Economic Justice in a Feminist World
As feminists struggling for gender, peace, economic, social and environmental justice, we know there is no single recipe for success but an array of possibilities that can and are making change happen. The menu of options is as diverse as our movements and the communities in which we live and struggle.
Before we dare to present some of the feminist imaginations for another world, here are the principles around which we base our propositions:
1. Self-determined development from the local to the global
We believe there is no one model for all and that everyone has a right to claim and contribute to building another world that is possible, as the World Social Forum motto puts it.
This includes the right to participate in democratic governance and to influence one’s future – politically, economically, socially and culturally.
Economic self-determination gives peoples the ability to take control over their natural resources and use those resources for their own ends or collective use. Furthermore, women’s economic agency is fundamental to mitigating the often cyclical nature of poverty, denial of education, safety, and security.
2. Rights, substantive equality and justice are at the core of the economy
The principle of substantive equality is laid out in the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) and other international human rights instruments. This principle is fundamental for development and achieving a just economy as it affirms that all human beings are born free and equal.
Non-discrimination is an integral part of the principle of equality that ensures that no one is denied their rights because of factors such as race, gender, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property or birth.
The inherent dignity of all persons without distinction must be upheld and respected. While States are responsible for ensuring the use of maximum available resources for the fulfilment of human rights, reclaiming rights and dignity is fundamentally a key space for civil society struggle and popular mobilization.
3. Just distribution for all, without monopolization (the anti-greed principle)
This principle, exercised through organized efforts to transform unjust institutions, guides the restoration of balance between "participation" (input) and "distribution" (output) when either principle is violated.
It puts limits on monopolistic accumulations of capital and other abuses of property. This concept is founded on an economy model that is based on fairness, and justice.
4. Feminist and cross-movement solidarity is key
In order to make change happen, we need strong and diverse feminist networks. We need movements building solidarity from the personal to the political, from the local to the global and back.
Building collective power through movements helps convert the struggle for human rights, equality and justice into a political force for change that cannot be ignored.
“Only movements can create sustained change at the levels that policy and legislation alone cannot achieve.”
See more on this at Batliwala, S: 2012 “Changing Their World. Concepts and Practices of Women’s Movements” 2nd Edition. AWID
See also
Gloria Carolina Hernández Vásquez
